Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Stuck in a Loop

I'm at that juncture again where I ponder the question to myself "Why am I writing games?"  I've been working on a game called "Ares:Dogfighter" for a few months now, but I'm slowly getting bored with it and there's a chance it will get slowly abandoned.

I always start with the best of intentions, and starting on a new game is great and exciting: the idea is epic in scale, the possibilities are endless, the screenshots in my head look great, and I know how I'm going to write all the code.  However, fast-forward a few months and I'm stuck debugging a small but frustrating problem that's taking up a lot of my time, and nobody has played it (or at least, no-one has told me they've played it).  So why am I spending the time writing it? 

Part of the problem is the time that marketing a game now requires, but without marketing, no-one will see the game among the other trillion games out there.  Setting up the blog/website/twitter account and regularly posting to it takes time, and my time is already limited as it is.

I'll probably stop developing games for a few months and start playing them again.  Or I could jump onto an open-source game and contribute to that, but I find it very hard to find semi-decent Java open-source games.  Eventually I'll have an amazing idea for a game, start work on it, and the process will start again.