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"To return to the question I posed at the beginning of this essay, that last point is one of the reasons I don't make Dragons Abound available and haven't tried to monetize it. Doing either of those things would be a distraction from what I consider the important work - keeping myself happy with interesting challenges and opportunities for personal growth."
Not sure I understand how monetizing it or open-sourcing it would necessarily turn it into a distraction... Wouldn't that depend more on whether or not you allowed maintenance, support, etc., to become a distraction?
It changes from becoming a hobby project, and from the author doing something for himself, to a product, and the author becoming a community manager. That is not for everyone.
But people asking specific things about it might become a distraction.
Getting unwanted input, or feeling socially obligated to help/change things, might become a distraction.
True, but if you're comfortable saying "I can't help you with that" or "I'm not really interested in doing that right now", doesn't seem like it would be much of a problem. At least not if you give something away for free; if the ones asking for help are "customers", I can see the dealing with distractions feeling more obligatory, but even that seems solvable if you just sell it with the caveat that only minimal support will be provided, or something, and let potential customers take it or leave it.
I think very few people would be comfortable doing that, to such an extent that it doesn't influence one's mindset on the project. This is a statement that takes into account the author's awareness of their own psychology.
I love this framing!
I've got a "forever project" I'm working on (a web based storytelling game platform) and it's been an absolute joy to have something I can keep extending and tweaking.
Sometimes my motivation is to enable a new type of game I'm designing and sometimes it's just to make the platform better.
One thing that I've found super helpful is having a huge diversity of TODOs. If I'm in the mood to code some logic - great, if I'm feeling like tweaking the visuals - cool, if I'm excited about doing game design and working on a draft – that's fine too. There's always something to chip away at that suits my mood and energy.
Eh, personally I disagree with this. I hate having 'TODO' lists for stuff like this, I like keeping ideas/notes. Maybe it's just a difference in the naming convention.
Another similar example - I no longer keep a 'reading list' or a 'someday maybe' list, I just have a series of bookmarks and notes that's searchable if I need to reference them for something in the future.
Either it's important enough to do now, or it's important enough to forget until it's important enough to do now.
Interesting how it first tells you that Forever Project is not about setting goals, while truly pursuing the goal of learning. This becomes especially clear in the end, when polishing is criticized. If there is a goal (learning new things), doesn't it strip away the benefits of Forever Project thinking?
I think "learning new things" is not a goal. A goal has an end, can be completed, more like a destination and can be reached. But "learning new things" is more like a direction, a journey itself.
Learning new things in open ended, so the project goes on forever potentially.
I believe the important thing is that the goal is just a placeholder for whatever you believe is progress, generally. So it's incredibly fluid if you allow it to be.
For example, I have been working on a pinball simulation, and my attitude is very Forever Project in most respects. I first did almost nothing in terms of productivity, and just played pinball games and became familiar. Occasionally I poked around at how the real games were made and compared them with simulations, and developed some distinction between "pinball video games" (which made up their physics freely and attached video game gimmicks) and "pinball simulations" (which largely stuck to realism as a benchmark). I took a class where I wrote a story about someone transformed into the ball by a "pinball vampire". This character had already been knocking around in my head, but now the concept was solidified into something which suggested an original game. I played in a pinball tournament, and got a sense of the spectrum of skills and personalities and how far I could take my own playing skills. I debated options for what I would do to further my study of the game, finally settling on simulation gameplay. The specifics of the game as a product could remain open: the goal now, which I've spent some months on, is simply to reproduce a well known game, "El Dorado", as well as I could manage. This has turned into time working on each mechanism and making iterative designs for improved accuracy. The other day I got in an order for real parts so that I could take better measurements.
Once the prototype is done - and done is a thing I can claim whenever, but I gave myself a time limit around the end of this month, early next month - I plan to put it aside for a bit, because I have other things I want to focus on, but I also intend to come back and start developing it further.
So while I have had goals along the way, none of them are do-or-die. Rather, it comes from a place of abundance. There's always going to be more to study, so pick a few things, and see how far I get.
I already know that the physics in my sim are not where they could be, despite my efforts: just the other day, I was linked to a paper on a new position-based dynamics solver which has groundbreaking capabilities for deformation and restitution(important things to model in a game with fast rubber deformations). On the one hand, I want it, but I also know it's getting me off topic, because I'm not engaging in this project at the level of using the newest technology and techniques, but rather, engineering a design using the things that are commoditized, well-tested. I am using the stuff built-in with Godot Engine, and seeing what I can get out of it. The goal is there to give me a benchmark, not to be my finish line.
And as article states, it's not the most natural thing to run a Forever Project if you've just come out of school and everything's been about getting the grade. The overarching goal is something more like "I want to let myself struggle and think deeply about this for a while." Because if my goal were "make a pinball video game" alone, I could easily have had something up and running in two weeks. It would be disproportionate, have completely wrong behaviors, no understanding of layout or game flow, and generally be trivializing of the topic. That I have a prototype that is carefully measured, emulates something specific and is built on numerous experiments instead reflects a desire to go deeper.
Hello, please put your website or Twitter etc in your profile so I can follow where this pinball madness is going :)
I don't want to personal-brand much :) but here are some fediverse and itch links, roughly corresponding to small and big news:
https://vulpine.club/@Triplefox
At minimum I will be putting up a downloadable on itch in a few days or so.
What does personal growth mean?
becoming more like the person you want to be.
Isn't it based on your personal achievements ?