Not enjoying making games

Authoring
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So this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I never find myself writing interactive fiction in my free time, or actively developing a game. The one finished Inform game I made, I basically had to force myself just to get it done: it was stressful and I was glad when it was over.

It’s not just writing a story, but making something that’s consistently engaging to play and comes off as original, not too short but not too long, and not tedious or repetitive. And if the player loses interest, that’s basically the end of it.

When I write fiction, I don’t always strictly follow my outline. Sometimes I don’t even finish one, and I go straight into writing the story in regular form. It’s not always linear, either – sometimes there’s a certain scene I have good ideas for or don’t want to forget, or I realize something needs more development and add a scene between two existing ones. It definitely helps to have a hint of where the story is headed, but often I get my best ideas when I start working on it directly and come up with more based on that.

With IF, there’s very little freedom for the process. If I start coding or writing, it’s very realistic that I might wind up heavily changing or even removing something that took a lot of time and effort to do in the first place. The challenge of coming up with everything (which rooms do you go to, which characters do you meet, what items do you find, what are all the puzzles) before you even get started feels too intense. And you have to make sure you like what you have, because if you don’t make it through to the very end, nobody will ever see the work put into it.

Actually programming the thing is a matter of typing the same code over and over again with slight variations. Don’t know how to do something, copy it from the recipe book and modify it accordingly. If you get an error, hunt down what caused it in these lines of code you’ve become overly familiar with. The testing process is also something I dread, with just how tedious the constant compiling and typing the same commands can be. It’s not even challenging for the most part, it’s just boring.

Sometimes I tell myself “I should work on that Inform game when I have time”, and when I do have time, I never do. When I open up the program, I remember why I don’t want to. It’s been about two years and I’ve always felt this way about it.

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I feel like game design is something where it is extremely hard to “wing it” and not burn an amount of effort twice (or more) the size of the final product by the end.

I have spent many years trying to make games by improvising them, and it left me with a mountain of failures. The data are interesting, at least. (And so was learning that I’m not good at improvising, apparently…)

I feel like gamedev leaves a creator with a choice: Either sacrifice the freedom-of-the-moment and outline, or make your peace with the fact that you are going to trash a lot of work hours trying to find the finish line.

If one of these costs is acceptable, then it’s likely the choice that will work for you.

For a dev to entirely improvise their way from start to finish, they need to have a deep mastery, intuition, and understanding of game design, writing, coding, and their preferred dev environment. The problem is that very very very few people have this, and everyone else has a unimaginably-long road ahead to get there.

So the rest of us need to choose to outline or endure the costs of flexibility. There might be a hybrid approach in there, somewhere, but sections of the game will need to be marked as one or the other, and will need to be interchangeable enough, so improvisation doesn’t wreck surrounding elements.

It’s also not always a fun process. I have been having a brutal time with my own project, but I’m slowly chipping away at it. Sometimes that’s how it is; there’s a point where it stops being exciting, and starts being draining and difficult, and then the final fifth of the process has you cackling and bloodied, delivering a work into the hands of an audience.

I only enjoyed maybe 20% of the process for making the I Am Prey beta, but the rush of that 20% makes it worth it.

Writing music is the only activity I have where I can improvise and have the fun the entire way, so if I’m looking for that, I don’t turn to gamedev.

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If you don’t enjoy the process, there’s no need to keep doing it. What I will say though is:

  • The more you make games in a medium, the easier it becomes, and the more capable and expressive you’ll feel about it.
  • I often like to write out a full walkthrough of a game before starting to code it. Helps me see whether there’s enough there, and see any snagging points. When I come to make the game, things will differ a bit as I come up with new ideas, but drafting it out first helps avoid a lot of rewriting.

Ultimately, if you prefer writing novels or short stories or whatever else, then there’s no reason not to do that instead.

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My problem is that I’m bad at improvising and at planning larger things. E.g. when I try and plan something I want to program, I end up forgetting like half of the things that’d be needed in the planning phase and only notice it in the coding phase. It still works out, but I still find it remarkable that you can just not think about half of the variables you’re going to need when you think about a problem. At least I only need to add things instead of having to throw away things usually.

