I want to talk about two of my games. The first is Quantron’s Game, which I’ve finally finished and just released after, well… 5 months. After I said it’d take 3 weeks. It took so long that the next Ludum Dare is starting now.

The second game is The Legend of Quintavius. This is also the explanation post I said I’d write. Will it be coherent and well-organized?

…No. TL;DR, I still don’t know what I’m doing.

My original plan for Quantron’s Game was to jam for 3 weeks straight and make a bigger game for Ludum Dare Extra that I could in just a weekend, as I’ve said before. But that plan evolved into a series of potential backup plans as I began to see the errors of my ways. I started this project even though I knew I’d be away from home for a week, thinking I’d have far more free time to work on it than I actually did. Then I got my work schedule, and I had to go to work for 6 days straight right before my time away. So I thought maybe I could still make half of the game for the jam, maybe the first 2 worlds, and release the other half in a content update sometime later. But ultimately I was only able to release just one… level. And it wasn’t even finished.

Needless to say, I overscoped. I can’t believe I fell into this trap, even after making over 10 other games. I truly cannot fathom how I thought I’d make this in 3 weeks.

For this game, instead of experimenting with one or a few ideas, I designed it to be as cookie-cutter as possible, so obviously based on other games and genres, and I tried to simplify every mechanic as much as I could. Not just because I like them and wanted to explore them, but because I thought they’d be easier to program, and therefore viable for a jam.

Then I went and made an entire AI for the second player character to be able to play the game itself. And it isn’t even good enough to play alone. You have to help it.

5 worlds is a lot of content, and I really should’ve just cut most of it. If I had been on track to finish the game before the jam deadline, I would have forced myself to. But after I missed the deadline, and for this game in particular, I just couldn’t bring myself to remove all this stuff. And instead of scrapping a project and moving on like most probably smart game devs, I tend to decide that, at a certain point, I’m in too deep and can’t turn back now. So I do more work, and then I feel that way even more, yet the goal post seems to be moving farther away. It deeply upsets me that I seem unable to fully realize my vision, even if I try to course correct.

I think Fitzcarraldo from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows pretty much sums it up.

I guess it’s one of those artist problems, that you can’t ever make something exactly the way you imagined it. And at this point, I realize the jam was just an excuse for me to pursue this idea. It was never a jam-sized game to begin with.

For crying out loud, I composed not a single song, but a whole soundtrack. For a failed jam game.

Remember when I said I’d never call myself a musician? Well I want to retract that statement because that’s not what I meant. I now realize I don’t really like that viewpoint, and that it might even be a little hurtful. And I will not hesitate to reevaluate a viewpoint of mine if I learn this to be the case.

I am of the belief that if you make art, you’re an artist. Because that is what an artist is, by definition. What I meant to say is that I’m not a professional musician. It's not my career, not how I make a living, and I don’t plan on making it that. I’m an amateur musician, but still a musician nonetheless. The same is true for pixel art. I don’t even make it consistently, but I do make it. Sometimes. Thinking this way, it turns out I’m a lot of things, which isn’t surprising since I make games by myself. I just have a hard time seeing myself as a professional… any of them.

I’m an artist with impostor syndrome who hates his own art. But while that isn’t really new around here, it isn’t much of an exaggeration. I’m proud of every game I’ve made, but lately I’ve been finding myself frustrated with the process.

Reaper and Sleeper are a lot like the 2 vastly different mindsets I have right now. One of them wants to eradicate every flaw, every deadly glitch, and make the world perfect, a task that we all know is impossible. The other wants to abandon the whole thing, to shut it down and start over, and to try again a different way or with something else entirely.

It’s about my inability to vanquish my own creation. I care so much about my games that I can’t let these things go, and at the same time I feel like I have to just get it over with and release something broken if I ever want to be done with it. And I know there'll be people who won't read any of this (not that I blame them) and then shit on the game because of how many bugs there are, and I am sorry but I’m not going to fix all of them. I don’t think I can. I will still try, but the game is jank on a fundamental level, and I have to move on at some point.

No game has suffered more from this struggle in my head than that ever-infamous “one game I’m making.”

After I graduated and went looking for a job in the industry, I found it rather difficult. I began to think I was simply not capable of doing the things that I earned a degree doing. So I began the year of 2022 planning to focus on something else, to finally finish The Legend of Quintavius. But everything slowed down after I had to get a day job. So I started making some hard decisions.

For a long time, I had stubbornly wanted to make the dragon sprite myself. But I recently decided it would be more practical to commission someone far more experienced in the art of drawing dragons, someone who could do it far better than I ever would have.

I also released the game unfinished and called it open beta. It’s important to get your game in the hands of players, because it will never really be finished. You can’t make it perfect, and there’s always something more you could do. It’s why scope is such a big deal. But I also released early because I figured it’d be helpful to know what bugs would actually bother people. Yet to this day, my google form still has 0 responses. I have no feedback. It’s just the fact of the matter that, without cold hard criticism, I can’t get an objective look at my work. No, I haven’t really been properly marketing this game lately, but I did try to.

