With big anticipation on my part, the programmer went back and started to work on the game. While he had been at the office, I shared a lot of the vision, and a lot of the overall thoughts regarding the game, but we hadn't dealt with a lot of the details. There was a basic framework, but not a lot of the specific gameplay details and database structure. My hope was that he would be able to take that vision and turn it into a functioning game. What I had hired was a front-end programmer that could do back-end if needed. Being unsuccessful at finding a back-end programmer, I gave him the green light to work on both aspects. Initially I did see some progress as the design was converted on the front-end, and the game started to be playable. I was getting excited, seeing the game in action. The amount of functionality was limited to doing an activity, as was programmed initially in the core.

Now, we needed more aspects of the economy working. We needed to have factories, so that meant we needed to be able to build buildings. To build buildings, we needed to be able to purchase construction materials as well as purchase land. It was all interconnected, and though I left the programmer with a lot of ideas, I hadn't done a lot of concrete stuff, like setting up the database, giving specific pages with actions, etc. Unfortunately, it was becoming clear that I was asking way too much of the programmer, and I needed to give him more details. The project stalled. It was becoming clear to me, that I needed to give my programmer, really specific instructions, and I just hadn't done that. I botched the process, and the project suffered. It wasn't long before there was frustration growing on both sides, and that I really needed to get into the code, and start developing more elements to the game, before a programmer would be able to take over. So, we decided, that for the time being I would take the project back, and in future when I needed more front-end work done, I would have to give him very detailed instructions on what I needed done. I had learned my lesson.

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