[quote=“Joey “Jess” Tanden, post:18, topic:69888, username:inventor200”]
One of my albums was heard by the guy who makes the languages for Game of Thrones, and he enjoyed it.
[/quote]
Nice! And another ancedote I relate to! My version was when the producer of God of War showed up at a Sydney gamejam and complimented the track I did for our team’s game.
-Wade
@Felicity_Banks In answer to the original second question (Am I (successful)?), I always viewed you as successful, off being prolific and getting some money 
I can tick a lot of the boxes on Felicity’s list. But I feel successful because in the long run, I have a high opinion of the work I’ve made of which I have a high opinion. I mean, my work has to excite me, and meet personal standards and goals, and most that I’ve released does. There was that topic about whether people looked at what they were doing as they were doing it, and thought, ‘This is awesome!’. And interestingly, I remember, @AmandaB generally did not, but I am expecting that feeling multiple times per thing to know that I am on track. We all have our own paths.
I also hang out in some of the worlds and atmospheres I’ve made in my mind. I mean I liked Leadlight enough that I made it twice. And that started with me enjoying retyping some of it into Inform and walking around in it again. So I’m not one of those ‘Once it’s done, it’s done,’ type people. I feel I know most things I’ve made pretty well.
Helping people to get where they’re going in writing or programming or other creative tasks is also satisfying, and it’s great when they knock it out of the park. I want to surprise myself and I also want other people to surprise me.
I wish I was more prolific, but I am a perfectionist, and there are also periods I go away to do music or release an album, so sometimes when I look at the longeurs between IF games and feel uncomfortable, I say ‘Oh yeah, I remember what I was doing between those two.’ etc. But we don’t really need excuses, do we? I mean I also have family strings and a nephew to look after and my hand-arm troubles and all that kind of stuff of which you’ve all got, too.
-Wade
Obviously I’ve had some success in IF but it tends to make me feel like a fraud, which then makes me feel like an asshole for feeling that way when I have what a lot of people want. Not that I am not grateful for the accolades-- it’s just that I’ve always been uncomfortable with the expectations engendered by attention. The primary emotion I had when both my games got knocked out in the second round of the FIFP was relief, although it was extremely exciting to be there at all.
The things that make me feel most successful are:
1.) Being a part of the only kind online community in existence, which is like a unicorn nuzzling me. I didn’t think places like this existed.
2.) Getting DMed by some of the best authors around asking if I want to beta test their games. Yes, I do want to, a lot, and being asked feels like arriving.
3.) Getting better at the thorny complexities of programming in Inform. It’s still atrocious, but I can see how far I’ve come from my first effort, which just got a write-up from Brian, but if anyone saw the coding under its clothes, they’d flinch.
"And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, ‘I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.’ […]
And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did."
— Neil Gaiman (from personal blog)
Very timely thread after having the first purchase ever of a Spanish game of mine (and second overall). When I wrote my first IF piece in 2015 it seemed unbelievable that someone would choose spending half an hour playing something I made rather than doing literally anything else.
Since then:
At almost 50, writing IF won’t become my job but, as side projects go, it’s the one I’m most invested in. See, I also have a moderately successful mobile app (10+ years, 1M downloads, 5k reviews) to which I’ll dedicate a couple of days a year and then forget about for months. And yet I keep pressing reload multiple times a day on my single-figure Itch analytics table.
The main audience my games are written for is the Spanish IF scene, which is very slow moving compared to the international one. I’ll translate a quote by Xavier Carrascosa (author of The Muse) which I regularly return to for inspiration:
When a game is published, it can happen that people play it and comment on it, and after two or three weeks there’ll be no further feedback. The game stays there and you can get the feel that no one is playing it, you have wasted your time and whatnot. But that’s how it is, it’s a small niche and we cannot deceive ourselves. We are writing games for a very small core audience, people of a certain age who are busy and won’t play your game asap because they love it. It can feel lonely, that so much effort was not worth it. But personally I do it because I enjoy it, I have fun, I love text adventures and that’s it. I know I’m writing games that can take several years to be played. They don’t have to be played right now.
I didn’t know there was a second. The first was a treasured possession of mine when I was 10 or so.
I am more successful than I would have been had I not tried. 
There are so many ways to succeed:
I think there are many more.
My two big goals when I started making IF competition-wise were to win IFComp and to be nominated for a Best Game XYZZY (since most nominees are about equally good, so winning isn’t so important).
I’ve been able to achieve almost everything besides those 2 goals. I got close; I took 2nd in IFComp. I placed in the top 5 three times. I won Miss Congeniality. I won Ectocomp, Parser Comp twice, and Introcomp. I won Best Puzzles, and Best NPC and was nominated for Best Writing and NPCs.
But I never achieved those two goals, and I think that was probably the best thing that could happen to me, because it’s given me a drive to keep going over the years. If I had won early on, I probably would have stopped and moved on to something else. Maybe that’s why Jeremy Freese and other ‘out of nowhere winners’ just make one game; where can you go next if your first game wins XYZZY and IFComp?
In small moments though the things that made me feel successful are Marco Innocenti offering to make graphics for Swigian because he liked it and the authors of 25-year old games saying they’re so glad someone still things about and reviews their games.
I actually am not sure what drives me to try to write an IF. It’s definitely not for competitions. I absolutely loved the show of the last IFComp (which was my first one as a visitor). But I don’t wanna be part of the competitions.
I have the urge to produce something that is playable. And if the process (of producing it) itself is fun then it’s the perfect thing for me.
I kind of feel like this thread deserves to be plastered on the front page of every website pretending to be news and every mainstream social media platform.
Way too many people these days have an attitude that it’s all about how much money you make or how productive you can be in a quantity over quality way.
People in this thread seem to have a much, much healthier attitude on the meaning of success than perhaps 99% of the people living in the developed world.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to be bringing home a paycheck just shy of the income limit to keep my SSDI or in excess of my SSDI plus that income limit or to consistantly produce a thousand words daily of creative writing or equivalent at a hobby that isn’t just consuming the content of others, but that kind of money isn’t worth working myself half to death at a job I hate or forcing myself to do something “productive” to the point it stops being enjoyable.
I love this response!
When I’m at my best, my metric of “success” is the same: do my stories resonate with people? Have my games spoken to others?
When I’m at my worst mental health wise, though, I am desperate for my stories to be seen. If they are unseen, I feel unheard. I think this is an insecurity of mine; it’s something I’ve been working very hard on.
I’ve discussed this in detail in A Single Ouroboros Scale’s Postmortem, and in forum threads here in the past, but sometimes I still fall back into old patterns. I talked about this most recently in the postmortem to my game Shyler: Bad Ending.
Money and awards and attention can be nice, but they don’t feel like success to me. It’s more like, if my work has a real positive effect on someone (including myself), that’s success.
I feel like I became successful as a writer as soon as I broke through all the obstacles that were preventing me from finishing and sharing my work. It’s so hard to learn how to do that—I first downloaded Inform around 2009, then I spent the next ~10 years writing, reading, waiting, worrying, and shelving ideas before I finished a game and shared it somewhere I knew people would see it. Being able to write a complete game that I love and am comfortable sharing publicly—and knowing I can do it again—makes me feel successful, especially considering the effect it had on my confidence elsewhere in life. It was really, really worth it to keep trying, even though it took 10 years.
There have been other successes too, like making new friends, or finding out someone I admire liked a thing I wrote, or hearing that one of my games got someone interested in IF. One person said free bird. made them never want to go to a zoo, which was not my goal but a pretty amazing outcome.
Amazing posts, I loved all of them…
Novel in Italian or english ?
btw, personally, if thou[1] have played my works, you surely understand that thou’re lucky in having only interjects as “strange english prose”…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio
[1] For Marco: hope you accept the familiarity of the tu 
For the others: I have used the english archaism for rendering the italian 2nd singular, absent in modern english.
I have the complete opposite issue. When I’m at my worst mental health wise, I want to be invisible and even positive attention feels dangerous.
In Italian. (here)
An “irrelevant small novel” as Gep Gambardella would have called it.
I accept the lack of formality, of course
I concur. They say a star is only as good as her last picture and a rock group is only as good as their latest album. I’ve won IFComp and been nominated for the Best Game XYZZY award twice, but I view Mathbrush as more successful than me because his output has been much more consistent.
I’ve only entered IFComp twice because the pressure of trying to repeat a success like that is too much. My second entry just missed out on the top ten, which is a position most people would be proud of, but I beat myself up about it for weeks. A competition is about comparing one person’s work to another’s, but comparing yourself to others - “social comparison” - can be very unhealthy, so it’s important to keep things in perspective. And as others have pointed out, competition wins and commercial rewards are by no means the only measures of success.
So, as to the question, “am I successful?”, I would answer “I have been successful, and I hope to be so again.” But I can only speak to how I feel.
I almost forgot - I have had some fan fiction! Obviously Mathbrush wrote the excellent The Magpie Takes the Train, but that was my chosen prize for winning IFComp 2018. However, Mathbrush’s son wrote a genuine piece of fanfic - an unofficial sequel to Escape from the Crazy Place! Receiving that has to be one of my proudest moments as an author.
Yep there’s a second. I still have my copy. Got it at a bookstore in the mall in 1985.
Got a job briefly (contract ended is all) at a game company doing localization and writing tasks in 2022, because the employees went looking through IFComp winners/high-placers! I got contacted because of Erstwhile placing 5th in the IFComp 2018 
That was really cool…