AbsurDock playtest progress
Pretty much a week has passed since my last blog entry, where i promised to update in a couple of days. Unlike what i initially thought, there isn’t much to report besides a dozen bug fixes, some balancing patches, and a pile of technical debt outweighing what my minimal viable attention span can handle.
I don’t even want to start fixing this content size fitter whatever the hell.
Truth be told, progress is slower than i’d have preferred. I wholly believe that if i drank the “get shit done” potion and locked in for a week, the playtest would be ready and out long before another wave of regret could hit. But at the current pace, it might take me more than a month to ship, i just don’t know yet. Realistically, if the playtest does release, there’s a sliver of chance somebody with an audience picks it up, since i’d finally have a tangible thing you can experience and play, rather than just a Steam page with a wall of text and a couple of gifs, which is largely the last ration keeping this playtest build in active development.
That’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re starting out making games: that feeling of novelty is the most valuable resource you get while you’re still learning engines, design, art, and other skillsets. I kept coming back because every day, game development offered something new, and that alone was enough justification to boot up Unity and Blender instead of some hyper-addictive, optimized, brain-frying incremental or MOBA. Now however, it’s turned into a routine: fixing something broken, polishing something already made so it doesn’t feel bad to interact with, balancing numbers for systems already in place. This lack of novelty, this routine-ness, is probably the worst thing i could have developed, because the thought of making games is no longer enough on its own. My brain needs external, organic validation to keep working at the same rate, and that’s something i terminally don’t have right now. This is why the whole playtest rush came to be: the mine of novelty got exhausted, and i need to build and expand toward different sources of dopamine, which is pretty sad when i think about it. It’s like buying a two-liter soda, enjoying the first two cups, and then realizing you don’t really want the third.
This is another reason you should make shorter games (and why everybody keeps telling you to). If you make a prototype in a month, you can fuel development on the simple novelty of the project and its concept for that one month. That means you can’t really get exhausted by any single project, and you’re not dragged down by the sunk cost fallacy, because nothing in the grand scheme of things was sunk. And if any prototype gets attention, or even prompts a Steam page, you have another anchor of motivation to ship it from concept to a full game.
This whole situation is funny, because before i started working on AbsurDock, my thought was: “The bad and boring part is making the systems. Once everything’s in place, i only need to add content, polish, and balancing, which is the fun part.” Now i’m precisely in the “adding content” phase, and understand just how wrong i was.