Monthly Archives: August 2014

Iron….y

Here we find ourselves in that too-often familiar situation.

I usually complain that I don’t have enough time to put into gamedev. Ideas usually come to me in my sleep, when I’m working at my day job, when Verto Studio beckons and I have to urgently fix a bug or work on it for other reasons.

Now, ahhh, I have/had a completely free three-day weekend. Verto is up-to-date, work is caught up, and I’m completely free. I decided to put together a three-day game-jam of my own this weekend. I even nicely packaged up my “engine”, the Verto Core, into an XCode Project so that it is ready to use for 3D game development.

All systems are go!

All ready to go, I dusted off my “idea generator”, the wacom tablet, and bam! I suddenly realized, I have no good idea. Nothing I can do in 3 days at least. That sudden realization that all of my ideas are ridiculous long-term epic game projects that cannot be accomplished by one man in any reasonable amount of time.

Now I’ve been at this far too long to know better. ..To know better that actually starting one of those long-term game projects, even on the whim of a weekend is a terrible terrible idea. Why? Because I hate visiting the graveyard of once-promising game development efforts. So much so that I do everything in my power to avoid adding to that graveyard.

So back to the issue at hand: why can’t I come up with any small-scale 3D games? I say 3D because it’s what I’ve always strived to achieve, and now that I’m here, I can’t just make a 2D game and throw away all that 3D knowledge and hard work it took me to get there. Maybe I’m thinking too hard. I always tell myself that I should never force a good idea out, and that it’ll come to me when the time is right. That or I just don’t have the right type of brain for game design. Thus I’ll just sacrifice this weekend to continued relaxation, gaming, drinking, socializing, and otherwise unproductive endeavors..

..frick