It’s fun writing updates when you feel there’s progress. Things are moving along and it’s easier to motivate yourself and keep going. At least that’s what it’s like for me.

I’m working on a game while working full time. Designing it, writing some of the code, but most of all, building a team I can work with to get it all done.

The game itself isn’t important for this post, but for anyone interested here’s where the updates usually go: https://medium.com/designing-building-hexagrid

I’d committed to myself to keep writing progress updates every week to ten days and after December 8th I failed to do so.

Why? My plans totally fell apart. I thought I had a good idea of what the game would be, how the art should look, and everything seemed to be moving in the right direction… After months of work, designing, coding, finding developers and artists, I got a build where I could actually play the core game with bugs and all. I tested it out with family/friends. Since it was a 4-player deathmatch we all had fun playing it. I thought the hard work was over. Now it was just going to be iterating on this build and making it better and that’s that!

As things slowed down I started thinking about the art, the game play, was any of it even good? Was it fun to play? Was I just excited? Were folks just being nice to me and giving me good feedback? Should I even have gone with multiplayer? Did it have enough depth? What’s the point of this anyway? This game isn’t going to see the light of day. The reason I’m writing these questions out is because I’m guessing a lot of us have been through it and it’s nice to explicitly see you’re not alone.

Oh and by the way, when I started searching for new art styles, ideas, I found out that the art I was getting from my art contractor was bought and then modified… so it wasn’t original. This was the point where I felt awful. This was just depressing and my brain was just like “Whatever. Don’t care. This game will never work. It wasn’t getting completed anyway.”

At the same time as work on the game was slowing down, I had also been working on writing a backstory for the game, because to me, there had to be a world in which to tell the story, play the game, so that I could make more games and expand this universe!

So now here I am. I *think* I like the notes I’ve made for this world. I *think* this would make a good single player procedural fire emblem/advance wars type. Maybe the multiplayer game can be redeemed? I’m going to find new artists to work with. Put the prototype of the multiplayer game on testflight and share that with more people. Maybe I’ll get a single player PC/console game and a multiplayer iOS/Android game out of this? Maybe the background stories can lead to a bunch of short stories? I really don’t know. I’m just going to try to build something and maybe I will.

Hopefully the beginning!

TLDR: If you’re making a game and everything is going awfully, keep at it. There are lots of other game designers/devs who have been/are going through the same thing. Sharing your story helps you get it off your chest and hopefully others!