This is how games don't get finished..

So I did some research and I've been working on the inventory system for my game since Dec 6th. That's pretty much two months of work and today's update was to have been about it; but then I realized its been a long time and while I'm dedicated to finishing my game it would be really easy to just get interested in another project and let it slide off the radar.

This is how games don't get finished!  I know it because I have not finished a lot more games than I actually have finished!

SideQuest : A side project that lives in the depths of my hard drive tempting me to not work on the Rise of Dagon!

I'm not unique in this; every dev I talk to struggles with finishing projects. We all have hundreds of ideas that are exciting and would love to spend time on them.

War Runner was a "runner" genre game with tank based combat as the focus.

I have a buddy at work whom I partnered with to make a mobile game called War Runner (ios / android) last year, since that time we've tried to get another project going together. I think we've started at least six separate games but put them all aside as we quickly get turned off.

We even entertained trying to go back and updating War Runner as we've found a few items could be improved but we made less money on War Runner than the fee's it took to get it on the app stores.

Heck we've even thought about re-using the assets to make a different style game.. War Runner was a typical  3-lane runner style game.  While we were making it we really kept wanting to make a free roaming random tank game where you could blow up things as you drove around and had randomly generated missions pop up on your HUD.

But we can't seem to work on anything for more than 2 weeks before we both agree its just not feeling right and drop it.

The one exception so far was I started a side-project called SideQuest.

The concept for SideQuest was "side scroller meets Diablo" style game.  I was really excited about this to the point I put together the surface level with a village where the player gets their quests, and does their tasks like selling trash items, repairing and getting supplies. (Note: I didn't code in all the inventory and such just made the level, buildings, and placed the NPC's).

I also made a set of prefabs for the first dungeon level and was starting to make a movement controller for the character to prototype combat.
 

SideQuest dungeon looking very slick!

I also tried to share this one with my buddy but he wasn't able to get any work done before losing motivation and we moved on to other ideas for projects to work on together.  

However for me this is really an exciting side project that I really want to go back to when I can! I often imagine when the Rise of Dagon is done that this is the project I will take on myself next!

Also I have been working on a book cover for a friend of mine who wrote a Fantasy novel; and we thought it might be cool to do the cover in Unity 3D .. so I've been spending time here and there trying to compose this scene for his cover; but honestly we've been working on it for a year now and he keeps writing other books instead of finishing this one!

one of many possible book cover images

So yes my friends its not just game developers who  have side projects and can't finish things! Writer's have side-project-itis also!

So in the end though, despite all the temptation, and despite six or more weeks of work on the inventory system bearing fairly heavily on me I did not succumb to temptation of alternate projects this week. 

What I actually did was program in the drag-and-drop system for Rise of Dagon and made it so you can drag items from your inventory in to your equipment area as seen below:

And that is how games do get finished my friends; you work through those long dark slogs that are buried in minutiae that never seem to end! Because there is an end in sight and that ending includes a game that I'll be incredibly proud of once I finish it!

Thanks for reading, see you next week!