DEVELOPMENT

1

1,436

Distractions; Games Take A Long Time

2 years ago1,292 words

Did you know that MOTHER 3 took twelve years to make? Also I barely did anything this week and I really don't like that!!

Well. I started off this Atonal Dreams work week well enough, making a bunch of smallish but important changes and bugfixes based on tester feedback; I've got through most of the minor things, and a lot of the somewhat challenging things, but there are still several fairly difficult big revisions remaining. Dialogue revisions being maybe the most time-consuming. No major mechanics reworkings, at least.



I wrote a post on ∞ my Patreon ∞, intending to update it every day over the course of the week with what I'd done each day, hoping it'd help motivate me to keep on track...

But that lasted a whole two days.

I've been intending to contact the doctor for weeks now about issues with my mental health and an ingrown toenail, and I finally did that on Tuesday. Even though I used an app to avoid direct social interaction, I had to pick up a prescription and medicine on Wednesday, and my anxiety issues are so frustratingly severe that that trivial, twenty-minute chore cost me the whole day. ∞ I already wrote a personal post going into more detail about it ∞.

Then on Thursday, I went to have yet another COVID shot - have I had three or four now?? - because the government sent me a message and a letter telling me to so I thought I had to... though when I got there, I got the impression few people had shown up, or it was mainly for people who'd missed the previous ones or something, so I might not even have needed it. It was quiet and calm, and I only saw a couple of nurses in a small room and a volunteer at the door who was probably even more awkward than I am, so that didn't activate my anxiety at all... during the event, though it was at 6:30pm so I couldn't concentrate on that day either because I was anticipating something way more crowded - like the last one I had - straight after the traumatising experience!! of picking up some damn toe cream the day before.

Then on Friday I woke up feeling sore, headachey, and consumed by a general malaise because the shot gave me terrible side effects! I spent the whole day in bed, trying to play Final Fantasy VII but unable to enjoy it because I physically felt like I was on the brink of death or something, not all that different to how I felt following brain surgery. Ugh.

Thankfully I seem to have made a miraculous recovery today, so that's a relief at least.



It feels I've been mentioning excuses for poor productivity in these blogs for weeks now. Or I'm sure it'd be easy to find evidence I'd been saying that for Atonal Dreams' entire production. My mental health - which has been the main cause of this - has been plummeting even further into a pit recently because of the daunting shift in focus that lies ahead, as I've mentioned a few times now.

I get concerned that other people might be annoyed by how long this is taking - "stop making up excuses!" - but honestly I don't think anyone really cares that much about this project of mine. But since I pretty much have to devote my life to it, I care a great deal, and get increasingly frustrated by how long it's taking.



I saw a comment on Reddit this morning which mentioned Earthworm Jim, an eccentric game/series/cartoon I first encountered as a child. Curious about exactly how many games were in the series, I looked it up on Wikipedia, ∞ which mentions ∞ that the third one "suffered a difficult, prolonged development cycle and was repeatedly delayed until it was released in 1999"... after starting development in 1996. 3 years was considered a difficult and prolonged development cycle back then! Though the first two were released in consecutive years (1994 and 1995), which I find amazing considering their credits only mention like a dozen people, if that, and visually at least they're extremely impressive for their time.

It's hardly a fair comparison since those games are ancient and had teams working on them, and I've seen plenty of indie games that've been in development for 5+ years... ∞ And Pokemon Red and Green took a team about six years. ∞ Is the rather aptly-named Duke Nukem Forever the longest at 14 years?

I just googled it, and ∞ this article ∞ mentions that:

Spore took 8 years,

The Last Guardian took 9 (wait, that actually released??),

Final Fantasy XV took TEN,

Mother 3 took twelve (there's even ∞ a Wikipedia article specifically about its development ∞),

and, yes, Duke Nukem Forever tops the list (I haven't heard of/played the others mentioned).




I was told Undertale took two years - or was it three? Two and a half? - but at this point I'm wondering if that'd be considered surprisingly quick for what it is!

MARDEK 3 took about three years... but I was building on top of the first two, and those were built on a few years of experimenting with various methods of making RPGs in Flash. And they weren't planned as well as they really should have been; much of Atonal Dreams' development so far has been spent on revising and refining stuff I very much went with my first draft of in MARDEK (had I just done that with this, I likely would have finished ages ago, but the result would just have been sloppy and awkward).

I naively thought Atonal Dreams would be done in half a year, and it's been what, two and a half? And I feel I can't move on with my life until it's finished, so I'm stuck in this horrible limbo, just getting older and not building any kind of career or life for myself, and that's been eating away at me more and more lately.

Hence the drive to seek out mental health help. I mentioned in ∞ the linked personal post ∞ that there's a place called Mind I've been to in the past for counselling - so not actual therapy - which might be my only option, at least at first, but it just feels so... low quality? Something like that? I have no idea what else I could try, though, so I might have to just look into that again maybe next week...

Though apparently ∞ a national emergency has been declared after UK's first red extreme heat warning ∞ for next week. While I lived in Australia for years where it was hardly uncommon that I'd spend my schooldays sitting around in a school uniform - including a thick blazer - in 35-45 degree heat, my body's hardly used to that anymore, and I don't think frustratingly hot weather will be conducive to any kind of healing either for me or the probably sweltering counsellors. Especially since the UK, not being used to this kind of heat, typically doesn't have any kind of air conditioning in buildings. So maybe I'll have to wait a bit. I can imagine my concentration at home being hindered by it too, so I really hope it doesn't last long.