“Perfect is the enemy of done”, this has been a problem for me most of my life. Starting something and then never finishing because I was not 100% satisfied with the result.
Last year I started work on a game that was supposed to be simple, a couple of boats bumping and shooting at each other.
While I felt that the look of the game was going in a good direction, the shadows that stayed put while the boats rotated annoyed me enough to switch the game to 3D. This decision brought on a whole different set of problems, one of which was the water. I couldn’t find any shaders that were cheap enough and looked the way I wanted them to. The next few weeks I spent learning how to write shaders, and made my own water shader.
After a few more months of spending too much time on details too small for most people to notice, I finally stopped working on the project. I burned out and lost the will to continue. The project was too far from finished to release, and I couldn’t make myself rush it to completion.
Lesson learned, I underestimate the amount of work it takes to make something I would be proud of. Because of this I decided to start again, but this time on a smaller scale since I’m still not willing to completely let my standards go. So my plan is this: Finish a game I’m proud of, however small.
I still haven’t given up on the shadows though 😉
Update: I followed through with my plan and released Run Die Retry 🙂