2DF and Beyond
I've had this post sitting as a draft for almost a month now. I was ready to write about how I had gotten back into the swing of working on 2DF and it was going to be full steam ahead. Unfortunately that plan did not pan out.
Around mid-August I finished the lobby, a feature that had bogged down the project since April. It's pitiful that it took me so long, but I was relieved to have it finished and ready to get cracking on the actual gameplay. I followed up that momentous victory by not touching the project for over two weeks. And today Dead Frontier 2 was released. Having missed my 10 year anniversary of playing the original Dead Frontier back in May, my new deadline was the release of Dead Frontier 2. As of right now, my progress on the gameplay is not sufficient for me to continue the project.
It's a shame to call it quits on this project, as it did have a sentimental aspect to it, but ultimately it has to be done. If nothing else, it was a valuable learning experience. I will save the bulk of the life lessons for a more in-depth post-mortem, but the big take away is that these larger scale, full game projects simply are not the right approach for what I want to accomplish. My goal is hone my skills and try new things, subsequently producing some portfolio pieces along the way. Spending months working on full games that I ultimately won't finish is not helping me achieve this goal.
I'll get into more detail on the plan moving forward in a later post. For now, suffice it to say I'm going to focus on much shorter-term projects. Weekend prototypes and the like. I mentioned previously that I felt like 2DF was keeping me from working on something new and now it's time to open the flood gates to all the ideas I've had on the back burner. Stay tuned.
Around mid-August I finished the lobby, a feature that had bogged down the project since April. It's pitiful that it took me so long, but I was relieved to have it finished and ready to get cracking on the actual gameplay. I followed up that momentous victory by not touching the project for over two weeks. And today Dead Frontier 2 was released. Having missed my 10 year anniversary of playing the original Dead Frontier back in May, my new deadline was the release of Dead Frontier 2. As of right now, my progress on the gameplay is not sufficient for me to continue the project.
It's a shame to call it quits on this project, as it did have a sentimental aspect to it, but ultimately it has to be done. If nothing else, it was a valuable learning experience. I will save the bulk of the life lessons for a more in-depth post-mortem, but the big take away is that these larger scale, full game projects simply are not the right approach for what I want to accomplish. My goal is hone my skills and try new things, subsequently producing some portfolio pieces along the way. Spending months working on full games that I ultimately won't finish is not helping me achieve this goal.
I'll get into more detail on the plan moving forward in a later post. For now, suffice it to say I'm going to focus on much shorter-term projects. Weekend prototypes and the like. I mentioned previously that I felt like 2DF was keeping me from working on something new and now it's time to open the flood gates to all the ideas I've had on the back burner. Stay tuned.