How I finally broke the dev cycle of doom and published my first game!

This post will show you how I achieve to publish Hexpert after starting dozens of projects and never completing them.

The never ending game development cycle

If you are a game developer you are probably familiar with the never ending game development cycle. The cycle starts when you get a great idea : The next big thing! It's a project you are highly motivated to work on and you spend countless hours on it. As the project grows, the development slows and your motivation goes down. While your motivation is extremely low on the project you suddenly get a new idea! The cycle repeats itself in a never ending spiral.

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How I broke from the cycle

I partipated in Ludum Dare 38, an event that was held in April 2017, one of the world's largest game jam event. The competition entry also referred as "compo" requires you to create a game following a specific theme under 48 hours. All of this is done at home, you are competing against over a thousand entries. Once you submit your game, you receive ratings from other creators. The more you rate entries, the more your entry will be visible to others. This system highly encourage you to play the games other have created in the same restrictions you had, you receive enormous feedback about your game and it is overall a great experience. My entry in Ludum Dare 38 is called HexCity and this is how it turned out :

Looks pretty bad! It does indeed, however it plays very well. It is a very innovative puzzle game and I recommend checking out it's Ludum Dare page. I was amazed by the comments that flooded the game's page, a lot of people liked it. It finished 135th in innovation on 1100 entries, not the best, but pretty good for a first entry I thought! This gave me a lot more motivation, because I knew my game was good from the start. I reprogrammed the game from scratched, because code written under 48 hours is more than rotten! It took me about 10 weeks to finish Hexpert and publish it on Google Play after hiring an artist.

What I learned

I was able to finish the project because it had a small scope compared to the other project. I already had feedback and it gave me a lot of motivation to go forward. From that day, I got a confidence boost to finish my other games and I hope to never return to that cycle again. Even though Hexpert did not get any success on the Google Play store, I am now an individual able to finish games, which is now much more valuable in my life.