I made a game with a group of well educated friends back in the mid 2000s. It was released (against agreements) when the core gameplay was roughly-in place, but all the art assets were 'programmer art'.
It made the top ten worst Steam Greenlight games (on some dead blog) and attracted huge quantities of negative criticism.
Even though it was never linked to my public reputation and I found it hilarious at the time...
It did make me very hesistant and perfectionist in future projects and took out a certain amount of faith that 'it will work out'.
I learnt a lot from the experience and I'm glad I did it. But gosh I wasted a lot of good juice and youthful exuberance on that.
> It did make me very hesistant and perfectionist in future projects and took out a certain amount of faith that 'it will work out'.
But that's because you still cared about others. And maybe didn't read enough startup/entrepreneur books or know enough people who did that. Once you know what crap companies willingly release which go on to be successful, it will make you far less perfectionist.
I had the luck of having a few family members in computing in the 70s when I was born, so I heard early on about Allen debugging/fixing the basic interpreter he wrote on a PDP for a processor he didn't have access to at the time on the plane for one of the most important meetings of Microsoft at the time. The absolute and total garbage Oracle released for many years when they started. etc. And those are old stories, but this happens all the time; a lot of products that are launched by big or small companies are so full of bugs that I wonder sometimes if anyone bothered to try them.
I simply stopped caring about perfection as it drove me insane and no-one cares anyway. Even, in line with this article, even if I make something ONLY for myself, I rather just finish it and then change it over time then try to get it in a 'perfect state' from the start. It doesn't make me happy as perfection is not really something that's easy to define; especially in software, it is so incredibly hard to get to anything better than 'ok', that striving for perfection (Dijkstra like) will drive you completely bonkers and nothing ever gets released.
I made a game with a group of well educated friends back in the mid 2000s. It was released (against agreements) when the core gameplay was roughly-in place, but all the art assets were 'programmer art'.
It made the top ten worst Steam Greenlight games (on some dead blog) and attracted huge quantities of negative criticism.
Even though it was never linked to my public reputation and I found it hilarious at the time...
It did make me very hesistant and perfectionist in future projects and took out a certain amount of faith that 'it will work out'.
I learnt a lot from the experience and I'm glad I did it. But gosh I wasted a lot of good juice and youthful exuberance on that.
Failure is not 'free'.