Comments on: Shelve it

By: My iPhone game graveyard | Bytesize Adventures

My iPhone game graveyard | Bytesize Adventures — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:52:17 +0000

[...] all started work on games only to abandon them part the way through. There can be many reasons for this but for me it’s usually because they just aren’t fun to play or were too [...]

By: Tightening the noose « Retro Dreamer Blog

Tightening the noose « Retro Dreamer Blog — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 23:07:36 +0000

[...] I’m smart enough that it kills me to think about that on any commercial or practical level. But on a spiritual, creative level, I think I’m cool with it. And if I read stuff like this a particular way: The Top Idea in Your Mind, I can convince myself we’re on good ground. Like scrambling around for funding, thinking about the business side of our games becomes all consuming. It becomes the thing I think about in the shower, and the end result is usually to slow us down. If I could make game development the top idea in my mind for the rest of the year, and Craig could always keep our current project as the top idea in his mind, I think in the long run we’ll produce better games, which you’d hope would ultimately lead to us selling more games. When we get all maudlin and introspective we end up wanting to fill our shelves faster than Miguel. [...]

By: Miguel A. Friginal

Miguel A. Friginal — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:51:55 +0000

@Mike I could not agree more. It may seem like I am advocating abandoning a project at the first bump; not at all! Maybe I should have made more clear that “actually finishing something” was the goal. But if thinking how cool your game is doesn’t keep you going while doing the boring parts, then there is something else wrong with the project.

By: Mike Berg

Mike Berg — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:55:55 +0000

Good post, in-our-face advice about something that’s hard to do. I do have a comment about the “once it’s no longer fun, you should shelve it” part… Any game project will come to a point where it’s not fun any more; that final 5% — bug squashing and polishing before release can be extremely frustrating and tedious. One of the biggest problems new indie devs have is never actually finishing a project, for this exact reason. A newer idea comes up that seems a heckuva lot more fun than buckling down and finishing the current project, etc etc. So yes, combine this with a +1 for Noel’s comment about making sure your protoype is solid, pick a good game to work on, and make sure you finish it! :)

By: Miguel A. Friginal

Miguel A. Friginal — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:39:23 +0000

@Erick You are not the first person to suggest this. But I still don’t see how to do it on the iPhone without releasing all the source code and requiring people to compile their own binaries. For an ad-hoc binary download to work I would need to add anybody interested to the provisioning profile… not practical, especially since I can only have 100 people there

By: Noel

Noel — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:51:37 +0000

Great (and sad) post. The corollary to all of this is, make sure your prototype is short and razor sharp. If you’re going to kill (shelve) a game, do it as soon as possible.

I should write a blog post on my prototyping process one of these days.

By: Erick Garayblas

Erick Garayblas — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:08:02 +0000

Nice article! Though I suggest if you already have a playable prototype that you’ve worked on for weeks and decide to “shelve it”, you might as well release it for FREE. Somewhere, somehow, someone will still enjoy your prototype–other than you. :)

By: BOb

BOb — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:21:04 +0000

Very nice post, you’re pretty good at this (ie. don’t shelve your blog) :)

By: David McGraw

David McGraw — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 02:25:49 +0000

Great stuff. It’s terribly easy to lose sight into what you originally wanted and turn it into something deserving (or not) of an academy award for gamedev.

Keep it simple… and fun.