Flower's Dev Diary (March 31st) - Cold hard truth edition
Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 8:24 pm
Ok, been more than a couple of months since my last dev diary, and as the third anniversary of the first release of the mod fast approaches (April 10th...three years already?! AAAAAHHHH!!!!), I want to say a few things that have been weighing on me more and more over the past while.
Most of you that follow the mod probably know that the final stages of it have been lingering epicly over the past 6 months or so. Namely, we're talking about HC Villagers here and the "end game" of BTW. I suspect this has probably left a lot of you with question marks as to where things are going, and admittedly, those question marks have been haunting me as well and have been hanging over practically everything I do.
Some of you may remember that about a year ago I made a decision that I was tired of developing for Minecraft and wanted to start up my own game instead (RTH). This occurred for a variety of reasons, most of which I won't get into here, but it became clear to me that I needed to move on. So, I began a final push to get BTW finalized and into a state where it would meet my own standards for what I consider to be a complete game.
Over the six months or so that followed, there was a flurry of development in that direction with me trying to cover what I considered to be all the remaining loose ends in MC to that end. Obviously, this was a rather massive task as I took it upon myself to not only wrap up BTW itself, but basically MC as a whole, and I think we're all aware that Mojang has left a prodigious number of loose ends in vanilla.
Me deciding to essentially freeze the code base at 1.52 was obviously a wise decision to that end as with each release Mojang seemed to be adding more dangling loose ends than they were resolving, and it's already been covered at length on these forums how the quality of content they were adding to the game has basically been in a steady decline ever since Notch left, with some of the most recent releases being the very worst examples of that trend.
Anyways, I kept soldiering on from there and trying to get things in a state I could consider final.
In retrospect though, about six months ago or so, specifically during the last Minecon, something really snapped for me, and beyond being tired of developing for Minecraft, some last straw process occurred within me that I think essentially amounts to the following:
I no longer *enjoyed* developing for Minecraft. Not one bit. In fact, I found trying to continue doing so to be a distinctly unpleasant experience, and I didn't even particularly want to play it anymore.
After much analysis over the past six months, I think what this basically comes down to is the sensation of working at crossed purposes.
On one hand, I very much want to complete Better Than Wolves to my own standards. I feel the community deserves that, the mod itself deserves that, and I personally deserve the satisfaction of knowing that I it to completion after all the work and time I put into it.
On the other hand, I absolutely hate the feeling I've had that I'm helping people that I don't like, by further contributing my creativity and ideas to the game as a whole.
After writing up a few paragraphs detailing the specifics there, I decided there's no point potentially causing additional conflict through making this stuff more public than it already is. Suffice it to say that when it comes to the current devs at Mojang, and the larger modding scene surrounding MC, I don't much care for many of the people involved, and thus do not feel comfortable contributing to their success, even indirectly through contributing my ideas to the game. When I sit down to work on BTW, it's very hard for me to escape the feeling that I'm doing exactly that.
This is a very different situation from when I first started working on BTW. Not only did I love Minecraft, but I had an infinite amount of respect for Notch with him having created what I considered to be a masterpiece of game design. I was more than happy to contribute in any way I could to that. With time, things changed in that regard when he left and when new people came on to try and replace him. But still, I kept running on that initial vibe, even as it slowly dissipated beneath me.
So: crossed purposes. I want to do something that pains me to actually do.
What has this resulted in? It fills me with regret to say this, but I think it's basically amounted to six months of procrastination while I struggled with those conflicting sentiments. Throughout that time, the final release of BTW has always just been a couple of weeks away, and throughout that time I always found yet another excuse to work on something else "just one more day", basically doing that 180 times or so in succession :P
That "something else" has primarily been my KSP mod, BTSM. Don't get me wrong, I think I have gotten a pretty epic amount of work done on that thing and achieved some remarkable stuff that I'm very satisfied with, so I certainly haven't been idly twiddling my thumbs watching non-stop TV or something. HOWEVER, that was not my intent with it. My intent was to maybe spend a week or two working on a tech tree that would turn KSP's career mode into something more to my taste while taking a *little* break from BTW to recharge my batteries for the final push. Six months later I instead have a rather epic feature list that touches on almost every aspect of the game and which has become a "total conversion" in its own right. Without really intending to I basically made another mini-BTW while procrastinating about working on BTW.
And why does that pain me so much? RTH. I wanted to start in on that about a year ago, and this is what's happened instead. I've been in a nice little catch-22 where I want to work on RTH, but feel compelled to complete BTW first, but can't bring myself to work on BTW, so I work "one more day" on BTSM as a more palatable immediate and "short term" alternative.
