Agreed: finish it anyway, if nothing else to gain valuable bug-squashing experience points. Just get an outside opinion before entering it into any Comps.
Oh, man. I got ninja’d while writing this.
It’s worth finishing if only as an exercise. Maybe someone else has an idea about how to move beyond a cliche. The way I look at things is that I will use something cliched as an example of how to learn about a part of the language. For instance, I created one room labeled room 1…100 as you go north, which would be awful in a game but useful to learn dynamic room names and directions. Another project was using Michael Callaghan’s questions extension to have a player guess a number between 1 and 1000. I’ve found that doing stuff I can’t quite do–but that fits into a game–helps me think bigger (ouch! a cliche!) because I’m not restricted by what I’m not sure Inform can do.
I think there might be possibilities for beginning writers who know their works aren’t super-profound to trade ideas/unpublished games/source code. I’d assume other people would give “here’s what I’d do” style pointers, too. Also, just putting time and effort into stuff can help you overcome a cliche or at least throw in a detail. It’s disheartening to realize you’ve been writing a cliche but you don’t want that to stop you from looking for better. Continuing the game is the best way to do it.
Scrap it and move on. Your heart won’t be in it now. Authoring IF is enough of a grind that without passion on your side, there isn’t much point.
The fact that you have enough self-awareness to recognize when you have produced something bland tells me that you have the ability to create something that isn’t. It would be a shame to squander that on a project that no longer inspires you.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You can’t think creatively and critically at the same time. If you’re watching out for cliches, you’re not getting down your brilliant ideas either. Just let it all spew out and promise yourself you’ll clean it up later.
A different viewpoint, with a lot of pull to it, I know. But where I’m coming from is, perfectionism is the enemy. I thought more the way you do ten years ago when I first tackled Inform and guess what — when I eventually got involved in other media after about a year of on-and-off IF work, I still had produced nothing releasable, because I had rebooted the process too many times. I have always regretted that. Now, people just have to take my word that I worked on stuff back then, and that sucks.
It’s discouraging to not feel as excited by the perfectness of your project anymore, to be sure, but in my experience it’s even more discouraging to contemplate, in retrospect, weeks or months of work with nothing to show for it. You don’t have to finish it to perfection — maybe just slap together the final stages and call it a ‘college try’ — but having finished something at least gives you something to reflect on and play/analyse as you contemplate your next step, as well as a psychological sense of forward motion that can’t be overestimated, IMO.
By being too willing to restart due to flagging passion, particularly after you’ve put in weeks, one runs the real risk of going through this same loop again and again and never having anything to show for it. Iteration is the key to success and the key to iteration is to finish every cycle.
Paul.
I don’t disagree with your larger point, but I would say that weeks are peanuts in the grand scheme of things. As an artist it’s not about the work you put in, it’s about the quality of the output and the scope of your ambition.
I went to a small art show a while back offering discounts on student paintings. There were a lot of extremely common subjects: bowls of fruit, ships on storm-tossed seas, that sort of thing. I assume the artists created them as an exercise for class. Even knowing it was an assignment, I liked one of the dozens of ship paintings enough to buy it. It’s a running joke in my house now; practically every movie we see that has any kind of home office or library has “our” painting on the wall.
There’s nothing really wrong with ships or fruit baskets or games set in your apartment. But some artists will master the basics and start to paint or design subjects that explore less comfortable territory. From my point of view, the most important lesson to be learned is not to underestimate the audience or waste their time. As a member of that audience, the artist owes himself no less. If a house game is the best you can do, make it a damn good game and don’t apologize for it. Otherwise, move on and don’t look back.
To clarify–I didn’t mean at once. Generally I alternate between learning something technical/new and writing down ideas for puzzles/plot etc. It’s more that if I let the technical side bug me too much, I forget innovation, and vice versa. But learning technical stuff is like cleaning my place up for me in that I’m not bugged by small stuff later.
When I’m inspired, or I feel like I’m inspired because ideas are flowing, I put off worrying about cliche til later. Agreed.
Also “doing stuff I can’t quite do” → “couldn’t quite do before” …
You should finish it. And release it. The only thing I would discourage is entering it in IFComp, if you feel it isn’t up to snuff. 
There is absolutely no shame in implementing your house or making a go-to-work game. Who knows, maybe yours will be the best go-to-work game ever! And regardless, there are skills that you only learn by FINISHING a game; even if what you really want to do now is move on to a different project you will get valuable experience by polishing up this one.
