Getting sidetracked… an introspection

small-gaia-gamma-coverThis weekend I got sidetracked by an ancient pen & paper love of mine: The Gamma World line of roleplaying games. Gamma World in its various editions holds a special place in my heart although I never was perfectly happy with the underlying rules systems. This lead to the creation of my new Gaia Gamma blog at the weekend. My fourth blog… besides this one, my ADOM blog and my Hexer & Helden blog. And you could count the OpenSAGA blog, too, as I currently am the primary writer there (my colleagues just dont’t want to or don’t find the time).

This got me thinking: Why the hack do I start new projects all the time? Instead of finishing the running ones (spell: iADOM, ADOM Live, JADE, Hexer & Helden).

I pretty quickly got to an answer… and I am happy to report that it’s not “I’m getting too old and senile to focus any longer” 😉 I guess there is a very simple reason behind this: I have always been a creative person and whenever the creative juices start to flow I need some outlet. Since I am interested in many topics I also fiddle with many things. Which leads to many projects. An interesting insight for me was to finally understand why the programming projects always are taking a back place quickly to the newest fad I’m burning for: I just feel that in the very little quality hobby time I have (compared to my times as e.g. a student where 90% of the time was quality hobby time) I nowadays just don’t like the thought to spend a whole evening debugging some code just to be able to get a minor feature running. One evening is a lot of time and writing non-software related things just has a higher “quality input to quality output” rate than programming.

Now if someone has a good idea on how I might be able to fund projects via Kickstarter (lacking a US bank account) this at least would mean that I easily might get motivated into finally finishing the ADOM pen & paper RPG since that would combine two beloved hobbies of mine – RPG design and ADOM. Suggestions welcome.

3 Responses to “Getting sidetracked… an introspection”

  1. getter77  on April 6th, 2011

    http://www.8bitfunding.com/index.php Perhaps 8-bit funding here might also be one to consider alongside Kickstarter? Despite being relatively new, one Roguelike project, Expedition, has already met the funding goal that was set and there is a growing motley assortment of generally gaming related projects springing up.

  2. DarrenGrey  on April 15th, 2011

    I’m not sure if 8-bit funding would accept a pen and paper RPG as a project – I think it’s exclusively video games. Another roguelike has gotten over $4k from it, but as far as I know you are supposed to be tied into actually releasing something from it.

    If you want to actually *get things done* I strongly suggest giving the 7-day roguelike competition a try one year if you have the time. It really forces you to focus your creativity on a limited and achievable scope, and the deadline is a huge incentive to work hard, work fast and prioritise getting things done over making code pretty. I’ve made 3 games for such competitions that otherwise I would never have written a single line on. It’s great fun, and it produces very real results.