Reasons To Not Become A Creator Or Become Like Me At All!

This is more of a status update article as I've once again come up with FOUR new unreleased, high potential, high combination ideas (not fully mentioned in the 'incomplete projects' document) as well as two hanging out for the ride.

• █████ ███: Likely 'high' $ potential theme pivot for a previous project.
• ████████ ████: █████████████ ██, could legit be new in the multiplayer genre.
• █████████ ████████████████: Combines the "Empty Room"How to successfully fail at finishing projectsI have basically failed the Thinky Jam 6, a jam where you're only supposed to spend [[[48 hours]]](Tooltip: As time is fake, I can still 'say' I probably spent less than 48 working hours on the game, but obviously that is not the intent, wh... 7-13-2026 game I mentioned here, with a new idea that was very lightly inspired by Beekie wishing to do a genre-merge with wordplay theming (after talking about RED and CAT). I could call this game █████ █████ ███ but this seems too pretentious.
• ██████████: Combines ████████████ ███████ ███ ████████ with an idea that was inspired by MisshapenSmiley (the previous inventor of move-counter parody game) first mentioning that this framing/theming has potential cool mechanic and puzzle properties, plus a game I played in the past that didn't get a sequel even though people thought it would.
• Lingo Multiverse: This project is unironically being combined with a little bit from The Stanley Parable, Patrick's Parabox, and The Witness now.
• DCC3: The highest spiritually fulfilling project, which has gained a few new ideas like ███████ █████████ █ ████████ ███████████ ███ ██████ ███████ ████ ████ ████████████ ███████████ ████ ████ ██████ ███ ███ █ █████ ██ █ █████, cool worldbuilding, lacking a middlegame, etc.

Oh by the way I'm doing this at the same time that Poke BALL Toads 7-level update is only like 60% finished.

While I am excited for any one of these to release, to show it to certain people I admire in puzzle communities... I don't know if I physically have the time to figure all this out and release any of it. Also it makes me look insane to start all these projects without finishing them, and also I'm not yet a millionaire and wonder if I need to do insane monetization now. Meanwhile I don't keep track of recent game releases anymore and I really wonder why that is.

How Have You Stopped Enjoying Video Games

Besides "frustration at actual real-life issues" there is also a comparison with music of past-me 4 years ago though this was never really conscious at the time. It is a really profoundly cursed problem if you feel like your own work is better than the average-of-effort-of-experiencing other people's work. This is worded very carefully as obviously I don't think my work is objectively higher quality than some hidden gem indie or high effort AAA game, but when the peak of experience you know of is higher, or you find tasks in games boring/menial/not new to you, this reduces the average gain for experiencing others' work. Recent detective games (not including the deluge of AI written AI UI detective games) I decided to play off-recording have only like 1.7 twists in them and many things I'd change. I suppose that was always the end result if I had this "I can always think of how to expand a game better after completing it" mentality.

After making music for 10 years, it was easier to find a track I liked by actually making it instead of trying to find new music and finding the majority of the time it's bland, nowadays I can even scroll down in my projects library and find a track I forgot I made and relisten to it.

Opportunity Costs

Being a publisherless not-on-steam not-particularly-interested-in-marketing-viral-capitalization-clown-nor-with-journalist-connections has its costs. Especially as I didn't really have the mentality of broad-streamer-appeal back then (I hope that now I do my games will be more successful but, well, I dunno), the problem is when you have a good idea you wonder if you're on an originality timer. I had the idea of a poker roguelike before BalatroIt would've not been as visually polished and was going for a more 'cheating in cards' magic trick angle, which is probably less broadly appealing, so I'm not under some idea that my execution would've been high popularity and of course, after mentioning the idea I got like 2 comments "oh so like that game". My eye is falling out. I haven't done a video on Minesweeper Plus due to not uploading the devlog of my own minesweeper game or finishing it. I mean that's just an unbelievably cursed problem for being nominally a gaming channel. This reminds me of the "games turning into your job so now you don't play games offline because what if you wanted to make it into content later to record your reaction, or what if you want to suddenly try to get sponsored for every video which adds stress, or what if you try to do editing better every video" problem that I now have (not the last part though). I'm wondering when I make my final video I will try to reboot it by streaming new releases. This might also prevent the problem of a massive game coming out that basically begs to be streamed instead of dripfed across 100 parts that take 2 years to finish the game in a normal Let's Play schedule. And constantly beg for money such that I can hire people to make all these ideas or something :(

This Goes Against One Piece of Common Advice

My experience was hearing the advice "be a creator not a consumer" repeatedly. You know what's cursed is, creators do want their work to be 'consumed'. In a utopia world, will everyone just want to create their own stuff all the time, I don't think so at all.

Sensibilities

Because of being poor and starving blahblahblah most of my game ideas (before this year, mostly) often had to be severely downscaled, no multiplayer ideas, no fancy 3D, etc. This wasn't a good idea for game-popularity reasons, to expect a niche to be a lottery-winning viral game under these conditions, when you need to instead picture an FPS battle royale audience or some other wider appeal to hook people.

Speaking of game popularity, I do often wonder how true it is, the "build it and they will come / the game will naturally go viral" idea. Surely a extreme large genre-bending game with great moments would break out... maybe? Is it guaranteed? I'm thinking of this in the "positioning yourself to benefit from such trends" lens, where for every breakout hit game, someone had to set up and make a game with these beloved traits. And it may be the case that your game being multiplayer, open to creativity, and also earlier monetization (not only pay-to-win whale monetization) would be really important.

There's an inverse to this entire article which is also an inverse to the problem I have. Someone can find they are so far below (considering their own creative work much worse than others') they are actually way more likely to spend money in games. A required belief (that you don't even realize you hold) for someone addicted to microtransactions and spending thousands on a WWE mobile game or something: you need to have more respect for the developers of the game and the officiality of the product, than you have for your own work.

Takeaway

I never thought I would stop enjoying video games, it's shocking to me. It's also probably unsympathetic in a "nice problem to have" way, like I have no idea if this is going to be perceived as 'wow bragging for being so good at design' or whatever ('Nice problems to have are also rarely actually nice to have'). This mentality has likely permanently cut off "wow I'll just play video games as a job for the rest of my life" which was actually accessible to me.

What we generally mean when we say “nice problem to have” is that the preconditions for having this problem are nice to have. i.e. you cannot have this problem unless some other nice thing happens first. This is not at all a reliable predictor of the amount of suffering involved.

The thing is, by definition, “nice problems to have” are ones that are not going to be shared by a lot of people (otherwise the preconditions would just be normal behaviour and it wouldn’t be a nice problem to have). As a result:

Most people probably won’t be able to relate to it, because their lived experiences will be so different.
People will be envious of you for the nice thing.

Thus the defining characteristic about nice problems to have is not that they are nice, but that you will be afforded no sympathy for having them.

This is part of the reason I feel utterly cursed now, if I were to write the 'advice to my past self' article, it would be true information that changes me massively.

Takeaway: Maybe don't get into game development or anything creative!