Life goes on

Mister Tins is now officially in sale, which means it's officially dead, and that's not a big surprise to me. I guess it's time for a brief post-mortem summary of what went right and what went wrong. Well, the good thing is that I finished it, and it was fun, not to mention that my long time dream to make a game has come true :). I still think it was quite a good idea, and a bit underrated, but looking back I think there are at least three reasons why this whole project was doomed from the beginning:

• Modern games are driven by artists, not by developers. It's just no longer "let's do the hard work and write the whole code and then we'll just throw in a few textures and the game will be ready". On the contrary, you take an existing engine like Unity, and then all the hard work is graphics, models, animations; the programming comes down to scripting a few events. I'm oversimplifying, but you get the point.
• Modern games take a lot of work. Even a simple indie game requires a team of at least a few dedicated persons and often takes years, especially when people have another full time job. I spent six months, but in reality only during the first few weeks I spent significant time on this project. It's good that I started with something simple enough that I was able to finish it, but it can't compete with all the professional games in the market.
• Another thing, which is perhaps not a strong requirement, but certainly helps, is when you can participate in various events and shows, contact other game developers, potential players and especially the press, long before your game is finished. Obviously, it's easier when you live in a large city in USA or Canada, not in some shithole in Poland…

In conclusion, if I'm ever going to get involved in another game, I'd certainly be joining an existing, dedicated team of artists, who need a coding monkey, and I'd teach myself Unity. Anyway, it's not going to happen very soon :). The good news is that now I finally have some time to release a new version of Saladin and WebIssues, work on redesigning my book, and simply read and play some games.

Also in my personal life there have been some changes recently; for example, I'm getting a divorce. I could make a similar list of things that went wrong, but I will spare you the details. Let's just say that one day you think you know someone, and then it turns out that your goals and values are so different that you simply can't go on any further. At first I was really upset because I hoped our son could have a "normal" family, especially that I din't have one, but the truth is that now I spend much more time with him than before we separated, and I'm definitely going to do everything I can to make it up for him. So I went through the whole denial-anger-regret stages and in the end I think it's for the better for all of us.

Luckily, there have been some positive changes too. I renewed an old friendship and made a new one, and that's something you can't overvalue. It also may have bigger consequences, because I think that I finally found a team of dedicated people and we have a chance to work on a very interesting and promising project - maybe it's not a game, but it's not one of those boring warehouse/financial/enterprise kind of applications either. So, life goes on…