
The End: I can not finish Limit Theory - CharlesW
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joshparnell/limit-theory-an-infinite-procedural-space-game/posts/2270873
======
TaylorAlexander
I’m in the same place in many ways. I had a successful kickstarter in 2013 but
totally over promised and was unable to deliver.

My June update has a little bit of what “winding down” a 5 year old
Kickstarter feels like for me:

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flutterwireless/flutter...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flutterwireless/flutter-20-wireless-
arduino-with-half-mile-1km-ran/posts/2204393)

I still have people demanding refunds, and I’m inclined to make sure everyone
is satisfied, but after five years it’s pretty hard to keep going.

But to the author of this: you’re not alone. And it’s okay. Some people will
be upset and many people will be totally okay with this. What’s important is
that you take care of yourself. You are no deadbeat - you’ve really given it a
solid effort and after all this time, it’s okay to admit failure, defeat,
exhaustion, or whatever you want to call it.

In time you will see that the work built character you never intended to
build. You will be better for it. The dream you once had may haunt you at
times, but try to remind yourself that the dream you imagined apparently
wasn’t as realistic as you’d believed. It’s okay to let go, and the healthiest
thing to do if you’re feeling burnt out.

You’ll be okay. The backers will too. You’ve given far, far more than any
backers have. You may feel forever in their debt, but nonetheless it’s okay to
stop. Kickstarter invites us to make impossible promises, and it’s insanity at
some point to keep pushing forward.

Take time off, accept that you’re done, and see what it feels like to relax.

To anyone else in this boat, you’ll have to follow your heart. Everyone’s path
is different. But many of us fail. Failure is a necessary part of
experimentation. I hope you genuinely realize that most people never even try
to launch their own company or project like this, and few succeed. We all want
to be the one who had success, hit the killer growth curve, and made it
through the hell to the kind of traction we’d always dreamed of. But we will
not all succeed. I did not succeed. But I’ve made what I’ve made and I’m sure
as hell proud of the work I’ve done.

Take care of yourselves. It’s hard to admit you were wrong, but it’s harder to
pretend you weren’t.

~~~
Aeolun
Honestly, if you’ve given a project 6 years of your life, regardless of how
much money I pledged I wouldn’t ask for more.

If you made a good effort and are burned out, you should just stop. I can only
imagine how liberating writing this post must have been, even if it was hard.

------
behrlich
I've been following this project since 2012. For some reason the kickstarter
caught my eye and I've been periodically checking the development forums at
least monthly.

This was an absolute journey. He was attempting to make a game engine
completely from scratch, including procedurally generated everything, NPC AI's
somehow running in this infinite universe all in real time. The
demos/screenshots were really beautiful throughout development.

A couple of years ago he had some kind of mental breakdown and stopped
updating the forums. When he came back he joined some kind of accelerator and
hired a couple of developers.

The project never seemed to evolve beyond engine work. The only "gameplay" was
some kind of mini game written for E3 multiple years ago. The most recent
updates are months and months of rewriting things back and fourth from lua to
C++, infinitely tweaking to make the framerate perfect (at least this is my
impression).

For having no stake in this at all - I'm really unreasonably sad about this
announcement.

~~~
anonytrary
> He was attempting to make a game engine completely from scratch ... The
> project never seemed to evolve beyond engine work. The most recent updates
> are months and months of rewriting things back and fourth from lua to C++,
> infinitely tweaking to make the framerate perfect.

Re-inventing the wheel and premature optimization are red flags in software
development. I can't say I'm surprised they never got around to building a
game. Based on their approach, it looks like they suffered from an XY problem.
Was inventing a new game engine really the right approach from the start? In
hindsight, looks like it wasn't, and I'm surprised they continued that
approach for so long.

It's mildly infuriating when the wrong team gets backed to build something.
This is why the founders matter so much. Anyone can have a great idea, but it
takes the right people to execute on something. Looks like this team was
unprepared to build what they imagined, taking funding for X and then spending
all of their time on Y, where they thought Y was a precursor to X, when it
actually wasn't. If I was a backer, I'd be incredibly disappointed.

~~~
cycrutchfield
I’ll play devil’s advocate here. The guy (yes, just one guy, not a team) who
was building this game dropped out of college to make it after the initial
Kickstarter. It’s likely that he was a fairly smart and driven guy, but simply
inexperienced both in terms of software engineering and game development. He
didn’t know it beforehand, but he likely bit off more than he could chew. He
devoted time and resources to things that were not critical for the success of
the project. He likely lacked good mentors (and a team) who could guide him
along the way.

I understand that it must be disappointing for the backers, but it is
infinitely more disappointing for the developer who obviously feels like he
let those backers down. Hopefully he picks himself up and learns from his
mistakes and does a better job next time, whatever that job may be.

