utopia, 20 july 2026

Things that probably aren't worth it

I spend a fair bit of time designing games in my head.

I mean computer games, anywhere from complex puzzle games to board games to interactive-novel kind of things. Just about anything but action games. The world has enough of those, and anyway, I hate doing real-time movement logic.

I did a game a long time ago where the entire rest of the game combined didn't take as long to write as the movement routine. And this wasn't "player presses a key/moves control pad to move the character around" kind of movement. This was just "press the go button and then watch as the animated onscreen character performs the instructions you gave it."

The problem with that is it's asynchronous and involves an event loop. Now, event loops aren't all that complicated -- I mean, Windows runs on an event/interrupt loop, and has ever since its first version -- but depending on your tool/environment/method, they can be a real pain in the ass to implement. The reason Hunt the Wumpus doesn't have animation of the bats carrying you off, as I originally wanted, is still right there in a grumpy comment in the code, and if you care enough, you can View Source on that page and scroll way way down to the comment in front of function batCarry. Short answer: I'd have had to restructure all the code to do that; it would have stopped becoming procedural and would have become an asynchronous event loop, and that was simply too much pain for a game which took, like, one afternoon to write and another to test.

But I digress.

This morning I put together the bones of yet another one in my head. That makes five or six viable games floating around in there (and damn, it's crowded), not counting the one which I actually went so far as to begin work on before I realized it had a critical-time-mass problem.

Actually, let's talk about that one because it's instructive.

This was in June of last year. I tinkered with it off and on for a couple of weeks. The game was a set of scenarios for the player, where they would have to make decisions at various points. Choose Your Own Adventure, but with fewer spots for player input -- more like an interactive novel, again (I am very fond of that format) ... mostly reading but with an occasional, "OK, do you trust her?" or something like that.

Each scenario had several outcomes; which one was the right outcome was a matter of opinion and/or what the player was trying to accomplish at the time.

These scenarios, I should note, all had sex in them. That's right, this was going to be an adult game, and yeah, you'd think I'd learned my lesson from Hotel Eleusis (which we will discuss some day). Actually, I did learn my lesson; I learned there was no way I was going to be able to charge people for the game if I did make it.

(Not to mention that these days I have abandoned the idea of bespoke game engines, and like Wumpus, it was being coded entirely in jQuery/JScript/HTML5, with no back end at all ... and this makes it kind of impossible to lock down. If you know the URL of the HTML page, then you can play the game. There's no way to set up a toll booth.)

Because I felt the scenarios would be much better if they were visual (and also as a kind of bribe, because, remember, I believe that people no longer know how to read, so offering them a game that was mostly big swaths of text would be doomed from the start if I didn't sprinkle on a lot of sugar), they were going to be fully illustrated. I wrote code to drop images onto the main canvas in controllable places so it could be like walking through a comic book one panel at a time.

I wrote the game-display engine; I plotted out everything; I wrote the separate code for the map page that's used for inter-scenario navigation; I plotted out everything some more; I did all the images for the first scenario and the introduction; I programmed the first scenario and the introduction and playtested it ... and then I threw the whole thing in a box (metaphorically) and I have no idea if I will, some day in the future, try to save it.

Not because the story wasn't good. I think it was.

The intro had thirty images, plus a large main title screen.

The first scenario had sixty-five images.

There are thirty scenarios.

Thirty scenarios times sixty-five images is one thousand, nine hundred and fifty images. Plus the thirty for the intro, plus some inevitable extras because there are couple of interstitial bits which probably would be outside that count ... so let's be nice and round and say two thousand images. Two thousand renders. At, oh, anywhere from five to twenty minutes per render, depending.

For comparison and contrast: I have just finished the layout for the eighth Coldpoint story, earlier this evening. It's an eighteen-page story. It's got a fairly compact layout, as my stories tend to do these days; the basic layout is eight panels per page, four rows of two, but I often do the rows three-up these days, so you end up with as many as twelve panels per page sometimes. This story used two hundred and six images, plus three other images which were used as components within the scene (that is, I rendered something that would later be displayed on a monitor screen or such within one of the other panels).

Call it two hundred images for an eighteen page story. For the game, I would have had to render the equivalent of ten of those stories.

The record for "comic" style story length is currently held by the recent Sleeper Squad 59, "Witch Wars," at thirty-seven pages. It took three hundred and seventy-eight images and almost an entire month to make. And as I was putting it together, I did have a few moments of "all of this, for an issue which has very little sex or kink and thus is only going to get read by the handful of True Believers ... is this really a good use of my time?"

(I should note, in fairness, that I was being overly pessimistic. "Witch Wars" has done nearly five thousand views on DA since 1 July when I posted it, and that's nothing to sneer at. On the other hand, "Opposition," which does have exactly the kind of prominent kink content that the DA audience wants, did over 7K in three days. And on AO3, where I maintain that the counts are low because they represent an accurate tally of True Believers only, "Witch Wars" has ... eighty-five hits.)

I can justify those projects -- barely -- because I enjoy working on them enough that I don't have to care who does or doesn't read them. But working on a game is work. Trust me. I have done it before. More than once. I know. It wouldn't necessarily be as bad as the more than a year I spent on Hotel Eleusis, but it would definitely be a time sink, and it would definitely be a chore. If I build a story and no one comes, that's bearable; if I build a game and no one comes, that's a tragedy. (And they would have to come without any promotion other than word of mouth, same as ever.)

So the bottom line is, I have some good games in my head I don't think you'll ever see, including that one I began and realized was unsustainable. Oh, I might dust it off. I might go ahead and finish writing it and just cut down to one or two illustrations per scenario. But I got so disgusted by how inevitably doomed it was that it's going to take me more recovery time before I can even think about looking at it again. It's been more than a year and I still can't.

This is the sort of situation that makes me wish people weren't such dicks about giving feedback. I mean, I have no way to take the temperature. The amount of interest in such a thing could be anywhere from "zero" to "tons" and I'd have no way to tell, because no one says a damned thing about anybody's creative output unless they have a complaint.

With nothing but radio silence as the norm, I have no choice but to play the odds, and it just feels like -- as dismal as the audience for them may be -- making comics is still a much better bet than making a game. Even if a comic flops badly, that's only two to four weeks of my life gone. With a game, I'd be doing well to get out at two to four months. It's not uncommon for a game to take years to make.

And, by the way, now you know why tiny indy game shops live so precariously. They either produce games of quality but only once every blue moon, or eventually sell out and turn into a garbage factory. Unlike me, they depend on their work to pay their rent.

I guess at least I got that going for me.

20 July 2026