It is the game, stupid!

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Paraphrasing the famous American catchphrase, I have noticed a pattern in my gamedev failures . Generally, people get to see the successes –or games that I finish–, but they don’t see all the projects that don’t get anywhere. And I have a few of these in progress that are at risk, and I think I know why. I’m mostly a programmer. I like programming, and it is what I have been doing for the longest time. It is true that I like music, and I can write some tunes, and at this point I have been practising pixel art for long enough that I can do some sprite work; but programming is what I enjoy most about making games. Not graphics or music or sound effects or level design or testing or promotion, or any other things that are part of making and releasing a game. So evidently you can get carried away by the things you like most –because, coincidentally, they are the things you are best at–, and it is fine. You may have heard about the thing that there are people that make games, and people that make game engines . You can guess which group I’m in, although I try my best to be in the other one! If I look at the games that I have released, and how I managed to do it, there has always been a constant: all the programming I did –call it the engine – was serving the game , while for the failed projects I have said a couple of times that “there wasn’t a game there”, and it is clear to me now that it was because I was focusing on the engine and not the game itself. I have plenty of examples, where I wrote very cool code that hasn’t ended in a finished game. For example my beeper engine to run on interrupt for the Speccy , or super smooth scroll for the VGA using unchained mode . And that’s public code, I have a lot more in private repos. And it is a shame! I’m going to try an experiment: let’s get one of those projects that seem to stall, and revisit the idea and focus on the game , independently of how cool the code may be. Because, at the end, what matters is the game, stupid! Would you like to discuss the post? You can send me an email !