You start working on a dream game, or some game that you really want to make. At some point you either take a break, work on another game to develop your skills, or develop your skills making the same game be it experience asking others for help, seeing the way they do things, or just randomly stumbling upon new information. You slowly realize how bad your old code is how messy the old way you handled things were, and now if you ever wanna add new content. You have to change a lot of the old stuff, or if you wanna add something new to that old stuff, you still gotta update it because. 1. It sucks so bad that if you tried to add smth new on top of that, it’d take so long, and you’d dig a deeper hole for yourself, and 2. You can’t stand how bad it is. Even though I had made quite a few games before, my max work time on them was a week or two. They were either just small projects or not the thing I wanted to spend my time making.
That means you’re learning, this feeling is perfectly fine, and in a lot of cases, a clear sign that you’ve grown as a programmer / game developer! Embrace it, but try to resist the urge to always re-write everything, otherwise you will never finish a game.
Yes. I’ve worked as a programmer for decades and this never goes away (at least if you’re not ossified and always open t learn new things).
It’s very healthy and should apply to all facets of life, imho.
But @tibaverus is also right: don’t throw everything away and begin all over every time, getting things to a finish line is very important too.
Also, be mild to your old self; treat yourself like you would like to be treated: honest yet kind. Right?
To prove my point, four new bugs, just from today:
Someone is noticing my work, but it still has a lot of bugs. They are distinct, but the root causes are:
- me applying stateful code that should have been stateless
- too much cognitive complexity in some functions
- too many loc in a specific file
- no four eye principle (code review) applied
Dozens more.
I will not throw this code away, I may not even ever find the time to properly refactor it. But it’s still pretty good. Throwing it away now and starting over from scratch will simply take more time than the benefit of fixing it in a shorter term.
I have completely deleted all my level unlock logic of my game jam game “Go to bed bat”
and I am still working on my codebase to make it readeble just to add some new levels (wich was so hard before, but it gets easier with some new tricks).
So, yes, this happens to all devs (especially newer ones like me)
Abandon this bogus idea of a “dream game”. Make the games you can make, not the ones you “dream” of playing. This’d require honestly self-assessing your current skills (including time/financial budget) and then putting them to good use.
I totally agree with @normalized
It is even possible that your dream game idea sounds good in your head but is super annoying to play.
Yep, totally agree. The key to realising it is in the word “dream”. As soon as you start to write it down and analyse your dream properly it falls apart into a nonsense and a nothing. Just like normal sleep induced dreams.
So true. But it is true in anything you do and keep learning about. If only I had a time machine!
Exactly happening to me and I’m revamping my game because of this feeling. I got all my mechanics work according to what I want, and when I found new ways to do things I got excited and kept changing and piling them in. I’ve only done 2 levels but I felt my codes got messy and all over the place. It felts unstable, like building a house with matchsticks, the more you add or try to fix things the more you feel like it’s gonna collapse anytime.
I’ve now downgraded my game and got rid of many “fancy” codes to the point where it could just be a “my first godot game” tutorial, which funnily enough it still would be for me technically even 2+ yrs of working on it.
The “fancy” stuffs that I’ve learned though give me more options/confident in planning better for the next game.
It will continue to happen; I’d be more worried if it stops happening. Means you’re learning!
Eventually you will develop tools and paradigms to help with expanding projects; one of the best tools will be documentation, write down what you are doing as you do it. Coming back to a project a year later will have some ramp-up time where nothing makes sense, adding documentation will speed that up immensely. Also having to explain yourself may bring some enlightenment when it wouldn’t make sense later down the line.
Yep, I’ve rewritten my game 3 times over the past 4 years. It’s so much better every time though, and I’m finally getting to a point where it feels sustainable. Strictly sticking to call down / signal up, as well as static typing, as helped a lot.
Oh, I just remembered this bit too: never throw away code, because:
I’m being pretty ambitious for my first game, and re-coded sections of it a couple of times. It feels like progress is very slow. I’ve taken a couple of breaks because of it. But I went into this expecting I’d have to redo a lot of things because I am learning.
Yes, the same has happened to me. I released a rougelite space shooter on itch a while ago, and it has yet to recieve a single view.
It seems the algorithm did not add my game anywhere. However, my newgrounds version has somewhere around 140 views. So I reccommend newgrounds, as I find itch to be a bad place to put games.
@bobjiim Wow. That seems to me like something is very wrong with the itch implementation, not a comment on your game. I mean it hasn’t even been looked at!
That is amazing! You must be so deflated from that. At least it is definitely not that your game is not good. Something must be wrong or at least itch thinks there is something wrong. It is like it has not even been listed yet. Are you sure your listing is at least visible?
Post a link to it and we will go take a look. A few views might trigger the algorithm.
Yeah, sure. Here is a link to the game. It says in a big green box “Published” so… Millennium RECODE Beta 0.66 by BobJiim
Sorry OP this is a bit off topic.
@bobjiim Played it, left some feedback. Hope that helps.
There are too many Games to play in a Lifetime already.
So no-one playing my Game is the expected Outcome.
If i want Peeps to play my Game, i need to promote it.
Posting about in different Places like my Website, a Forum, and maybe a social Media.
This is a good Thing for me because i don’t want many Peeps to play the Games i made so far.
These Games are good Practice for Dev but terrible Playing for Gamers.
(And even once i want many Peeps to play my Game, i don’t want to get so famous that it makes my Life worse.
Though open‑sourcing the Game early most likely guarantees that if it gets famous, i don’t get very famous alongside it.)
Totaly agree with you @sosasees , becoming famus can be a bed thing (Just look at Dany or Dani?) His comunity forced him so much to develop his games faster (I would probobly turn crazy) Adn ther evn is this evil YT chanel, he makes 1 video a day forcing dani to make carlson faster. His video series is caled dayli carlson newa (Maybe somone can do something to stop him BC I am not in to YT bc of Gogle (I dont like google))