During the development of A Witches Story, which at this current point in time has very long list of un-implemented features, I took a short break and worked on a game jam project which then grew into a larger project which eventually became Reflector. At the time I told myself I was doing this to give my self a break and I would come back to the project feeling revitalised and enthusiastic, which ended up not being the case, I was merely procrastinating on the project and lying to myself about it. I continued to put off going back to the project and instead grew Reflector into a larger and larger project and once that stopped being fun I just started searching out new video games to play to fill the void. So the question is, what made me come back to the project?

I got to the answer thanks to some great advice I got from a new book from a great game developer and podcaster Matt Hackett along with some serious introspection about the project. Turns out I was procrastinating not because the project wasn't exciting anymore, it still very much is, however the bit of work I needed to do/was part way through implementing (creating routines for NPCs) was actually the boring bit, and mainly because it was a very time consuming process that involved a lot of copy and pasting JSON code and tweaking values.

So the answer was in this book:

How to make a video game all by yourself, by Matt Hackett. The section about developer experience specifically and a great quote from the great John Romero:

Great tools help make great games

What a I really needed was to create a tool to make the job of creating NPC routines quicker, easier and maybe even more fun. So that's what I did, turns out even the development on the tool was fun and very satisfying. In less time than it would have taken me to complete 1 NPC routine I created a tool to help me do it and then created a new routine and tested it with plenty of time to spare. That's what reignited my game development spark and got me developing again in my spare time, instead of doom scrolling and searching for new game play experiences to fill the void.

So look out for an update to A Witches Story soon and if you want to grab yourself a copy of the book either physically or digitally head over to Valadria.com for all the links