In a previous post I talked about my youthful love of coding games. I stand by everything I wrote there, but I thought I’d post an update after the release of my second little game: Drumpf Flinger 9000.
What I said in that post was entirely true. I do have a lot of skills that transition very well into game creation. Perhaps too well.
I found that as I work on games in the evenings and weekends, my excitement quickly wanes. Why, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you.
It feels like work.
Probably because it is work. Not in the sense that it’s hard or requires commitment. It does, of course, but I mean it feels like my day job.
Oh, I get to do a bit more creative things (3D modeling and animating, for example), but by and large, the coding is the same. Yeah yeah, different language, different platform(s), different concerns, but it’s still just code.
Perhaps if it were my job, it’d be fine. But as it is, it feels like it scratches the same itch as my actual work. And what’s the point of that?
Oh well. It was fun, and an experiment well worth trying. I learned a lot about modern games and 3d game engines (some physics-related maths too). I’ll probably still tinker with one or two game ideas I have running around my head. But I’m not gonna worry about ever releasing them (unless I just happen to like them enough to finish up).
I think I’ll be focusing my off-hours energy on writing prose and creating comics.
Speaking of which, my Summer of Fiction was fun. I wrote a few short stories and got further along on Zombie Mart. Didn’t get to finish it, but I’ll continue to release chapters as I have time to write them. You can expect a new chapter this Friday, actually.