The whole situation has basically been fucked, and after spending much time on self-reflection, I'll be the first to admit it.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of good has come out of BTSM. First of all, I think it's super cool and very fun, which I definitely take pride in. Secondly, it's exposed a wider audience to my overall design style and it has struck a chord with many that may not have been familiar with BTW. I've also become familiar with both the Unity engine and C# (KSP uses both) which I suspect I'll be putting to good use with RTH. It has also opened me up to aspects of designing creative-style gameplay that I had not dealt with previously and it has thus broadened my perspective as a designer. Lastly, it has reminded me that I am not a "one trick pony" and that my capabilities extend way beyond BTW which is not something which is necessarily evident after devoting yourself to a single project for an extended period of time.
But that aside, it's not what I should be working on at this point in time, and I am keenly aware of that.
So what does all this introspective wankery actually mean to the future of BTW, BTSM, and most importantly (to my mind at least): RTH?
Well, let me tell you :)
Primarily, I wanted to write up this dev diary to clearly state both to you guys and myself that I'm giving myself ten more days to "finalize" BTW, and that's it. The third anniversary seems like a good date for me to set a do or die deadline on this and put this to bed once and for all. It's become clear to me that I need to make a clean break from this catch-22 of mine and simply move on to bigger and better things.
What will this final release actually entail? Basically, everything I feel I can realistically get done in ten days time and put a period on the end of this prolonged sentence.
I warn you now: it likely won't be epic. I simply can not afford (including quite literally in the financial sense) to let this drag out any further and say turn HC Villagers into something that fixes all of Mojang's mistakes and makes them a fully integrated part of the game. Heck, there might be very few changes to them indeed, or simply a baseline implementation of what I had once hoped to be a much larger system.
After those ten days, I'm basically done with modding, and entering into the brave new world of being an independent game developer. I will continue to maintain and support both my mods, possibly adding small bits here and there as the mood strikes me, particularly with BTSM which I still have a few plans for, particularly since I am still an avid KSP player, and I still enjoy working on it. But that aside, on April 10th my title officially changes from "mod developer" to "independent game developer" and my focus will shift almost entirely to the latter.
Anyways, that's the story. My apologies for the length of this, but I thought it was about time for a public explanation of what's been going on and what the future holds.
See y'all on the 10th :)
Most of you that follow the mod probably know that the final stages of it have been lingering epicly over the past 6 months or so. Namely, we're talking about HC Villagers here and the "end game" of BTW. I suspect this has probably left a lot of you with question marks as to where things are going, and admittedly, those question marks have been haunting me as well and have been hanging over practically everything I do.
Some of you may remember that about a year ago I made a decision that I was tired of developing for Minecraft and wanted to start up my own game instead (RTH). This occurred for a variety of reasons, most of which I won't get into here, but it became clear to me that I needed to move on. So, I began a final push to get BTW finalized and into a state where it would meet my own standards for what I consider to be a complete game.
Over the six months or so that followed, there was a flurry of development in that direction with me trying to cover what I considered to be all the remaining loose ends in MC to that end. Obviously, this was a rather massive task as I took it upon myself to not only wrap up BTW itself, but basically MC as a whole, and I think we're all aware that Mojang has left a prodigious number of loose ends in vanilla.
Me deciding to essentially freeze the code base at 1.52 was obviously a wise decision to that end as with each release Mojang seemed to be adding more dangling loose ends than they were resolving, and it's already been covered at length on these forums how the quality of content they were adding to the game has basically been in a steady decline ever since Notch left, with some of the most recent releases being the very worst examples of that trend.
Anyways, I kept soldiering on from there and trying to get things in a state I could consider final.
In retrospect though, about six months ago or so, specifically during the last Minecon, something really snapped for me, and beyond being tired of developing for Minecraft, some last straw process occurred within me that I think essentially amounts to the following:
I no longer *enjoyed* developing for Minecraft. Not one bit. In fact, I found trying to continue doing so to be a distinctly unpleasant experience, and I didn't even particularly want to play it anymore.
After much analysis over the past six months, I think what this basically comes down to is the sensation of working at crossed purposes.
On one hand, I very much want to complete Better Than Wolves to my own standards. I feel the community deserves that, the mod itself deserves that, and I personally deserve the satisfaction of knowing that I it to completion after all the work and time I put into it.
