A day late and a dollar short...

For the past year, I've been working on my first solid, dedicated game project. With this being my first game, I decided I was going to actually basically imitate an older game, making something new with my own spin on it. The idea here was to take an idea that I already know works and see if my own creative direction on it would be feasible. Sort of an ice-breaker into making a full on game. (For simplicity's sake though, I won't get in to details on what the game was)

About a month after I had the idea and began writing out the concepts, I found out a group of others had the same notion. I decided to continue my work though as their project's direction was considerably different than my own and so I just wanted to disregard it. Plus their team management just didn't seem to have anything in gear and so I wasn't expecting anything to ever actually happen. I went about my work and figured all would be well.

Along the way, I found people eager to help out. However as is usually the case with volunteers, enthusiasm was short lived. I expected this however, and kept on going. I wanted to keep things small, not get over loaded with drop-out team members. Basically just one person at a time and if they drop, I replace them. However as you can imagine, this isn't a very efficient approach to things and will only get you so far.

And so this went for a year. It got to a point where I expected to be able to prepare for putting together a Kickstarter campaign. All I needed was a little bit more in the art department and things would be good to go. The ideas I had were very solid, everything to make an excellent game for sure. Was expecting that I'd be seeking around $150,000 as my goal, which I felt fully confident I'd reach with ease, considering my designs and the popularity of the game I was designing after and with the fans of said game desperately wanting a new one. For the final art push I needed, I had a couple people who seemed eager to make it happen. They hated their dead-end current job as much as I and were ready to get out of it.

Few months later, virtually nothing happened. Constant "do you have that model ready??" followed with "No, not yet, I just have no time". Which continued all the way up until now. In the mean time of all this flaking out, the opposing project managed to get their shit together long enough to launch a Kickstarter for their own project. It's already doing hugely successful, virtually just off of name alone already well on their way to the goal amount. All I needed was about 4 good models within about 3 months and that would've been it... But I was unable to get even that little bit of dedication from anyone.

I'm basically sitting back now and watching my life's dream unfold for someone else and also having the last year of hard effort amount to nothing at all. It's moments like this that you have a hard time knowing what to do or how to keep going.