[davidfactorial]

I relate to this a lot, having also started and then not finished a lot of games like the author.

Perhaps it seems obvious to say, but I have only recently fully internalized that making games is not the same activity as playing games, and that it will take many orders of magnitude more time to polish even one gameplay feature compared to how long it will take for that gameplay feature to become stale _to me_ as the dev playtesting that feature over and over again.

I wonder if a lot of gamedevs just get tired of playing their own game and thus don't care about it anymore as a result?

Seth Godin has a book called The Dip about the slog in the middle that many creative projects have (business starting as well). I wonder if gamedev has a particularly nasty dip and that is why so few finish.

[khalladay]

> I wonder if a lot of gamedevs just get tired of playing their own game and thus don't care about it anymore as a result?

FWIW, if you work on large enough projects, you probably aren't playing the game that much at all unless you're a gameplay programmer (and even then, you might only play the small fraction of the game that your feature touches). I do graphics/engine programming for games and the closest I get to playing the game is "load into level, teleport to position X, use a cheat code to give me item Y, use Y, see rendering bug"

I've joked on some projects that I'm excited for the game to ship so I can learn how to play.

[WalterBright]

I never got tired of playing Empire.

[davidfactorial]

Incidentally the few games I have actually finished were all Ludum Dare games with a very short timescale of 2-3 days.

[whateveracct]

I usually take the Friday + Monday off of Ludum Dare, and I block out the entire weekend for the event. Turns out, making space for gamedev makes me make games.