When Art Becomes Obligation
Posted on May 13th, 2014
The game began as a submission for the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. To no one’s surprise, it didn’t get in (the alpha version was extremely rough), but I mostly just used that as an excuse to jump into an idea I’d been toying with for a while. And when I’d never touched RPG Maker before and everything in it was new, it seemed like the perfect dev tool.
Then I started running into its limitations. Having come in from the freedom of Twine, those limits became really frustrating. That feeling of frustration makes working with the thing seem like a drudge or a wrestling match sometimes; I wish that I had started off in Unity instead of, in some ways, wasting my time with a program I’ll quickly outgrow.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad I’m making this game even if the means and results aren’t everything I expected. It’s the sort of thing I would’ve eventually done anyway and even might redo once I have more skills. I just hate feeling trapped by it, knowing that if I do something else I really want to do, I might not get back to this game for a long, long time. And in the meantime, I’d feel bad for leaving it neglected.
Though I often enjoy working on it, I think the main reason I’ll finish the game within the next few weeks is because I’m tired of looking at it and want to move on, and I’ve delayed the release month already. I think the main thing I’ve learned from this is not to give games release dates or definite timeframes until I’m fairly sure I’ll want to finish them by then.
I’m kinda having the same problems with XP. RPG maker 2000/2003 (same engine for Yume Nikki) has more freedom than XP and it’s pretty annoying and hard to adapt to it. :/