Another project !

I've been thinking quite a lot about what's motivationg me in writing code and games at home, as this is also what I do for a living (lucky me!). More specifically I tried to analyze why I statrt lots of projects and rarely finish any of them. Long story short, I think it all boils down to me being more interested in writing nice code and developping a nice tech that creating a fully finished game with it as the ratio of time spent on thinking about tech vs game is probably 20:1 ... All that is great and I've learnet and keep learning a lot from this "R&D" but this doesn't provide the rewarding feeling of having completed something entirely (which is a really really nice one - I've expereienced it twice recently when finishing the development of Enslaved - Odyssey to the West and its DLC)

So to break that cycle, I want to start working on a project that has the opposite characteristics of my usual projects:

• Not technically challenging, so there is no opportunity to get sidetracked/lured by interesting problems to solve
• Design is simple, achievable end well established, so again there is not a lot of fiddling around with tons of ideas before getting a grasp of what thet game I want to make is all about
• Added value is in the final product being neat and polished
• Not attached to its codebase. This is a weird one but over the years, I realized that if I write a C++ engine for a game, I get really attached to the codebase and want to make it as neat and well architectured as can be - certainly because I have this long term project of coming up with some tech that is full-featured enough for XBLA-scope projects. On the other hand, I tend to consider code written in any other language as some discardable one-off thing where I wont bother spend ages polishing code to death. Consequently, I'll write this new project in C# / XNA so I can get it done quickly, because the language is inherently efficient and because I won't be too bothered to hack things around when needed. (Moreover, I think there are a lot of lessons to learn from the XNA architecture that I could apply in my C++ engine)
• A 1 person project. I don't want to depend on anyone nor have people depending on me for this project. No that peaolpe I have been working with on other stuff are a problem - I love them and they are skilled/reliable/etc ... but I just want to try something different this time. This mean almost no art/anim etc as I can do basic stuff but that's it :) I am also looking forward to the music/sound bit as this will bridge my passion for code/games and playing music :)

I have my mind set on what this project will be and the best way to sum that up is: "a remake of Picross with a neat interface a-la PS3's crossmedia bar" ... More details in my next post.

In the meantime, take care !

-m