One day maybe I'll actually finish making this game

[reakain]

I have a silly beat em up game I keep slowly building on. The problem is that I keep rebuilding it. Not, like, the characters themselves or the narrative plan or anything, so much as originally it was a little 2D game, but then I converted it to 3D thinking it would be easier to do all the beat em up stuff, and I started building a whole 3D game setup in Unity, with a bunch of levels and additional things.

Coming back to it (while avoiding finishing my dissertation, oops), I decided that actually 2D would probably be easier than 3D, because I'm not competent in the type of 3D modeling using for character and animation modelling, and I don't particularly want to build those skills. So I went back to 2D, and at the same time switch engines to Godot because it seemed simpler and more catered to 2D game design... Then I decided I wanted to update the 2D pixel assets I had previously been making. It's starting to feel a bit like Theseus' video game hahaha

Anyone else also struggling with just rebuilding games instead of finishing them?

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

That's a surprisingly common hurdle people go through, my friend. To me, it only means that you really care about the game you are making, which is about the best thing anyone could ask for.

If you are interested, YouTuber Yahtzee Croshaw (of "Zero Punctuation" fame) has gone over this sort of thing on his "Dev Diary" series.

Oh, and welcome to the forums!

 

[Samatonic Samatonic]

I would consider myself guilty as well, I have too many side projects (games mostly) that I want to complete. But in the end I leave it collecting dust. I have my ideas stored, but never used. I've built a small game myself, though only 2 levels.

 

[moonbits]

Oh yeah, it's the nefarious game dev spell. I've rebuilt my FPS project because something about the project doesn't really work for me. Animations, controls, physics, who's responsible for what, what state machine pattern, how to handle scenes vs instancing, signal callbacks.

 

[reakain]

That's a surprisingly common hurdle people go through, my friend. To me, it only means that you really care about the game you are making, which is about the best thing anyone could ask for.

If you are interested, YouTuber Yahtzee Croshaw (of "Zero Punctuation" fame) has gone over this sort of thing on his "Dev Diary" series.

Oh, and welcome to the forums!

Ooooh, I'll definitely check it out! I always struggle with knowing when I should listen to the voice saying "rework this part" versus when that voice is trying to ruin me hahaha

And thank you!

Post automatically merged: Aug 24, 2025

I would consider myself guilty as well, I have too many side projects (games mostly) that I want to complete. But in the end I leave it collecting dust. I have my ideas stored, but never used. I've built a small game myself, though only 2 levels.

Oooooh, yes, I am the same with too many side projects hahahaha

I got really big into making things with gameboy studio for a bit. I ended up sharing all the sprite assets I made, but never finished the game I had been working on (oops)

(Oh, hey, I can do multiple replies in one post! That's handyyyyy)

Oh yeah, it's the nefarious game dev spell. I've rebuilt my FPS project because something about the project doesn't really work for me. Animations, controls, physics, who's responsible for what, what state machine pattern, how to handle scenes vs instancing, signal callbacks.

I like that you call it a "spell". It definitely feels kind of like that! I try to reuse as much as I can, but it always feels like a trap. How much of the game did you end up actually rebuilding when that happened?

 

[BulletHammer]

Aw man, I always wanted to make my own game but I fear this exact thing might happen to me xD

I'm currently learning Blender and ZBrush and I'm pretty decent with 3D animation, so I think If I ever get around to it, It'll most likely be a 3D game.

That being said, I remember reading somewhere that during the development of Super Mario 64 the first thing developers worked on was movement, they made a bunch of test stages just to make sure it was fun to control Mario, then built the entire game around that. So I always thought If I were to develop a game I'd first nail gameplay, then work on the rest .--.

But then again, I never even made anything close to a game, so I've noooo idea

 

[CDeluxe]

I have a silly beat em up game I keep slowly building on. The problem is that I keep rebuilding it. Not, like, the characters themselves or the narrative plan or anything, so much as originally it was a little 2D game, but then I converted it to 3D thinking it would be easier to do all the beat em up stuff, and I started building a whole 3D game setup in Unity, with a bunch of levels and additional things.

Coming back to it (while avoiding finishing my dissertation, oops), I decided that actually 2D would probably be easier than 3D, because I'm not competent in the type of 3D modeling using for character and animation modelling, and I don't particularly want to build those skills. So I went back to 2D, and at the same time switch engines to Godot because it seemed simpler and more catered to 2D game design... Then I decided I wanted to update the 2D pixel assets I had previously been making. It's starting to feel a bit like Theseus' video game hahaha

Anyone else also struggling with just rebuilding games instead of finishing them?

