Snarboo

I love everything about this.

Am I the only person annoyed by the usage of "game loop" as an objective measure of a game's worth? I understand game loops exist in programming, but reducing it to a bullet point on a book report style game review seems weirdly reductive.

Also wondering how much this mindset exists in commercial game design, and if that attitude is detrimental to good design.

I haven't finished a video game for a while annoyingly but I DO have my methods, and it is mostly deviating from these methods that has slowed me down

usually for glorious trainswrecks projects (i.e, small stuff) I make it so that no matter where I am, I can wrap and release the game- this means I have to close all buggy gaps/unfinished areas/unfinished mechanics when I'm not working on them otherwise I'll forget. this method is great cause it means when you get sick of a project, you can dump it out that same day

I've continued this method when making big games like Amy In Artland, cause it would drive me crazy if I had to keep track of unfinished areas, bugs, etc, as I'm working on it, especially with a world that big.

Anyway with regards to finishing bigger work... one of my first games ("D.S.A" (https://thewaether.itch.io/dsa) ) was a game I started all the way back in 2010. after a few months of work on it, it was then abandonned for nearly 3 years, and I became obsessed with the idea of tweaking it into something else and unable to figure out what I was doing with it. I took a course in game design from 2010 to 2013 that didn't really produce any finished work. After graduating, I walked around my hometown. now detached from the course, I found my mind was just a cloud of forgetfulness. It was like I couldn't remember more than 5 minutes ago. I was always tired. I became ANGRY. i remember I was suddenly overcome with ANGER that I had not finished the game. I became so outrageously angry that I picked it up, and just started working on it, even if it was crap. I had to do it to stop the rage consuming me. suddenly- working on the game was BETTER for my mental state than not working on it.

...and then I worked on it nearly non-stop for 2 years, and finished it in 2015. I released it and 2 days later Undertale came out. .....barely anyone played DSA and, thinking about it, that's fine cause it's not my best work. But it was two years of a LOT of learning and first-hand experience on making a game.

Flash forward a few years and the experience working on DSA has helped me finish more things. Here's some things I felt while finishing DSA:

1. this is hellish and something will stop me when I'm right at the end and make the whole thing a waste of time, it'll be a miracle if I finish this
2. I'll probably die before I finish this
3. every time I make an asset it's like 3 more assets appear on the to-do list. this is like scaling an endless mountain of assets that never ends

...Anyway. the list of assets did, in fact, end and the game was complete and I couldn't really believe it when I did it

Now with even more experience, I have some more methods for finishing games.

1. working on a massive game for ages made working on small games afterwards a LOT easier
2. have more than one thing on the go at all times. Have so much on the go that you procrastinate on it and trick your brain into working on the other project while procrastinating on the first project. create a chain of procrastination that will backfire and thus allow you turn procrastinating into productive time
3. if you have a fun new idea for a game but you're TOO BUSY working on something you already started, jump to the one you're more interested in. that initial rush of inspiration is THE BEST time to work on anything and produce something good. and at worst, you'll have loads of fun demos and prototypes in your ouvre that are still fun to show off
4. don't be a perfectionist. I put it like: "make the shitty version of what you want to make and then without realising, you'll have made the good version"
5. you get better at finishing things, the same way you get better at any other dev skill. finish a bunch of small stuff and before you know it you're suddenly finishing more. You've become a finisher

i love the way this aesthetic looks. really fucking hoping i can finish this game