let it leave me like a long breath

recently i've been really wanting to work on a larger game project again while also being painfully aware of how a larger game project means like, working on lots of small fiddly bits forever. i have something like a half-dozen game concepts outlined and any one of them could become some huge 10-year gamedev project, and committing to any one of them would preclude any of the others being made, and i'm just kinda bad at the kind of unattachment that'd be required to consign them all to non-existence.

this is incidentally also why i keep writing updates for fics that have been abandoned for like ten years. it sure would be nice to finish up all my wips and have a clean slate to work with, but i don't really think that's how creation works. or at least it's definitely not how it's historically worked for me.

anyway so instead of working on one bigger project i've been messing around with a bunch of smaller ones. which is completely counter to the point above about wanting to finish things + not being able to release all these half-finished things, but, well, that's how i get into this kind of mess. :V but i've put together a bunch of javascript demos with art and stuff, and that's neat because at this point i could probably throw together a NES- or SNES-styled game all by myself. i'd just need, you know, a concept, instead of an engine demo.

basically i'm in this weird space where i keep working on code/'engine' stuff while having very little idea about the actual game parts, which is basically just an intensification of my existing issues working on gamedev stuff.

(i posted about this a little on mastodon but working on game mechanics is the hardest part of gamedev for me, since that's when a project goes from being a cool render toy to being an absolutely terrible game -- a half-finished & incomplete mechanical structure adds just enough interactivity for a program to become a miserable-feeling game, and i'm really bad at pushing through that part to get anything implemented-enough to be playable and fun. basically it's this tedious & exhausting lull that totally saps my enthusiasm for working on anything)

anyway all that to say that i've been picking away at a little javascript game project (the same one i've been posting about here and here) and mostly circumventing the 'mechanics suck' part by just implementing all the ui and interface first in a kind of 'creative mode' before i start thinking at all about mechanics & balance. that has at least let me get into it enough to be able to refine some of my mechanical concepts before i actually try to implement them, so hopefully that means when i do get around to adding in the mechanics i'll have a better sense of what's "engaging"

anyway i mostly just wanted to make a post since i've been trying to post more + it's been a while since i posted anything

oh yeah also one of my games on itch.io is in a game bundle right now -- wrt the whole 'gamejolt bans all sexual content' thing, somebody started a #FuckingCensorshipBundle (hashtag hashtag etc) on itch, where all the proceeds are going towards SWOP behind bars. & you know my game is free but if anybody feels like buying the bundle to support a good cause, go for it.

the ongoing crackdown on any kind of sexual content online is genuinely very disturbing but for me personally it's mostly made me want to make explicit sexual content a major part of any future game i make, even if they're not 'porn games'. i do keep wanting to make some kinda horny actraiser clone, but, you know, see top of post

anyway i think that's enough text for now. god, imagine try to post this on twitter-styled sites. 11 tweets or w/e with random ui breaks in the middle of every paragraph