[advice_giver]

Yeah, I see this all over these indie game dev posts. Highest priority is writing your own engine and solving some deep but tertiary technical problem. Whether the core mechanics are fun or not is whatever. It's truly BPDD (blog post driven development).

[stevenwoo]

It's pretty funny because I got lucky and got paid to game development with people who made some big hits and the very first thing we did after getting a block to draw on the screen was try to make a fun game mechanic. Even for a multiplayer online game - we made or simulated something that could be done on a developer's machine to find something fun first and then worked on the multiplayer details that this blogger spent a large amount of time on - in at least two of the three parts of the blog postings on this project - we had difficulties to overcome in exactly the same manner in adding multiplayer to a game but that was after we had something fun.

[rhizome]

It also validates their student loan payments.