The State of Development
I haven’t been active in a while. I hoped that I could pick things up again soon, but it looks like it hasn’t happened. I have a job, and I struggled a lot with this, but I no longer have time to make a game. Time For Birds is on hiatus, and if I pick it up again, it’ll be a different kind of game.
But time wasn’t the only problem. Here’s everything that went wrong.
Firstly, I turned my hobby into a job. I launched a Patreon with hopes of supporting my endeavors with income, but it turned into a source of anxiety. I felt like I needed to work. Game development turned into a bad experience where I felt pressured to get something interesting done to gain approval of supporters, but then I got stuck making game engine components. I started feeling heavy guilt, and it made me want to take multiple month-long breaks from the project so I could forget about it.
To add to the stress, I was accepting Patreon rewards for custom modeled birds. This worked well the first month, and then I lost all motivation and never gained it back. I’m still trying to contact some people to offer refunds without much luck.
In the future, I won’t take money until it’s done.
That was the biggest issue, but these next issues still greatly affected development.
- The scope was WAY too large for my first time making a complete game
- I’m hardly interested in most RPG gameplay, making the game engine a struggle to create
- I did not have enough coding experience at the start, so there is too much old spaghetti code
- I was working alone
- It’s tough to say this, but there were too many birds
If I start up again, it will not be an RPG. It will be a much smaller game, and a lot of it will be coded from scratch. I also won’t intend to model 200+ individual birds.
I’ll be closing down the Patreon next month (June 2019), archiving the posts, and shelving the project. It’ll be safe and in a place where I can resume development if I find the time.
I deeply appreciate your support up to this point. Despite the issues, I still had the time of my life making this game.
— Dove 💕