When is something done?
By the standards of the AAA games industry most of my projects are 2.0, but I did not even release them
What it means to be “done”
I have been thinking a bit about perfectionism lately. I always considered it a virtue, but now I look at it as a crutch. How many apps have had whole additional systems built into them just to avoid releasing them?
Take scvmrack for example. The original designs were done 3 years ago!
The original had a gameplay management system. It rolled for you with modifiers, added and removed items for inventory, healed, destroyed your items on crit fails, and God only remembers what else.
It was all done, but then ‘it was not perfect’, so I scrapped the whole thing to add a ‘simple mode’ that just tells the player exactly what to roll. A complete refactor of the whole gameplay loop, weeks of work—left incomplete because it was not ‘perfect’.
Better done than perfect
Scvmrack is now in ‘ultra’ simple mode. It allows basic interaction and is little more than an interactive character sheet. And you know what? It’s better than nothing. Each day I actually get closer to making that Reddit post in r/MorkBorg, r/SideProject, and all those other communities.
It is not revolutionary. It is not going to make Johan Nohr PM me asking me to work on the official version, but it is something. And it will be done.
Perfectionism is often an escape
I think that perfectionism is often just an excuse for not finishing things. It’s a way to avoid the fear of failure, or the fear of not being good enough. But the truth is, no one is perfect, and that’s okay. When I release it, it will not be perfect. People will find bugs, issues, and gaps. And you know what I will do? Probably have a panic attack, but after a few breaths, I will fix them.
If I do a good enough job, I will have problems with server throughput. That’s a good problem to have, and I feel I’ve grown enough as a developer to handle it.
I will not give you a motivational speech about ‘chasing your dreams’ or ‘never giving up’. Just try to ship things. Maybe under a pseudonym, maybe under a fake company if you fear ‘your name being tarnished forever’. Just ship it.