Holding Patterns…
Stuck Waiting… Well, work has been put to a dramatic halt lately. I actually have developed three more games that are ready for release, but the powers that be aren’t sure of them right now, and so they sit on hold. They may still see the light of day eventually, only time will tell I guess. It’s extraordinarily frustrating to put that much time (and not to mention COST) into developing something for it to end up sitting on a virtual shelf, especially when you have an audience that’s calling out for more games to be added and for some more variety. I see both sides of the argument, certain groups want to curate to make sure a market doesn’t get saturated in crap, and at the same time, that causes market stagnation with nothing new coming out causing player/user attrition because of that curation. In my opinion it just harms the overall reputation / view of a market. As long as certain requirements are met (keeping the garbage where it belongs), it should be released. Let the players decide to hate it or love it. If you’re going to spend dollars on people overseeing testing and more, and have already spent that money, why not just let it go out and recoup even a tiny amount of the cost, even if sales aren’t the greatest. The downside to this, is several ideas I was going to work on have now been put on hold because I no longer have the confidence that they will be seen as unique titles and not compared to other things that look similar, and I can not sink the time and money into something that may just get rejected. It’s not worth it, especially for someone like me that does this in their spare time. Sure if I was a larger studio with money to spare, it wouldn’t be an issue. But when I sink even $500 into a project that gets rejected, I’m never going to see that money again. It may not seem like a lot of money to some people, but to me that’s a month and half of car payments, so it’s an eye opener and makes you think twice about doing anything else. But this is a rant I could go on for days about, so I’m just going to shut up now. In the meantime I have a ton of ideas but nothing to develop them on. My lovely little alienware laptop I spent a small fortune on is sitting in a dell repair center currently because of constant crashing, lockups and worse problems. I sunk about $600 into it myself trying to correct the issues, new SSD, new ram, nothing was working (but I got some nice upgrades! 8tb of disk space!!!).. When the cpu cores are reaching 212F while sitting at idle, you have issues.. Thankfully it was still fully under warranty. I know they’ve already replaced the motherboard, they won’t tell me yet what else they’ve done. My guess is the overheating caused damage to other components.. Supposedly they should be done with it by the 20th, then shipping time back to me. Hate the waiting game especially when you spend 3k on a device, you kind of expect it to work without issue. In the meantime, have several new ideas that should be a lot of fun, just have to wait to start development. I did pick up a chromebook with an Intel I3 in it, and got Unity installed on it, but it’s slow and difficult to work with. Maybe if I get really bored in the next week or so I’ll try messing with it. Until then, new stuff is in the works.. Just have to wait…
