Wednesday, April 7, 2010

A Late Blog Post, and Nothing to Show for it.

It was a week ago today that I half heartedly decided that I was going to need to set forth on my sixth re-write of my game project, due to the complexities of asynchronous content loading that my project was going to require.

Today I am very nearly back to the stage I was in before my re-write began, (with a few more head aches and a few new nice features) only 4 days later than I had hoped.
Have I mentioned that making games is difficult before?
I would say that the greatest challenges so far have been to keep motivated, stay focused, and maintain the initial vision. I have wanted to scrap the whole thing a few times (and in some ways, I have done that with each re-write) because it just wasn't progressing the way I had hoped.

I am new at this, and while I have built games using tools and simple to use game engines, I have never built something this complicated before, and I am starting to understand why developing tools in favor of using out of house options is not as popular as it once was. It's time consuming, difficult work that through the process feels like it has few rewards.

But that aside, I have learned a lot, mostly what doesn't work, but in that process a few things that do. I am determined to finish this project, and while determination alone won't guarantee success, the simple fact that I am still motivated to get this done is surprising to me.

I have decided that I will release the project in a more scaled back form for the initial release. Seeing as I have eaten up a month of content creation, and world building time with all of my learning through this tool development (of which there is a great deal more learning to be done). So I think I will release something that has the core gameplay concepts intact, but with fewer places to explore and upgrades to be discovered.

From there, I will work on the larger fuller version to be released later (if possible, as a patch to the first release), so that I can thank those who purchased early (rather than charging them for it). This is still at least a month away from even the first release being ready for peer review, let alone thinking about the second release of things.

But I look forward to being able to work on more fun and exciting games that fill a void in the marketplace, and are the kinds of game I want to see more of.

Until next time.
fidgetwidget out.

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