Overload

I recently noticed one of the game developers that I follow made a come back. They were working on a really interesting concept for over perhaps a year, then disappeared for months. It is a fairly popular game and the dev had quite a large number of users eagerly awaiting updates. There were lots of posts on multiple forums and most everyone assumed the dev abandoned the project, if not suffered serious issues in real life.

Then the dev made a post, after months of being away. The dev reassured the masses and commited him/herself to working on the game again, with much more frequent updates. Some rejoiced, others are more skeptical, me among them, just wanting to see an update rather than a promise.

Well if your wondering, that dev isn't me :P



I've been away working on various things, and I'm not back with promises or deadlines or games even, but rather I thought I'd just post something for the sake of it.  I've been thinking the last few months mostly. In search of what my overall problem is, I've pinned it down to the weight that ties down creative people in general. The idea of perfection in the work you do, and the constant self imposed scrutiny of your own projects. I notice that this weight is heavy with me, and I'm only now realizing how much of a block it can be.

If every thing that I make needs to be perfect, then I'm setting the bar way too high to just get stuff done.

On a macro level, I have the power to add, delete and change things in a project. Adding is great, because it means new content. Deleting is useful because some stuff just doesn't work out the way you wanted. But changes... changes are a nightmare. Changing something in a project, in the sense of modifying content for the sake of it, is the largest issue I've discovered in destroying a project. In the context of text based games, proofreading is an example of a good change. Proofing is kind of like adding quality in a sense. So then what are these bad changes I'm talking about?

Let's take for example Midnight Room. I've rewritten it twice and the third version is a wip. The first version was mostly an exact copy of the style of Next Door Girl April, with a sex appeal variable. I wasn't happy with it so I started over with a different concept that blended the idea of good vs evil. It was good, but not good enough. The most recent version, which I've released a part of takes the idea further with multiple balances between polar opposites. I really like the idea, but it is really painful modifying the old version to use the new system. All of this is piled on top of the core criticisms I expect about player agency and the like.

And so that is where I've been. Since a few people have mentioned I should post the game around Lagoon and AIFA, I'm thinking about it. Again, what's blocking me is that whole perfection thing, but then again, that didn't stop me the first time around.