So this entry is going to be a lot more personal, but still related to this project. This week has mainly been some work with the train station and trees, not really enough to write a whole diary entry about.
One thing that stands out to me though, is I actually cut a planned mechanic. You may remember from diary #2 that I was thinking, oh, I should let the pops drink water to sustain themselves. And it would be a pretty simple system to add – just another couple of states into the state machine, and it’s done. The thing is though, it’s a slippery slope. It’s easy to think, oh, this mechanic makes sense, let’s fit that in too. But the cutoff has to go somewhere, otherwise the game will never be finished. Especially in a town builder, it’s easy to just keep adding things that make it more “realistic”, but the real questions are: Does it really add to the game? Even if it does, is it worth the time investment and added complexity?
Especially in game development, I think that this concept of “feature creep” is prevalent because it relates to the question, why do we create games? That’s different for different people, but I can do my best to explain it from my point of view. My day job right now is software engineering at a global megacorp. I’m sure a quick Internet search or two of my name will pull up the specifics. Overall, it’s been pretty good. It pays enough that I can support my family of five – it’s not my fair share of the profit my labo(u)r generates, that goes to the shareholders (yay capitalism!), but it’s still plenty. Some of the work has been interesting and meaningful, like reducing Internet traffic by up to 0.5%1*. Some not so much, like code migration and features for projects that got shut down soon afterwards.
It’s never really been my “passion” though – a word I have to put in quotes because it gets misused so much. That’s been games. After studying game development in college (i.e. university) and working in the (mobile) games industry for a bit, a very well-timed recruiter email and a lot of luck sent me over to the megacorp. And there’s always been this desire to build what I want to build – it can only be suppressed for so long.
So the next question is, why did I wait until now? The other piece of the puzzle will be familiar to some of you – late diagnosed ADHD. I had occasionally done some “side projects”, but never ended up finishing any of them. Turns out, there was a reason for this! And while getting on a regular dose of amphetamines hasn’t been the perfect solution (among other things, I’ve still had depression and anxiety to deal with, and getting COVID last fall did not help that at all), it has helped me start to figure out the question, what do I really want to do with my life, and how can I make it work?
Of course, this can easily turn into, “I want to make my dream game”. Realistically though, is it really only one “dream game”? Or is it just a vague concept in your head? For me at least, when I come with something extra I should add, it’s in the service of a vague “dream”, rather than an actual game concept. It hits the need to work on the project you want to work on, but doesn’t necessarily help the game itself. And that’s what makes feature creep so sinister, at least for me – it scratches that gamedev itch, but gets in the way of your long term goals. It feels like the right thing at the time, but if the more fulfilling goal is actually releasing a game, it’s a net negative.
Anyway, I hope that made a coherent point and wasn’t just a stream of words. Here’s some screenshots of what I’ve been working on:
- This is based on very rough calculations, and is oversimplified to the point of just being wrong. The full explanation would make up its own article, but the gist of it is that we weren’t clearing any bottlenecks (not all Internet traffic has the same impact on infrastructure), but were delivering substantial data savings to users. ↩︎
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