I find i have the same trouble, wanting to add more and more to a game, change this, improve on that. Like you said, it really is the ship of Theseus.
There's always that feeling that 'if i just add this one feature, my game will be perfect' and so you always feel that need to do just one more thing
There is that old saying, "a painting is never finished, the artist just stops working on it"

I find it helps to set personal deadlines. Something like "ill have this amount of progress by the end of the month"
Work on having something functional, first.
And remember that, if you really wanna make games, this wont be the only game you make. Dont worry about making it 'my one perfect game'. Be thinking about what game will come after this.
If you have a good idea, consider it would work best for this game, or maybe is worth keeping written down to come back to when you make your next game.

 

[qw90700]

thinking it would be easier

If you have to learn something from scratch then naturally it won't be "easier" for have to learn and build skills for the new thing gets harder and harder.

That's why I stick to what I know: 2D and 3D game engines I wrote a long time ago with minimal updates, I still use Photoshop for 2D visuals and Blender for 3D visuals and stuff, Reason for music and Audacity for sound editing.

However just because it's easier for me I stick to Game Maker because I mastered it. Unity would be easier especially for real-time physics but I already have it at home on Game Maker. Unreal would be easier for simple 3D but I already have it at home on Game Maker.

The logic is whatever you mastered is what will always be easiest for me. I have decades of experience with these aforementioned programs that sometimes even I surprise myself for what I can do with them. Only recently I started to use Pixelorama for pixel art that my Photoshop experience makes it easier for me but if it was based on learning from scratch I know I would have a hard time learning something new. Naturally learning and building skills takes too much time but when you can develop the game with what you know it's already okay and easy for you.

I would say 3D assets and animations easier to do than 2D but if you know how. Animations would be the most bothersome aspect of it and then optimization of 3D model. You can't just make a model willy-nilly and expect it to work okay, gotta delete whatever is unnecessary about it. And then lastly textures of 3D model's hardship is because of technical aspects to make them work okay in the game than actually creating the visuals. So despite it's easy to develop 3D game these days I would still stick to non-pixel art 2D games for most of development time wasted on visual assets. If I take like 20 days for finishing visual assets it's takes like 2 days to produce all the musics and SFX and then 1 day to actually build the game and programming the base of the game and few days of adjusting the game for a proper state.

 

[reakain]

Aw man, I always wanted to make my own game but I fear this exact thing might happen to me xD

I'm currently learning Blender and ZBrush and I'm pretty decent with 3D animation, so I think If I ever get around to it, It'll most likely be a 3D game.

That being said, I remember reading somewhere that during the development of Super Mario 64 the first thing developers worked on was movement, they made a bunch of test stages just to make sure it was fun to control Mario, then built the entire game around that. So I always thought If I were to develop a game I'd first nail gameplay, then work on the rest .--.

But then again, I never even made anything close to a game, so I've noooo idea

Yesss! I try to start with basic mechanics first, but I end up hopping around to other elements when I start getting sick of working on the one piece. So I end up jumping between code and art and writing.

I find i have the same trouble, wanting to add more and more to a game, change this, improve on that. Like you said, it really is the ship of Theseus.
There's always that feeling that 'if i just add this one feature, my game will be perfect' and so you always feel that need to do just one more thing
There is that old saying, "a painting is never finished, the artist just stops working on it"

I find it helps to set personal deadlines. Something like "ill have this amount of progress by the end of the month"
Work on having something functional, first.
And remember that, if you really wanna make games, this wont be the only game you make. Dont worry about making it 'my one perfect game'. Be thinking about what game will come after this.
If you have a good idea, consider it would work best for this game, or maybe is worth keeping written down to come back to when you make your next game.

Hahaha, feature/scope creep is always such an issue. Luckily for this it's less about scope creep, but more of the refactoring component, which is the other side of the "perfect game" pit trap, I feel like. I feel like I can spin forever "tuning" one piece, oops.

If you have to learn something from scratch then naturally it won't be "easier" for have to learn and build skills for the new thing gets harder and harder.

That's why I stick to what I know: 2D and 3D game engines I wrote a long time ago with minimal updates, I still use Photoshop for 2D visuals and Blender for 3D visuals and stuff, Reason for music and Audacity for sound editing.

