Back in middle school and high school, I spent a ton of time experimenting with Inform 7 and making lots of not-very-good experiments that nobody except my family ever saw. Eventually this culminated in Scroll Thief, which just kept getting bigger and bigger as I went “huh, you know what would be interesting to add” and added it. I never would have released it at all if not for Introcomp’s one-year deadline, and its sequel was going to be bigger yet—there was a coal mine with time travel where you had to sync up four different versions of yourself, an abandoned vaguely-Mesoamerican temple where you’d design your own maze to lure a monster away and steal its treasure, a whole area based around potions…
Eventually it collapsed under its own weight and I couldn’t bring myself to work on it any more because it was too overwhelming to think about. I experimented with some other games—one based on Suspended’s core mechanic, one with intricately detailed rules for heat transfer—but the scope creep inevitably outpaced my enthusiasm. So I never released anything except extensions and little demos for almost a decade. The release of Dialog was reviving my interest a bit, but then the pandemic happened and life got more complicated and I just didn’t have the time or energy for IF any more.
Then I saw on Tumblr that the long-awaited open-sourcing of Inform 7 had happened, and that brought me back! So I returned to the forum, spent a while catching up on what had changed, and started experimenting with the new release. There was a thread at one point asking how long it would take experienced authors to write Cloak of Darkness from scratch; I thought “hm, I’ve been using Inform for ages and am a fast typer, this sounds fun”, and finished in four minutes and sixteen seconds.
EDIT: That actually isn’t quite accurate. I found the post and it came after Enigma. Oops.
So when ECTOCOMP came around, I thought “hm, writing IF in four hours sounds like a fun way to make myself actually finish something”. The result was The Enigma of the Old Manor House, and I had a lot of fun with it; the constraints kept the scope creep in check and turned it into a puzzle to solve. Instead of Scroll Thief’s incessant “I wonder how I can implement this cool idea”, it was “I wonder what cool ideas I can implement in a short amount of time”.
That led to trying to plot out an IFComp entry—like Enigma, making a plan first instead of letting it grow organically as I went along—and Death on the Stormrider didn’t do great in the comp but got some lovely reviews so I consider it a success. And talking to my friends about it (and showing them VtM: Night Road) led to one of the players in my VtM game wanting to adapt one of our early stories into an IF, which turned into Loose Ends, and I wanted to share the fun I had in ECTOCOMP with my non-coding siblings, which turned into The Labyrinthine Library of Xleksixnrewix (salvaging tons of unused code from that temple in the Scroll Thief sequel…I’ll put the original into the next Bring Out Your Dead or whatever).
Now I seem to have sort of settled into a genre—a lot of my works are mysteries of one sort or another—and I’m working on another IFComp entry for this year, plus some more experimental works which may or may not get anywhere, and my siblings asked if we can do ECTOCOMP together again.
So I guess the moral is—finished is better than perfect! There was a (probably apocryphal) story going around recently about an art professor who did an experiment. He told one class of pottery students they’d be graded on quantity (how many pieces they finished by the end of the semester) and another class they’d be graded on quality (the single best piece they made). At the end of the semester, the best works all came from the quantity class, because they were continually trying and failing and learning from the process, while the quality class wasn’t. But that’s definitely been my experience. I’ve improved much more as a writer, designer, and coder by writing a bunch of IF than by working on a single scope-crept project forever.
The other moral is I like comps because they give me constraints and deadlines. Also, Scroll Thief (among other things) got me a job as an engineer at an escape room, so I spent a lot of those intervening years designing and implementing puzzles in real life, which didn’t hurt!