For the first time in months I have actually done a bit of development on QubeKwest. It’s a new year and I’m hoping this one sees a lot of progress on the game. Comically, I hit my limit on development laziness before the new year, so I can’t even claim that this is some sort of new year’s resolution. The reasons for my resuming development aren’t exactly what you might expect.
The first source of the “itch” to start coding again came from playing Minecraft with my brother again. One day he randomly called me up and told me he wanted to play again. I accepted his offer and have been playing for a couple of months with him. This inspired the same sorts of thoughts that caused me to start writing QubeKwest in the first place. In other words, playing Minecraft simply made me want to make something like Minecraft only better.
Part of the reason for stopping the development for a while was that the unimaginable scale of the project had rather started to soak in. That in turn made me feel like the progress I was making was painfully slow because after so long, and so much work, I still essentially have nothing to show for my efforts.
The second motivation to resume and what helped to remove a source of not feeling up to the task of writing QubeKwest actually came from a book I’m reading. I’m reading my way through Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation (which I’m enjoying immensely) and at one point they were talking about how long it took to develop “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.” This SNES game from 1991 lived entirely in a 1MB cartridge and took something like 3 years to create for a whole team of video game writing experts. More impressively, and the part that really hit home for me, was the fact that the game took 60,000 hours of development time.
So Zelda took that long to make for a group of coding wizards. A game that had very few of the problems to solve that QubeKwest has (though I’m sure it had many others that QubeKwest doesn’t). There were no clients or servers or networking. There was never more than one player playing at a time. The world was expertly hard coded by level designers instead of a completely computer generated world that is dynamically modifiable by any number of players simultaneously.
To be clear, I’m not putting down the efforts of the game creators at Nintento and that particular Zelda game is one of my favorite games of all time. I’m simply pointing out that it felt like a bit of justification that a game I’m writing from scratch, by myself, engine and everything, is taking so long to make. When I read that I smiled and honestly felt better about the progress I’d made so far.
Now in a situation where I wasn’t feeling down on myself for a lack of visible progress, and motivated to make a better Minecraft-type game, I started working again. Here’s hoping that a new year brings with it an incredible amount of progress and continued motivation. Happy new year everyone.