I decided that I'm not going to fix most of what I considered to be bugs, for that reason and many others. It’s just not worth it. Of course I’m not allowing any game-breaking glitches, but if the archer gets stuck under a rock, or runs off into the wilderness and gets swarmed by orcs, that’s not a bug. That’s a feature. I talked about this more in another devlog, about how the fog of war makes the game more realistic, its characters more like real people, even if it isn’t great game design. At the very least, if I can inform players of every known bug, that helps.

The gameplay is just an ambitious idea I had 4 years ago. What really matters is the experience itself.

It’s a labor of love, a carefully crafted work of art, a world and characters that I truly care about. Every game I make is a fan game of something, and this one is a fan game of the entire fantasy genre, of stories like Lord of the Rings and Eragon. And what started as the second game I’ve ever made became the biggest game I’ve ever made. Part of me believes that it could be successful, reach new audiences, maybe even form its own community. I already have ideas for potential sequels. It’s one of my greatest achievements, and I’ll never regret making it. I’ve given as much of my soul as I could to it, and it’s never enough for my own insurmountable standards. I’ve given up on it several times. Part of me thinks this game has been a failure the whole time, that I should just get it done and move on without regard for quality, or not even do that and just cancel it, because it was never going to go anywhere and nobody cares about it. I feel like I don’t care enough about it, that I didn’t work hard enough or that I wasn’t smart enough. I’ve been wasting my life on it. I’ve been questioning whether I even want to do this anymore.

Why am I still doing this? This isn’t a hobby anymore, if it ever even was. I don’t make games for fun. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t. But I don’t make them for money, either. It would be nice if games could pay for my existence fees, but it still seems far from a viable career. And that was never my main reason anyway.

I make games because I have to. Because it’s the only thing I can do. The only thing I do, at all. I am compelled by something to create. Any time I’m not making games, I’m thinking about them while I do something else, or nothing at all. It’s what I decided to go to college for. It’s what I have a degree in, what I accrued student debt for. In case you were starting to wonder, I’m not going anywhere, because there’s nowhere else for me to go. If there’s anything I’m to do, it’s this. Nothing else is more difficult for me, but nothing else is for me. It’s the only purpose I’ve ever had.

Every game I make has a story. Every game I make is part of one big story. That’s why I couldn’t stop myself from making Quantron’s Game, why I refused to give up on it even though it drove me crazy. It connects every single game I’ve ever made. It shows how everything is part of just one universe, and how it was always meant to become something so much more, a larger story that I no longer feel I will ever be able to tell by making games.

I’m not giving up because it’s difficult, I started in the first place and I’m still going, because it’s difficult. That’s why all my games are so hard, because otherwise I feel like they’re not worth playing. And that’s one thing in particular I’ve been trying to figure out, too. How do I design a game that’s both fun and easy AND still challenging, that’s rewarding to play instead of just rewarding to beat?

But I feel like I’ve reached the limit to what I can do by myself. That’s why I asked for help with the dragon. And there are even bigger games I would love to make, games that I know I could never make alone. I have thought about how I might put together a team, but that’s a whole other set of challenges that I don’t think I’m ready for right now.

So what am I going to do? Or rather, try to do? Because I haven’t been following through on my plans. I’m tired of saying I’ll do something and then beating myself up for not being able to do it.

Well, I want to return to The Legend of Quintavius, and I will not start making another game until it’s finished. And instead of banging my head against the wall trying to solve bugs, I’ll take a more artistic approach and focus on refining the story, visuals, and music, one last time. Hopefully this means I’ll be able to meet the approximate deadline I have in mind, but I still won't say when that is because I don’t really trust myself anymore.

It will be the last big web game I make for the foreseeable future. I just don’t have enough time to keep making them at this rate anymore, not without stressing myself out.

I still want to make games sometimes. After all, I know more about this field than any other. But they have to be either tiny, simple web games made during a weekend, like for a game jam, or a single large project with no deadlines that I work on every now and then, for fun or maybe to sell eventually. But these medium-sized experiments just aren’t feasible.

Instead, I’m going to focus on doing something completely different. I’ve been reevaluating how I might tell more of my tall tale in a much easier medium. Because it doesn’t have to be just games. Stories come in all shapes and sizes. And for my next story that I’ve been itching to tell for years, one I originally planned to be a game, I think I found an even better way to create it.

But I won’t make any promises. I can’t make any promises. Because I put all the skill points I had in game development, and while a few of them will transition over to this new idea, there’s a lot more I’ll need to learn.

I feel bad for venting, but maybe you relate to some of these things. If so, then I just hope this is something you needed to hear.

Here’s a more positive look at the Quantron’s Game situation. Maybe the one level I did end up releasing for Ludum Dare 53 was enough for a game jam after all. Something that explores the idea and gets it in people’s hands. That’s the whole point. It doesn’t have to work, it’s just a neat little thing that I made.

Thank you for reading.