Posting gamedev progress online

[a327ex]

20/08/19 - Posting gamedev progress online

I've been posting some of my game's progress on Twitter for a while now and I always noticed that it had a weird effect on me, especially if a post tended to get more popular than normal. For whatever reason whenever that happened it had a really negative effect on my motivation, often times causing me to eventually stop working on the thing that got somewhat popular entirely.

I noticed that this had always happened, even years ago back when I started making games and posting my progress online, though then the effect was more subtle. This always confused me and seemed counter-intuitive, because you'd think that if you got confirmation from the Internet at large that something you were working on was actually good you'd have more motivation to work on it, right? And for the one game I managed to release so far I happened to never post any progress of it online (not even anonymously, which happens sometimes as I post on a gamedev related 4chan thread), only after the game was pretty much complete I started posting about it for marketing purposes and then I quickly released it. So my confusion was increased even further.

And so the other day, a few days after this post on Twitter got popular https://twitter.com/adnzzzzZ/status/1158921655110066177 I noticed this effect happening and on the next night I had a pretty enlightening dream and posted about it on a gamedev Discord server I'm a regular in (yes I'm the kind of person who talks about their dreams, I know), here's what I posted:

This realization seems pretty obvious in retrospect but it's the kind of thing that you don't really think that much about unless you're really paying attention. I'm not going to get into the details of the dream entity or the fact that I'm more status seeking than I'm willing to admit, so let's just assume that that's true. Essentially that means that, at least for me, posting progress for games I'm currently working on will work against me to some degree and that I should avoid doing that.

There are benefits and drawbacks to that situation. The benefits are that I identified a potential source of problems for my productivity (and a tricky one at that) and that I don't have to worry about posting things online while I make the game. The main drawback is that it will be harder to get validation for if the decisions I'm making for the game's visuals will be good enough. One of the hard problems I have as a programmer generally working without an artist is making sure that whatever I'm making is looking reasonably appealing, and the easiest way to test for that is by posting it online and seeing how people react. Not having access to this tool is a real disadvantage, which I'm not sure yet on how to fix.

[smokku]

There is science behind this: https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself