Lately, we’ve been wondering whether to continue programming or not. Well, it’s less of a question of whether or not to continue doing the one thing we’re kinda good at. It’s more a question of why we do it, And whether or not it’s shown results. The answer to that second question is honestly a resounding no. We’re gonna try to work out why that’s the case.

First of all, we damn near never finish anything. We get a day or two of divine inspiration, wherein it feels like there’s nothing that can get in our way of implementing a big juicy Concept. It’s always something sort of basic, with a big hook. We will tear through the basis of the idea for the first couple days, and then by day three we’re bored.

When we try to show what we made to friends it doesn’t read as significant, because at the end of the day all we really did was reinvent a wheel that’s available for free as a Godot project template on GitHub. There’s this need for extrinsic feedback in us that never feels met. This is partially because very few of our friends are programmers, and the ones who are work at a higher level than we do. When everyone else works in Godot, they can click a couple buttons to add a rigid body collider to an actor to replicate what takes us like 100 LOC and a sweeping edit of our Makefile.

We push this C stuff because we have this big imagination, where we believe at the end of this long road we’ll end up with a project that could conceivably be ported to another platform. The PlayStation 2 and the 3DS are our primary targets, and we genuinely believe we can get there. But if we can’t get the base video game finished for the platform we’re sitting on, coding the thing in, then how are we going to port it?

And again with the kinds of concepts that inspire us. “It’s like Kingdom Hearts, but with Quake movement.” “It’s like King’s Field, but with Quake movement.” “It’s like a Slender: The Eight Pages clone, but with an actually prescient story instead of just pointing to a popular Internet figure and asking the audience to clap.” The things that inspire us are massive, known, and are just sort of lame ideas, while we lack the skills they require to reinvent.

And like, shit man, that’s really the root issue. We don’t even like straight game coding that much. Our passion lies at the system level, we just love working with low level code and constrained hardware. We wish we could make a thin engine, and be “The Engine Girl,” to whom a few co-conspirators would request new features, and then those co-conspirators would base their code on what we write. Almost like we were a middleware vendor or something, but actively in voice chats with the people we license our software to. That way, the people who like to get Real Shit Done can get their Real Shit Done on top of a layer that we can guarantee will fulfill our requirement of being portable to the PS2 or 3DS.

We’re burnt out right now after putting down a couple months of work on another failed project. It was going to be a 90° dungeon crawler about a gig worker who took scavenging jobs on derelict space ships no one else dared to enter. It was in collaboration with another programmer friend, with the goal of making it in time for Dungeon Crawler Jam 2025. We used C, because she was struggling to wrangle RPG Maker into shape for her own jam project and we figured it’d be a fun high-to-low level whiplash, and she had expressed an interest in joining us in learning C. Plenty of planning went in, but since she burnt herself out on her own game project, she couldn’t contribute much and we missed the deadline. After we both decided to keep going on it, we worked on it on and off over time ironing out the dungeon graphics, lots and lots of essential architectural cruft, a controller-ready composable menu system and a popup text box. But after two months, she hadn’t returned to the project for much and the guilt was mounting, so we both decided to call it quits and move on to do our own things. We learned a lot with that project, mostly we learned how to write a game engine in C! We read a ton of Doom and Quake source code, and we implemented a lot of those ideas for this game, but at the end of the day trying to come up with a turn based combat system on my own without much interest in the concept was too high a wall to climb for a project that didn’t captivate either of the people working on it anymore.

Conclusion…

Well… We have none. Back to the drawing board. If we can derive anything of use from this (besides a bunch of solid code!) then it’s this: we have to get better at being satisfied with imitation under our limited resources and circumstances. Without being paid for this work, as a hobby thing to do in the middle of a depressed unemployed haze, dealing with our myriad mental health issues, it’s all a little too much to expect results so soon from an endeavor we ultimately started just half a year ago on an ideological switch. The rest of our life’s game development experience has been in Unity and Godot, man. The paradigm shift has been massive, this takes time and we have to readjust our expectations of ourselves. Reinventing wheels is a necessary part of the process of learning, and so is maintaining our health while self teaching and living under our parents’ roof with no income. Lately it feels like the sky is falling, so having to hold the weight of the atmosphere AND a growing passion is getting harder and harder. Above all else, we have to forgive ourselves for these failures as it’s all part of the process.