Loitering with the Joneses of technology

– I've reviewed mystery adventure The Black Lily, from IFComp 2014, on IFDB.

– I participated in an IF podcast last week, but I don't know when it will be around.

– My Inform CYOA extension is pretty far along. I hope to release it sooner rather than later so that it can ward off the ravages of age. Tools are particularly susceptible to those ravages. Some of them get ravaged before they even get out the door. I reckon the important thing is not to dawdle in the doorway. Whether due to feature creep, or to the high and impatient current speeds of all of modern citizens, technology and history, you can be left palely loitering in the doorway with your outmoded tool.

This happened to me in 2012 with a GameSalad project. That this was only four years ago surprises me; it feels like much longer. Such time collapses are illustrative of the point.

I spent months using GameSalad to build the engine for an overhead viewed point-and-click adventure game with a dash of action. But not difficult action. The iDevice touch interface wasn't going to be slick enough for tight control. I was building this engine for a ghostly horror type game I was going to call Hedra.

GameSalad was in development heat at the time. Every time it got updated, I had to redo more stuff in my game. Plus Apple's Retina technology was coming in. Suddenly it came to GameSalad. Then everyone had to figure how to trade in double resolution graphics as well. As a one-man band, I was having a hard enough time tuning the engine per se to keep up with the Joneses of technology, and eventually I gave up on the whole thing. My demo no longer runs properly on my current Mac. It needs an old version of GameSalad on an old Mac or a bunch of updating, and even if I did update it, I'm no longer in the headspace or flush of interest to make that game.

I think this all makes Hedra the only computer game in my gamemaking history that I invested solid time in but which didn't get off the ground. I've got a decent number of incomplete games behind me, especially back on the Apple II, but I consider those to have gotten off the ground because they reached the point where they had either a bit or a lot of game content going before I stopped working on them. Hedra doesn't exist except in my head; all I've got is part of an engine that was intended to turn into it later.

Having only abandoned one project late in the fundamental development stage strikes me as a fortunately low stat. I think the rate has probably been helped a lot by most of my projects having been all me. The moment you become part of a development team, you can face exponentially more complex completion factors, but technology affects all projects.