I personally wouldn’t say mastery, but there are some programming languages I just feel comfortable in. If I then have a good IDE and understanding of the problem to solve, I can get into a flow and just code. IME Twine is decidedly not a good IDE, at least for SugarCube. I don’t know how good the Inform workflow is.

My technique for dwindling motivation is setting many small goals, so I can feel like I have accomplished something.

I tried making music once, I was so horrible I was like “Nope, creative commons music for all my projects it is then” lol.

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I’ve always thought IF was kind an unusual art form in that it requires both “right brain” and “left brain” thinking. I’m not a very good upfront planner myself, though I do my best to outline and plan when I sense a project is going off the rails. The other strategy I employ is to separate the writing from the coding. When i’m writing first draft material, I write by hand in my notebook. I don’t do any coding. If I’m coding, then my writing is at a minimum, usually just short quips.

You might like to try some platform like TWINE which involves (generally) less coding than Inform (though I tend to think that the most engaging TWINE games still require some amount of state tracking).

And as another poster has said, you don’t need to pursue an art form you don’t find satisfying during the process.

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@Scrooge200, it sounds like you have some ideas that you want to express, you have some creative itch that you want to scratch, but that the process of codifying it into an IF language is holding you back, because you do not enjoy that aspect of IF development. It also sounds like so far you’ve concentrated on Inform 7 for you IF-tool of choice.

From reading your post, I got the distinct impression that you may want to try collaborative IF development. It sounds like you have ideas, characters, scenes and plots, but the act of codifying that into a working game is not the fun part for you. Other people might have the exact opposite problem… they might love coding, even love debugging games, but have trouble with the creative aspects, or have trouble coming up with engaging ideas.

Perhaps you could talk to people who are into IF and find folks who might be interested in collaborating with you on one of your ideas to help bring it to life. I know I have a ton of unfinished Inform projects lying around, mostly because, yes, at times it feels tedious to implement all the little details that make the game work for the player. I do enjoy coding, and I am a software developer by trade, so for me one of the harder aspects of creating IF is the creativity part.

Collaboration might not be the key. It might be that you want to write traditional fiction that frees you from the confines of interactivity and just allow the reader to flow along with your ideas and your imagery without having to codify it at all. And there are plenty of communities where you can share non-interactive fiction and find your audience for that.

You might want to try writing some choice-based IF instead of working strictly with Inform 7. Choice-based IF is much closer to writing “regular” fiction because it is essentially small bits of non-interactive fiction interspersed with choices that can either branch off to different plots or just possibly change details that could change the “look and feel” but more or less stick to the same script.

I have dabbled with choice IF a bit, and I found that inklewriter.com is really simple tool that makes it easy to try choice-based IF out without having a big learning-curve investment. It’s simple, web-based, stores you stories for you, and free to use. I really like it, as far as free web-based software goes, it’s pretty great.

I have also tried Twine, which seems to be the most popular choice-based IF development system (and I suppose, most popular period for the IF-Comp). It’s a bit more of a learning curve. Compared to Inform 7, which is much simpler IMHO than traditional programming languages, Twine seems fairly easy to learn. I say “seems” because I haven’t actually used it for anything substantial.

There’s also ChoiceScript, which has its own community and is also free to use for non-commercial or you can even sell your games on it I think. And I don’t hate it, got to be honest, but I didn’t really look into it too much. It looks a bit like markdown, I think?

I do hope you continue to dabble in the IF community, even if you want to stop writing IF. There’s a strong need for quality beta testers, reviewers, and just people to play the games! :slight_smile:

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That’s very me. Thankfully I have my brother as a creative and design type, so when I have an idea I can go on a walk with him and flesh it out via talking.

There was also the very funny incident when I showed him some worldgen code I made and he told me that rivers typically don’t cross facepalm. Yeah, even things like that I can manage to overlook lol. We still laugh about that one.

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There’s this running joke in the Spanish IF scene that what people really like is writing IF engines, rather than IF games. Over the years there’s been a pattern of former adventure game players getting caught by nostalgia and deciding to catch up with the genre after a few decades… writing a new development system.

