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Finding Motivation to Finish a Game

It’s been a long time since I posted, so here’s a related joke.

Q: How many people does it take to NOT develop a game?

A: Hundreds. One person to not develop it and hundreds to make all the 
   games and books that the one person plays with instead of working 
   on their game.

I’ve been slowly adding things to the game over the last 4 months, but I just couldn’t work up the motivation to make a post until now. I’ll try to post several updates in the near future talking about some of the difficult or fun bits of code I wrote in the last few months. This post is just to talk about the ups and downs of seriously working on a video game.

I have heard many people say that the most important thing for an indie developer to do is to release your games. They said that you will want to keep working on your game until it’s perfect. They said you will have trouble seeing past all the flaws in your game. That you’ll never think it’s good enough. I thought they were all full of shit.

I was wrong.

I went into working on this game saying that I had a reasonable set of features I wanted to include. I was so proud of the first few steps, that I didn’t think I’d ever feel ashamed of showing my game to the public. But as I got closer and closer to having an actual “Game” on my hands, I started to feel less and less confident. When you’re still thinking of your game as a prototype, everything that isn’t broken is a point of pride.

PurePride

Pure Pride

As soon as you start thinking about releasing it, every single flaw sticks out like a sore thumb.

LevelSelectionShit


GameMenuShitComplete Crap

At some point, you have to learn your limits. I can get the buttons and text to look a little better. I can add sound effects and find some music to play during the game. I can even animate the sprites that I currently have. But I can’t make sprites that look much better than they currently do. I can’t design a beautiful looking menu. I can’t write a stirring soundtrack that everyone will want to listen to.

So that’s what my game is going to be. Coherent looking menus, crappy but functional sprites, basic sound effects, basic music and a decent selection of levels. It’s a first game. It will work and I’ll be happy with it. And I will get it released.

I’ve been working on my own game instead of playing other people’s games the last week or two, and I’m very happy with the progress I’ve made in that time. The best advice I can give to anyone else that gets stuck on their first game is to keep pushing through it, because it gets better. My game isn’t ready yet, but I’ve accepted the limits of how good it’s going to be and I know what it’s going to take to get it finished.

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