7. Refresh, Restart

The Crossroads of Creation: Navigating the Hard Decisions in Game Development

Hi, I'm David and this is my place to talk about what I love most: making video games with my son 13-year-old Luke. Last year we released a Roguelike called Brawlberry. Now we're working on an Irish-themed Survivorlike called Sons of Dagda. This is my place to talk about how this is going and to nerd out on all things games and game dev.

Last week’s regular article talked about “The Dip” and loss of momentum. After that stall, I’m lucky to have two weeks off—two weeks of focused effort. The plan is to push the game hard during this time in an attempt to revive interest.

At the same time, my wife is heading back to work after maternity leave, so I’m also on full-time dad duty, helping the transition be as smooth as possible. But, babies sleep, and that means I’ve got some focused, planned sprints to get this project back on the rails.

I knew I wanted to strip the game back to basics, starting with the weapons. I shrunk down the weapon selection to just one, familiarised myself with the codebase again, and started fine-tuning. I fixed a myriad of bugs, scaling issues, and overpowered mechanics.

One by one, I went through each weapon and polished the hell out of them. Motivation started building. Luke saw me working and instantly joined in himself.

I built out a new building that sucks up all the gems (à la the orb in Vampire Survivors). It looked and felt amazing to be making forward progress.

Luke built a wall to help with defenses, added more map obstacles, and created paths to navigate.

Instantly, the game felt better. Navigating an actual map rather than just a big open field felt much truer to the game we had envisioned months ago.

And yet…It still wasn’t fun.

It had moments of fun, bursts—brief glimpses of the game it could be. I could see what needed to be done, and I saw the long road ahead to get it there. And after two whole weeks of complete focus and drive, we had moved the needle, but not enough to squash the growing worry:

Is this the right game to spend all this time on?

Our goal, in general, is to make small, polished games that help us grow our skills. And it was starting to feel like we had missed the small part of that equation.

But then—is this just “The Dip,” as I mentioned in the last article? Do these thoughts make me lazy or wise?

After two weeks of hard work, I expected the momentum to carry us closer to the finish line. But even after all that effort…

We didn’t want to work on the game anymore.

It’s a big decision to drop a project like this. We’ve spent months pouring our free time into this beauty, and though we can take our learnings, for the code, art, etc.—the soul of the project doesn’t transfer so easily.

And then, another dimension to the decision: is this the lesson I want to pass on to my son? That when things get hard, you bail? Or that you shouldn’t attempt the impossible?

When I’m looking for advice on life decisions, I always turn to philosophy—not any of the ancient texts (too dry for me)—but instead, a good friend of mine: (and fellow substacker) The Living Philosophy. Only a short drive away, so Luke and I trucked out to his hermit cave, sat him down as a playtester on the game, and made a final decision.

It was hard to watch. I’m super proud of what we made. But nothing was fully together. Seeing the game through his eyes solidified the decision: this wasn’t working. And rather than force ourselves to do something we no longer want to, let’s spend our time doing something we do.

After all, this is supposed to be a fun hobby.

Even writing this now, I’m not fully sure about the decision, if I’m honest. But we gave it a solid two weeks, and we learned loads.

So what now?

Start with fun.

This won’t be the end of Sons of Dagda. Like us, as game developers, it will continue to evolve and change. We plan on taking the amazing concept art from our amazing artist, Delilah, and move into a 3D space. We have one mechanic we want to polish and polish into a regularly play-tested experience. It’s actually something we have been playing around with in the background so we have high hopes for this iteration of Dagda.

Tough decisions this week, but overall Luke and I are energised again and are now hyper-aware of letting a project get away from us. Onwards and upwards!

Thanks for reading.