Success rate of these projects typically correlates with being supported by solid game concepts to be implemented in them (without being too ambitious).

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My therapist would ask why you feel tension about this. There are lots of things I don’t want to do (climb Everest, get more education in physics, learn another language, attend to having nice fingernails), but I don’t feel any tension over not doing them. They’re just absences. But there are things I don’t want to do that I feel tension over, and it’s usually because of a cognitive dissonance surrounding the type of person I think I should be.

For instance, I’ve never made it through Joyce’s Ulysses. I hate that book. But I see myself as a well-read person, and well-read people not only read Ulysses, but generally like it. So that screws with my self-image.

So clearly there is some pressure here that is causing this tension. There’s obviously nothing wrong with loving IF and being a part of this community and playing, testing, and participating in every way other than writing. Yet here you are fretting about it.

You can write smaller things, like speed IF, where you are very constrained and don’t have time for very much, and the expectations are different. Like a Petite Mort for Ectocomp.

Or you can hook up with a partner and split the tasks.

Or you can write in some other format.

Or you can just realize that this is yet another thing that you don’t want to do in a list of millions of things you don’t want to do, and that’s OK.

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I wouldn’t enjoy planning everything out all at once and wouldn’t write IF if I had to. I recently wrote a bit about writing incrementally (linked below).

However, my advice is a corollary to Amanda’s. As our time is limited, I suggest doing what you love, as much as you can, for as long as you can. We already spend a lot of time–most of us–doing things we don’t want to do.

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I definitely have times I need to put game writing aside for a month or longer. Sometimes I enjoy just having the ideas drip in. I feel like I’m exploring more that way. It can go in cycles. Sometimes I need that one idea that actually “sings” … and often it takes coming up with a lot of mediocre ideas along the way.

One thing that helps is realizing some days I like certain aspects of game writing and some days I like others.

I’m not too worried about changing stuff mid-stream. So often I need a good-enough placeholder idea before I see what I want. There’s a feeling of “good frustration” that drives me to do better.

I’ve never felt I had to come up with everything at once, but different people’s styles may vary. I generally don’t get a project rolling until I have a beginning and end, and then I fit the middle in. But I don’t want to wait too long for everything to fall into place. I think I really look forward to having an incomplete work and saying “Where can X or Y fit in?”

In fact sometimes when I write out what I have, I see what I really wanted to write. It used to be frustrating knowing something was incomplete but with time I managed to shift the focus to having confidence I would fill in the gaps. I hope you can find that too, or something like it.

One other thing – I don’t expect excitement when I’m writing. I just have confidence I will look back at the end of the day, and I can say the stuff I chose to tackle was overall worth it.

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I do all my Inform 7 in VSCode with a build script. It’s great.

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Does it have something like “apply changes” or “start from room” or debug commands or do you need to do that yourself?

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No, it’s got syntax highlighting/checking but that’s about it. I use test phrases or cheat commands (placed in a “Not For Release” section) to get to states quickly. But then, I’ve never used the skein much anyway. I’m too much of a pantser for pathways through the game to stay stable for long.

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That said, I’m now envisioning a little village built around the crossroads of two rivers, one freshwater and one saltwater, and it’s giving me all sorts of ideas.

This is what got me back into IF after burning myself badly with scope creep. Making a game in four hours is a lot of fun! I recommend it.

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I did a speed jam and learned a lot. What can be done in, say, 2 hours? It forces you to throw out grandiose ideas, right from the start. sometimes that’s a good idea for larger games too!

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Scope creep is always a problem in all of my projects. If the scope is too big and I don’t divide it into manageable milestones for motivation, I effectively end up dropping it.

I don’t really see how much the scope could creep up in IF. Like on of my projects has scope crept up to “create a programming language” by now, I don’t see how you could have something that drastic with writing lol.

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See almost every person who thought they’d write their own parser IF system. There are a lot of them. :slight_smile:

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Huh, so that’s why that list is relatively big for a relatively small space lol

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Mostly I’d go “oh hey here’s a cool idea, let me put it in, that sounds more fun than paying off my technical debt” and if you do that for a while it turns out you start dreading the concept of fixing the mountain of problems you’ve put off…

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