I've blabbed from time to time on here about the more personal side of developing games, about the insecurities it brings out or the stresses of working insane hours for months strait, and today I'm going to blab a little more about something new to me about development.
I've been working on SiC for just shy of a year now, and I'v hit an incredible new problem. I'm afraid to finish it. Most of my games in the past have been small projects, the largest that actually released was Monotaur took about 5ish months (and ended up being basically hot dogshit) but most of my other projects have been 1-4 months, give or take. All of my other releases have really been half baked. It's rarely that I feel the game is done and ready to be released, it's more that I'm sick of tweaking it and can't contain my excitement for others to play it any longer. SiC on the other hand, I'v been tweaking and fixing a near complete version of for almost a month now and, while I'm sick to fucking death of tweaking it, I'm not excited for you all to play it.
I'm not sure if the different feeling comes from me having said again and again that this game'll be the best one I've made yet, or that it falls into a more traditional core gamer genre, but either way, I'm terrified of development coming to an end. The prospect of releasing SiC and finally having to come to terms with the fact that I'm not a special snowflake dev, that I'm not one of the talented and lucky individuals that get to make this a profession, that I'm just another drop in the Indie bucket, another abandoned listing on Steam Greenlight. It's terrifying. Just the possibility that I slaved for months working as hard as I have as long as I have all to just have it fail after release is. . . well, mortifying.
Maybe this is all for nothing. Maybe people will really like SiC when it's done, maybe it'll sell actual copies and people will think it's the greatest thing ever. I mean, it won't be the greatest thing ever, but maybe people will connect with it. I sure hope they do, developing more games would be a hell of a lot easier if I didn't have to waste so much time working for cash.
In any case, I'm going to push all these thoughts down deep in the back of my mind at least long enough to make SiC's planned October 15th release date. Fingers crossed, I make it in one piece and maintain some morsel of sanity.
Thanks for reading,
Wyatt
Butterflies can't have strokes, their brains are too small.