Hello
I find myself abandoning hobby projects and never getting a finished version. Primarily due to me not being a student with no responsibility and a whole lot more free time, but among other reasons, a lack of accountability. I was thinking, why not try making something with someone else? Since then it won’t be as easy to abandon a project because something else caught my mind. However none of my friends or colleagues share this interest, but perhaps one of you guys might be interested.
A bit about me, 22yo fintech backend developer professionally working with Java. My two main ethos, or things I want to do differently are:
- Games should be dynamic. There should be many ways to approach a system (think markets in games, players should somehow be able to influence the buying and selling prices, along with the wares being offered by interacting with the game world)
- Games are too transparent. Being able to directly compare items by their raw stats make it a lot more boring. Games should show this with text or more broad values making the player infer which is more efficient.
I am mostly thinking about making a primarily text based game, since it’s a lot more likely to reach a MVP, but I’m open for most things. I’ve got some game ideas myself but if you have something better I’m open for it.
I’m primarily thinking about chatting on discord or waheteven about some ideas and toolchains and setting up a public repo.
Also if you don’t vibe with my ethos, feel free to comment that as well, maybe you’ll find someone with similar values here.
Similar things happen with me btw.
I was making an accompanying program for X4[1] and while I was underway, making the underlying data processing, required for the widget, life happened, I took a break and instead of coming back to it when I had the time, I started another project.And now, the next version of the game has been released, which I didn’t play to see whether having the program would still make sense.
Most programs that I haven’t been able to complete in a single sitting, are lying incomplete.
One program that I completed; though about making a PKGFILE for it, didn’t get back to it, because I get ideas more often than the drive to implement those.In my case, even having enough people tell me that the program will be useful to them, might be enough to get the drive. Otherwise, I just tend to think through how it may be implemented and be happy with it. In other cases, I just make the minimal functionality required for me to use it and leave it as is. e.g. Thinking of making a GUI, make do with a systemd service instead.
X4: a game that has Linux binaries available on GoG ↩︎
Have you tried a game jam? I had the same issue until I started joining game jams on itch.io. jams have deadlines, so I started making small games that were functionally complete, even if the scope was small.
I have thought about it, but working full time makes it quite hard. Perhaps I’ll try during vacation.
If you can find three hours over the course of a weekend you can do Trijam. Pick an engine and make the smallest possible thing you can.
Yeah, I get that. You kind of just have to make time for game dev with a full time job. I got around that by getting up at 7am and working on my game until I go to work, and then working an hour or two on it after work, and on weekends. The gamedev comes in waves. Sometimes I’ll spend a couple weeks doing mostly gamedev stuff in my free time, other times, I won’t work on games at all so I dont get burned out.
Don’t take this the wrong way but you should complete something yourself first. Enter a game jam as others suggested. Limit the scope.
Not OP but the advice to limit the scope kind of kills the fun for me. I don’t want to code up the 100th variant of pong or pokemon-look-alike.
Limiting the scope doesn’t mean copying. It means keeping the feature list low so that you have something workable in a reasonable amount of time. Otherwise you’ll get overwhelmed and likely never finish.
This is one of the reasons I’m a big fan of the pico-8 “fantasy console”. It nearly forces you to limit the scope of your game. There’s plenty of interesting and fun games on that platform that are heavily limited in scope.
I agree with your two main ethos statements. I’d love to collaborate on game design, but I have the same problem of never finishing game projects. I usually get stuck when it comes to art assets, 'cause I’m not an artist and I can’t afford to hire one.
I actually had a similar problem with artists with my project. We did eventually find one interested in doing a rev share but it took us quite a while
