Re: Monthly chat February 2016
Congratulations on the upcoming marriage! I'm happy for you man!
Severestormsteve, I'm glad to hear your game projects are coming along. CAE Jones that goes for you as well, though you make it sound like "the pit" has a stronger hold on you at the moment, hehe. As long as you can keep yourself coding you'll be finished before you know it. Each time you come up for air (facebook, forum, email), you're playing programmer's russian roulette!
I'm slowly trying to get myself back into the community. I still don't even run Skype, and only barely glance at my email to see if anything non swamp related needs my attention. It's just so hard to get back in once you've been away, I'm not sure how so many others manage to pull it off. Plenty of times I've seen people surface after essentially vanishing for weeks/months and they seem to pop right back into the swing of things.
I think it was back in early November that enough "life" had piled up that I reached a state of being overwhelmed. I stopped even looking at Skype, email, and the forum, and that was clearly the tipping point. It's the whole "out of sight, out of mind"... hmm, it strikes me as odd to use that saying here... and once I wasn't constantly seeing stuff about the community it was 10 times easier not to think about it.
By the time the dust started to settle and life was a little more manageable, I was shocked by how much time had passed. I remember thinking, Holy crap, literally 3 months has just flashed by of me being away from the audiogames community! It's hard to explain, but it was actually frightening to see just how easy it was to be gone since for years I've found it hard to imagine not being a part of this place. I guess anything and everything can change quickly, if you slip up and let it.
The bright side is that from the moment I had that startling realization, I actively started programming again and I made some difficult changes to one of my long running projects. I have talked about my Castaways 2 project with several people in the past. It was a large project with grand goals, and as a result I've never been able to get very far before Swamp regularly pulls me away. Each time I'd get back to C2 (Castaways 2), I'd have lost all momentum and would usually tear out and redo whole sections of code. I'm guessing my fellow developers understand why it works like that. While doing complicated code, being pulled away before you're ready usually means you'll come back to something that's more work to re-understand than it is to just tear down and start fresh on.
So I looked at my beloved Castaways 2 project and made the tough decision to change its direction into something much smaller. When us developers have built up a grand game idea, we can get stuck and never be willing to change it or scale ourselves back. We sort of fall in love with the project and get all stubborn about it. In a situation where you can't complete such a grand project, for whatever reason, those stubborn love-projects will never be finished.
To get myself out of that trap, I tell myself that what I originally planned for Castaways 2 can just come into existence later down the road, perhaps as a Castaways 3. I'm also happy to report that several testers have been playing Castaways 2 since Friday night, and it has continued to come toge
ther at a pretty good pace. I had already had a ton of code written for the "grand" Castaways 2 idea, so when I decided to change I sat down and asked myself what type of game I could easily create with the stuff I'd already written. Thanks to all of that code I started with, it only took a few days of programming before I had it far enough along to bring the testers in. If all goes well, we should have a new game soon.
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