On the other hand, I absolutely hate the feeling I've had that I'm helping people that I don't like, by further contributing my creativity and ideas to the game as a whole.
After writing up a few paragraphs detailing the specifics there, I decided there's no point potentially causing additional conflict through making this stuff more public than it already is. Suffice it to say that when it comes to the current devs at Mojang, and the larger modding scene surrounding MC, I don't much care for many of the people involved, and thus do not feel comfortable contributing to their success, even indirectly through contributing my ideas to the game. When I sit down to work on BTW, it's very hard for me to escape the feeling that I'm doing exactly that.
This is a very different situation from when I first started working on BTW. Not only did I love Minecraft, but I had an infinite amount of respect for Notch with him having created what I considered to be a masterpiece of game design. I was more than happy to contribute in any way I could to that. With time, things changed in that regard when he left and when new people came on to try and replace him. But still, I kept running on that initial vibe, even as it slowly dissipated beneath me.
So: crossed purposes. I want to do something that pains me to actually do.
What has this resulted in? It fills me with regret to say this, but I think it's basically amounted to six months of procrastination while I struggled with those conflicting sentiments. Throughout that time, the final release of BTW has always just been a couple of weeks away, and throughout that time I always found yet another excuse to work on something else "just one more day", basically doing that 180 times or so in succession :P
That "something else" has primarily been my KSP mod, BTSM. Don't get me wrong, I think I have gotten a pretty epic amount of work done on that thing and achieved some remarkable stuff that I'm very satisfied with, so I certainly haven't been idly twiddling my thumbs watching non-stop TV or something. HOWEVER, that was not my intent with it. My intent was to maybe spend a week or two working on a tech tree that would turn KSP's career mode into something more to my taste while taking a *little* break from BTW to recharge my batteries for the final push. Six months later I instead have a rather epic feature list that touches on almost every aspect of the game and which has become a "total conversion" in its own right. Without really intending to I basically made another mini-BTW while procrastinating about working on BTW.
And why does that pain me so much? RTH. I wanted to start in on that about a year ago, and this is what's happened instead. I've been in a nice little catch-22 where I want to work on RTH, but feel compelled to complete BTW first, but can't bring myself to work on BTW, so I work "one more day" on BTSM as a more palatable immediate and "short term" alternative.
The whole situation has basically been fucked, and after spending much time on self-reflection, I'll be the first to admit it.
Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of good has come out of BTSM. First of all, I think it's super cool and very fun, which I definitely take pride in. Secondly, it's exposed a wider audience to my overall design style and it has struck a chord with many that may not have been familiar with BTW. I've also become familiar with both the Unity engine and C# (KSP uses both) which I suspect I'll be putting to good use with RTH. It has also opened me up to aspects of designing creative-style gameplay that I had not dealt with previously and it has thus broadened my perspective as a designer. Lastly, it has reminded me that I am not a "one trick pony" and that my capabilities extend way beyond BTW which is not something which is necessarily evident after devoting yourself to a single project for an extended period of time.
But that aside, it's not what I should be working on at this point in time, and I am keenly aware of that.
So what does all this introspective wankery actually mean to the future of BTW, BTSM, and most importantly (to my mind at least): RTH?
Well, let me tell you :)
Primarily, I wanted to write up this dev diary to clearly state both to you guys and myself that I'm giving myself ten more days to "finalize" BTW, and that's it. The third anniversary seems like a good date for me to set a do or die deadline on this and put this to bed once and for all. It's become clear to me that I need to make a clean break from this catch-22 of mine and simply move on to bigger and better things.
What will this final release actually entail? Basically, everything I feel I can realistically get done in ten days time and put a period on the end of this prolonged sentence.
I warn you now: it likely won't be epic. I simply can not afford (including quite literally in the financial sense) to let this drag out any further and say turn HC Villagers into something that fixes all of Mojang's mistakes and makes them a fully integrated part of the game. Heck, there might be very few changes to them indeed, or simply a baseline implementation of what I had once hoped to be a much larger system.
After those ten days, I'm basically done with modding, and entering into the brave new world of being an independent game developer. I will continue to maintain and support both my mods, possibly adding small bits here and there as the mood strikes me, particularly with BTSM which I still have a few plans for, particularly since I am still an avid KSP player, and I still enjoy working on it. But that aside, on April 10th my title officially changes from "mod developer" to "independent game developer" and my focus will shift almost entirely to the latter.
Anyways, that's the story. My apologies for the length of this, but I thought it was about time for a public explanation of what's been going on and what the future holds.
See y'all on the 10th :)