~~~
coldtea
> _I’ll play devil’s advocate here. The guy (yes, just one guy, not a team)
> who was building this game dropped out of college to make it after the
> initial Kickstarter. It’s likely that he was a fairly smart and driven guy,
> but simply inexperienced both in terms of software engineering and game
> development._

The "dropped out of college to make it after the initial Kickstarter" part
doesn't support the "smart" part that well. At best he's smart despite doing
so.

~~~
cycrutchfield
I mean, it’s not like he can’t go back to finish his degree. It’s better to
try and fail than not try at all.

~~~
Aeolun
Especially while still at an age where you can drop out of college. It’s a bit
hard for me to drop out of a marriage, child and job to take on spending years
on a passion project.

------
beefsack
I'm a backer, and am now very used to non-delivery after backing hundreds of
projects as a gamer on Linux. The non-delivery of projects, either complete
failure or just failure to deliver to Linux, is probably around 20% or so in
about 100 projects backed.

As a FOSS proponent I'm obviously biased in this, but I believe failed
projects have a duty to release source to the backers in some way. In a
perfect world, the community will help carry the project over the line, but
worst case at least the backers receive something of value and can do with it
what they will. It doesn't matter if the original developer has concerns about
levels of quality or completion.

Please see this both as a general comment to the community, but also a plea
directly to the developer in this particular instance.

~~~
vertline3
"I believe failed projects have a duty to release source to the backers in
some way."

He said in the link

"I will prepare the source code for release"

And he will be in touch after the source is released.

~~~
benatkin
Commenters on the KS page were also asking about the source code despite the
author mentioning that it will be released. Maybe they suspect that the source
code release be failed to be released in a timely manner just like the product
was. If it is indeed a duty, it might be prudent for a creator in a similar
situation to delay the announcement until the source code has been prepared.

------
jcims
For all the charlatains on Kickstarter you also have folks like this that feel
an almost unbearable burden to make good on a promise made. I feel bad for the
guy, hope he can dust himself off and take the good and leave the bad from the
experience.

~~~
anonytrary
I feel worse for the people that believed he could deliver on something he
clearly didn't know how to handle.

~~~
ndnxhs
That is the nature of kickstarter. You are not buying a product, you are
funding the development of a product that may or may not ever succeed.

~~~
austinjp
Exactly. Funding any project is a gamble. Gambles don't always pay off. There
could more emphasis on this. The mental health of the developer is placed way
below the importance of delivery.

------
forapurpose
Josh, you have my sympathies. IME, in 'our culture', whatever that is, people
like to boldly ignore limits to emotional energy. 'Just Do It', 'live with no
regrets', and all those slogans. If you say you're not doing something due to
a lack of emotional energy, people will call you a wimp, sometimes to your
face.

And so it's a mistake that everyone, it seems, ends up learning from hard,
scarring experiences. There really are limits and they are just as real as
limitations to how fast you can run and how quickly you can code. Often I see
consequences that are similar to Josh's - you fail others because you didn't
take emotional energy into account when you made serious promises to them. A
failed Kickstarter is no big deal, those are expected to be risky; I see
failed marriages; people neglecting or otherwise hurting their kids; people
failing their employees, partners and investors; and people losing their
family's and friend's money and good faith.

IMHO, if you want to be honest with others you need to be honest with
yourself; you need to know yourself and your capacity. Also, you can then
learn to manage and increase your emotional energy, to spend it efficiently,
and to use it to your advantage as the powerful, irreplaceable capability it
is. Ignoring it is like ignoring any constrained resource, such as cash flow
for your business. It might help if we taught people these things as children.

EDIT: A few additions

------
siavosh
As a developer who's not in the game industry I am constantly surprised how
often I read that an indie effort has decided to build their own game engine.
Are Unity/Unreal/etc really that limiting or is it a psychological trap
engineers keep falling into?