Seems to me that you are coming from the perspective of what sort of release is good for the audience whereas I am coming from the perspective of what sort of process is good for the artist. I would add the one point though that what’s good for the artist is good for the audience, because somebody who gets in the habit of giving up mediocre ideas A and B may well never make it to the stage of producing amazing idea C (i.e. ambition needs to develop on fertile ground not spring full-formed out of first-game territory — and how long can you toil in darkness really without feedback? An artist needs to get their mistakes out there so they can hear the criticsms that they didn’t see coming.). And if amazing idea C is never produced because the artist didn’t want to go through the developmental stage of painting sailboats, then that’s bad for the audience in the end. Anyhoo, I think the positions have been staked out pretty clearly. Nobody’s wrong, really, in any absolute sense — there are valid points visible from both perspectives, I admit.
Paul.
Thanks for the feedback and encouragement, all. Even if it’s not the most original game ever written, I agree that it’s both good practice to finish the game and a good exercise in getting things to work.
This is a great thread; I’m glad I took the time to read it! An open, non-judgmental discussion like this is just the thing to motivate hopeful authors. Because I am a procrastinator and become discouraged easily, and because I’m very detail-oriented, I always fail to complete the projects that I start.
I believe that if you have a sincere idea, it’s best to stick with it, no matter that you second-guess its value or feel that it is too cliche. I think if you really had artistic inspiration, you have something worthwhile to express, because no one else has ever had exactly the same inspiration as you.
The problem: When you try to take the practical steps to implement your grand idea, there’s always going to be some point that you just don’t know what to do next. The trick is not to let the uncertainty stop you from working on the parts the parts that you do know. The real difficult is when your vision begins to change, because you have new ideas to fill in the gaps in your original plan that conflict with what you’ve already worked out. When I try to change what I’ve already implemented, I find that I simply can’t break the cycle of indecision, and I never see my WIP take shape. I’m trying to stick to a policy in which I refrain from changing anything until I have a rough piece of IF that’s fairly complete in and of itself, even it may be incoherent.
And even though there are many cliche’s in IF (as in any medium) you can always bring an interesting angle to it. Many genres of fiction are loaded with common themes, settings, happenings, but there’s still room for a great murder mystery, romance, or whatever…
–Zack
z-machine-matter.com
Well since last time I posted a “bummer”, this time I will post a “brag”.
Slowly but surely (I use that phrase a lot when it comes to coding IF), my first real game is coming along. It seems like every day I solve one problem and discover another one. Today I finished up an “After” action that does four compares and based on the player’s inventory, performs one of four actions. (Depends on whether the player has two items, the first of two items, the second of two items, or neither of the two items.) I messed around with a case statement and a big long if/else chain before just breaking it down into four individual clauses. It may not be the most elegant solution, but it got me past that hurdle and on to the next one.
I also implemented a help/hint system in my game that gives you specific hints based on what room you are in. I may end up breaking them up into two levels, like “hint” and “solution” or something like that. I also added “about”, and a player.description. Things are coming along!
Brag:
I just got back from assisting my housemate, who was conducting an Inform workshop for about thirty middle-school girls. Despite the rapid-fire pace of the workshop (1.5 hours total from “do you guys like playing games? We are going to talk about a kind of game without graphics” to “hopefully you guys have some sort of working thing…”) and the fairly casual setting, it seemed like most of the kids were actively engaged and about half seemed to be Truly Getting It.
Bummer:
I’m a bit worried that Zarf’s recent teaser post implies that his work in progress is quite similar in genre to my own (er rather, my most progressed work in progress) – no better way to make a game feel inferior than to compare it against a Zarf work. 
This is arguably less of a true bummer and more of a good excuse to step up my productivity.
I’m curious what genre my teaser post implies.
(Of course I will be revealing more soon, but for right now…?)
Creation myth/elemental powers. But of course, I could be reading that into it because that’s what I’ve been thinking about.
For me it implies the aftermath of destruction from meteorite impacts. Maybe I’m being too literal. Shrug.
Alien pure-light entities discover the benefits of sexual reproduction?
Awesome — congrats and keep it up! 8)
Paul.
To balance that out, I’ll post what is a very definite bummer on my part: I seem unable to create a simple test game.
The problem isn’t the coding. Rather, what’s frustrating is trying to visualize the game itself. Every time I try to create a quick and rough approximation or model of what I want to see, I end up either bored or go “hey, you know what would be cool? Destructible environment.” That, or something equally inane.
sigh This is seriously blocking my creative flow.