I suppose the reason behind finishing the project is because most people can start a project, few can actually finish one. 90% of the work takes 10% of the time and few people can do that last 10% ;) It is always a trade off when adding in hacks - generally you don't want to be hacking things in the first 90% :) itll 'byte' you in the end :D -----Original Message----- From: gameprogrammer-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:gameprogrammer-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of David Olofson Sent: 01 March 2005 19:51 To: gameprogrammer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [gameprogrammer] Re: Current game projects... On Tuesday 01 March 2005 20.21, Alan Wolfe wrote: [...] > I think I wish I had something complete enough to classify as a game > instead of practice of techniques hehe Speaking of which, why does this happen? Of course, you're not going to get any games done before you've mastered your tools to some extent - but then what? After learning all we need and then some, we still have this growing heap of dead, half-finished projects... Of course, some were just bad ideas, or the code/design was FUBAR or something. One may just as well make a note about how not to do things, and move on. At least in my case, there's another reason: It's more fun to play around and try new stuff than to focus on rolling out finished products. Once you have a "finished" product, the hack value diminishes (nothing interesting left to do, since it's supposed to be *finished*), you'll have to maintain it (mostly boring work) - and when you're there, you have to figure out something new to hack and start over. Not sure what to do about that... After all, the primary motivation driving most spare time game developers is probably the hacking itself and/or that feeling when you finally have little objects moving around and doing (more or less) sensible stuff in some kind of virtual world. Once you reach the level where you go "Yeah, it works! I can do this." some of that motivation goes away. What remains to do to get a real product is mostly design, tuning and debugging. More of the same old stuff, basically. I can tell you one thing from experience, though: Leaving an unfinished project alone for too long certainly does not help it's chances of ever being finished... It's like the code goes old and grumpy and starts to resist hacking. :-D //David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate .- Audiality -----------------------------------------------. | Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia. | | MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... | `-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -' --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se --- --------------------- To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html --------------------- To unsubscribe go to http://gameprogrammer.com/mailinglist.html