~~~
cycrutchfield
NIH Syndrome. Also, I imagine that a lot of game development is fairly menial
drudgery from a software development standpoint, so the temptation to make it
more intellectually stimulating probably becomes pretty high.

~~~
smadge
I haven’t looked closely at game engines. Is it possible to write the game at
the level of abstraction you want, then write a translation layer into various
game engines? Or do these game engines tend to creep into all of your code,
preventing you from decoupling your game from the engine? If this were
possible then you could prototype the game using a game engine to get a “MVP”
and if you aren’t satisfied, swap out portions of the engine with custom code.

~~~
lodi
All of these engines (Unreal, Unity, etc.) are written as monolithic
"frameworks" that want to own the top loop and have you override certain bits
to customize behavior. Also, the nature of games requires that various
components (graphics, physics, ai, networking, etc.) are tightly coupled
together. So, no, you're in a world of pain if you want to use Unreal and not
do things "the Unreal way".

\---

Honestly though, I see nothing here that couldn't be done in any modern engine
out of the box though. They can all stream assets in and out of the level
asynchronously (for "infinite extent" levels), build meshes/textures
programmatically, support fully dynamic lights, etc. If you have some
requirement for procedural generation that isn't supported out of the box
(e.g. baking lightmaps at runtime), surely it'd be easier to just write that
part yourself and inject it into the existing pipeline.

------
michaelmrose
Kickstarter isn't as I hope people have realized by now a store with extreme
preorders. Its not an act of bad faith to fail and its not shameful. A
substantial portion of software projects fail and many burn through a lot more
than 180k of investors money.

I hope that the author can learn from this and move on to more fruitful
endeavors. You deserve to.

------
jtchang
I'm not even surprised. I took one look at how much he raised and the scope of
what was promised and instantly knew it would be damn near impossible to ship
everything.

Games are super hard. Even with near unlimited budgets. I don't fault Josh for
closing up shop one bit. He spent 6 years on it.

------
juice_bus
I commend the author for deciding to open source the code up until now - it
could of been fairly easy to just go off the radar and never look back.

------
abraae
6 years is a heroic effort. Great work Josh. If your life obligations permit,
grab your backpack and head to a warm, strange country, lie on the beach,
clear your head for new battles ahead on a different field.

------
singularity2001
You (creator of Limit Theory) should get a $300,000 job with the skills you
have shown. You did not fail. You just underestimated that one person can't do
the work of a 50 head game studio alone.

------
fastball
Honestly, I don't think there is a person alive that could single-handedly
develop a game of this scope without getting burnt out.

That's the first problem. The subsequent problem, once you've realized that,
is that many people that _want_ to pursue solo development of a game are
unlikely to be good PMs once they bring on others.

~~~
fastball
I mean, just look at what a joke No Man's Sky was, and realize that they had
way more funding and many more people working on it at various points.

~~~
jcl
To be fair, No Man's Sky is a much better game today than it was around
launch, when it was getting peak bad press. At that point, the prudent move
might have been to cut their losses and move on to other projects. But instead
Hello Games has spent the last couple years releasing free updates.

~~~
fastball
Absolutely!

But that still took two extra years and loads more money and people.

------
bjnord
What stands out to me is the supportive comments on the Kickstarter page for
this announcement. I only speed-read the first page, but they're almost
uniformly "that's OK, you gave it your all". One person said they found his
updates inspiring.

He may not have reached his goal, it may have been an unrealistic goal for one
person, but clearly he ran the process in such a way that he kept his
supporters rooting for him. Compare that to the pitchfork-and-torches ending
of a lot of failed Kickstarter projects.

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ricardobeat
> We've written a custom engine from scratch using C, Lua, and OpenGL

No other explanations needed :(

------
anonytrary
Part of starting a project is in understanding the scope, commitment and time
you will need to dedicate to finishing it. Ideas are easy, execution is hard.
If there are people depending on you, don't start what you can't finish -- it
will just leave tons of people sad and disappointed.

------
OMEGALUL
Did I just waste 6 years?

~~~
krallja
This is in reference to the top post today, “Did I just waste 3 years?”
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18092108](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18092108)

