Where I am today, in life and my career, is thanks to a powerful drive to always learn, grow, and push my limits. I’ve rarely encountered much internal conflict related to this process. Often, I have a wealth of things that I might choose to work on. In the past, I typically picked something that seemed fun or interesting at that particular moment. That was pretty much the only criteria. Now that I have the freedom to spend more time on personal projects, especially ones that earn revenue, I’m having difficulty continuing with the same process. These days, I feel like I need to prioritize. As a result, I feel like I’m missing out on wider explorations that I would have chosen in the past. Lately, that’s been troubling me.

As you probably know, I started creating casual games a couple years ago. Within about four or five months, I released three games. Since then, I haven’t finished a single new game. Actually, no, it’s time to be blunt. I haven’t started a single new game either. I played around with some ideas, but they didn’t make it beyond the early prototype stage. Those ideas simply didn’t resonate the same way that my first game, Chroma Circuit, made me want to start creating games in the first place. Gridshock and Qrossfire, my other two games, were deliberately derivative because I wanted to spend time focused on building a foundation of knowledge and code that could be used across many games in the future. Qrossfire, in particular, cemented this new direction of how to decide what to work on.

Since then, instead of starting fresh with new ideas, I’ve mainly continued iterating. I haven’t stopped expanding my knowledge in this pursuit, even with the same three games, and I’ve found enjoyment during every step of this process. I’m experimenting, adding features, and refining the experience in many ways. I’ve improved the controls, refreshed the graphics with better artwork and special effects, and I’ve added new mechanics. I still have many avenues I could explore with these games. Their modest success on mobile is just good enough that I don’t feel like they’re a complete dead end, but they’re also doing just bad enough that I’m driven to continue with them just to prove that I can do better.

For some reason, though, I feel kind of stuck. Part of me wants to move on and try new genres of games. I want to get back out of my comfort zone and force myself to write code for things that are more advanced than what I’ve done so far, or at least work on things that feel newer to me. Obviously, I’ve only focused on the same sort of game. Maybe that’s slowing my advancement. Not to a halt, or I’d be completely bored, I would have moved on to something different by now. Instead, it’s enough to keep me interested, but I’m clearly not propelling the same way I used to in school and during my early career.

I can see the deceleration just in the fact that I don’t blog as much anymore. I don’t say, “hey, look at this random cool thing I worked on last weekend” very often these days. I’m okay with that, to a certain degree, because my blog posts have been getting longer too. When they’re finished, I feel like I accomplished something, and that they include more insightful information now than I could include in my old writings. Of course, I’m far more active on Twitter now than when I was blogging weekly or monthly, so it’s not like I’ve disconnected myself from the Flash community that I first joined thanks to my blog posts.

Even after writing down my thoughts, I’m not feeling any more decisive. I’m frustrated with myself for not finishing a few projects that would bring my existing games to new platforms. They’re at least halfway done, if not more, so I’m feeling like I wasted time if I don’t get back on track with them. Then there are way to improve the games and learn more by adding features that I’ve not tried implementing yet. Micro-transactions. Achievements. Stuff like that. On the other hand, I have those prototypes that would easily make playable games, if not necessarily breaking new ground for me, and I have a few ideas that are still simmering in the back of my mind that I want to start exploring. I want to reach a point with one of them where I’ve verified that the idea is fun, and it excites me to move from prototype to the complete game.

Both directions that I keep comparing pull at my interest, but I don’t want to split up my time between both of them either. I feel like I need to choose because the day has too few hours to work on everything at once. I’ve already divided my time between games and other software. There are other activities, not involving programming, that I want to dabble in too. Every project I continue to work on is interesting to me in different ways. That’s the hardest part about making choices in this area. I want to fit everything in, and I want to get it all done in the time it would take if I chose just one. You might say that all that potential is a good thing, but it feels like a major barrier to me.