However just because it's easier for me I stick to Game Maker because I mastered it. Unity would be easier especially for real-time physics but I already have it at home on Game Maker. Unreal would be easier for simple 3D but I already have it at home on Game Maker.

The logic is whatever you mastered is what will always be easiest for me. I have decades of experience with these aforementioned programs that sometimes even I surprise myself for what I can do with them. Only recently I started to use Pixelorama for pixel art that my Photoshop experience makes it easier for me but if it was based on learning from scratch I know I would have a hard time learning something new. Naturally learning and building skills takes too much time but when you can develop the game with what you know it's already okay and easy for you.

I would say 3D assets and animations easier to do than 2D but if you know how. Animations would be the most bothersome aspect of it and then optimization of 3D model. You can't just make a model willy-nilly and expect it to work okay, gotta delete whatever is unnecessary about it. And then lastly textures of 3D model's hardship is because of technical aspects to make them work okay in the game than actually creating the visuals. So despite it's easy to develop 3D game these days I would still stick to non-pixel art 2D games for most of development time wasted on visual assets. If I take like 20 days for finishing visual assets it's takes like 2 days to produce all the musics and SFX and then 1 day to actually build the game and programming the base of the game and few days of adjusting the game for a proper state.

I like your comment about the knowledge transfer (pixelorama from photoshop). Most of my background is in Unity, but because I've done so much with it for different things, and then general structures are the same, the transition to Godot was actually pretty painless, and it definitely has some nice quality of life pieces for what I'm doing.

As for assets... I definitely agree that 3D can be easier/faster purely from the animations standpoint. My trouble is I just never get far enough in learning how to do the 3D. All of my 3D modelling experience is actually in CAD programs like solidworks and autodesk inventer/fusion. I also agree that non-pixel 2D is probably better than pixel 2D from efficiency. I just go back to pixel art because it's something I have a lot more experience with for doing animations. That said, I did go through and adjust the gameplay to cut the number of animations/sprites I would have to make by more than half.

I'm definitely trying to be efficient, the issue is just that sometimes I focus on the efficiency/refactoring instead of just... working on it. Ooops

 

[qw90700]

My trouble is I just never get far enough in learning how to do the 3D. All of my 3D modelling experience is actually in CAD programs like solidworks and autodesk inventer/fusion.

Then I would recommend anyone to learn Blender. If you know how Blender was before, I gave it a 2nd chance last year and I can say whatever 3D you wanna do in it got so easy and fast. Can even develop 3D animation movie with it fast lol.

 

[reakain]

Then I would recommend anyone to learn Blender. If you know how Blender was before, I gave it a 2nd chance last year and I can say whatever 3D you wanna do in it got so easy and fast. Can even develop 3D animation movie with it fast lol.

Yeah? I'm definitely not learning it for this project, but it is something I'm interested in. I tried picking it up in, like 2010... then in 2014/15, then 2019, and then, like, 2022 or something? Has it gotten even simpler to use? I hadn't felt like the UI or set up had really been changing all that much.

 

[qw90700]

Yeah? I'm definitely not learning it for this project, but it is something I'm interested in. I tried picking it up in, like 2010... then in 2014/15, then 2019, and then, like, 2022 or something? Has it gotten even simpler to use? I hadn't felt like the UI or set up had really been changing all that much.

Let's say it's still like plotting an airplane but things got more simple and faster. So after you learn the terms and hotkeys Blender uses you can master it in a week lol.

 

[reakain]

Let's say it's still like plotting an airplane but things got more simple and faster. So after you learn the terms and hotkeys Blender uses you can master it in a week lol.

"plotting an airplane" I have never heard that description before but I love it hahahaha

Yeah, I think the next time I try to learn blender I'm going to print out a hotkey cheat sheet and tape it to my desk. I remember when I was learning it before things started to click a lot better once I figured out some of the hotkeys, but boy does it hurt how much they're absolutely necessary.

 

[DreamCPS]

(...) So I went back to 2D, and (...)

:
More power to you.

And btw, what coding language are you currently using for this game?

 

[reakain]

:
More power to you.

And btw, what coding language are you currently using for this game?

Ahahahaha, the perfect snip.

Currently I'm using Godot, which uses... I don't know, its scripting language feels like some monstrous combo of python and matlab? Previously I was using Unity, so I used C#

I jump between coding languages at work all the time, so as long as it isn't as unhinged as javascript or VB, or as ancient as Fortran it feels like 'just another scripting language'