lol… any plans for GTA-esque “Streets of Goo” graphics pack?

No music online sorry to say - it has been years since I recorded anything.

kingofthespill - Ha! Don’t forget H*LY F*CK and I think E*T ME B*TCH! :) But point taken. There is “no profanity” in World of Goo, however we will be releasing an add-on Profanity Pack ™ for the more … adventurous… players. I know what you mean with music too, such a subjective form of self expression. You have music online? Always fun meeting other music peepz.

I have seen and experienced a similar perspective loss when working on creative projects. It is a serious problem, though much more problematic for me in music composition versus software development ( i.e. contract projects).

Finding willing “cold” beta-testers, ones that have no idea about the original Tower of Goo, might be a good time investment on your part. Random people might be able to give you some feedback that you are not expecting, and help you find out if you are hyper-focused on something they could care less about. For instance, there are some folks who are offended that the original has samples of someone saying H*LY SH*T, especially as this is available to kids. For them that overshadows the fun of it. Anyway, having other people tell you straight if anything really sucks can alleviate you needing to wear that hat.

It’s not always that bad, though. Distraction is good. I’m in a period of voluntary distraction from another project right now. I know I’ll go back to it, probably soon, because I’m starting to miss it, but we needed some time apart. What is also really, really good is borrowing a fresh pair of eyes from someone. Find somebody you can trust who has never seen the game before (or who hasn’t seen it for a while), let them play it, and ask them to give you their honest opinion on it. It’s a marginally different process to focus testing, because focus testers tend to be people from your target audience who you might not know that well. Having someone you know, maybe even from outside the target audience, maybe not even a gamer, tell you what they think can work wonders for your perspective.

I think my biggest hurdle is at least getting it to be playable first, and then after that it’s just a matter of tinkering with it every now and then to keep it fresh. Since a lot of what I release ends up being for the community anyway, a few tweaks and code enhancements tend to add up for me later on.

I know exactly how you feel. I’m working on a similarly named, non competing game to yours. The fun part of development is always coming up with the cool ideas and solutions, but for the past few months, it’s been more about doing the work implementing them, and then listening to crushing criticism* on something that isn’t even finished. That can be rewarding, but when you smash your head against annoying problems, it takes the joy out of it.

And then when opportunities to be creative turn up again, you’re sort of exhausted from working so hard on the game, and not completely sure how to marry new ideas with your existing stuff. I can totally relate. I concluded that all I can really do is hunker down and keep at it. If I need to, I take a break for a few days, indulging guilty pleasures (Battlefield 2, in my case) to recharge my desire. Running on empty where passion is concerned is not worth the blood sweat and tears.

For what it’s worth, I thought your experiment for Tower of Goo was fantastic, and I’m definately looking forward to seeing how you develop it. Stick with it guys!

*Actually, feedback has not been bad, but I’m a depressive, and want to believe that everyone hates me :

I stumbled across this site via indygamer (http://indygamer.blogspot.com) and started reading, and I like what I see here as regards “keeping it real”. I’ve been making games on and off as a hobby since I was 14 or so (which comes to a total of 10 years, yeah, I’m young ^^), and this is definitely a problem I’ve run into before. Like you, I find that distractions such as toys and such on my desk help immensely, as do a few other things such as random doodles when I’m not sure how to proceed with something.

There is one other thing that I’ve found that helps, provided you’re working on your own project, and that is to take a break completely for a few days. Don’t even look at it, and play a game, read a book, do something else entirely. And when you come back, sit back and just play with it for a few minutes. Try to play it, and see what feels off. This part can be tricky for me, because sometimes my early attempts at defining a way of going about getting the “feeling” of the project down turn out to be completely wrong for the task at hand, and I hate scrapping work. But it’s a lot easier to do when I’ve been about and looking at what other people have done for a while, and I have something else to gauge myself by than just my project I’ve been staring at forever.

So anyway, I hope this blog serves it’s purpose for you, and good luck with keeping the distractions up and the productivity on-track!

Hmm.. so I guess a better way of “keeping to the original design” would be to stick to the original SPIRIT of the design - not the explicit word doc or whatever - problem is it’s hard to keep a record of that original spirit since it’s more of a feeling than an easily recordable pile of text. I think in the extra commentary on the Zoolander DVD one of the guys said something about the initial gas station scene - where the male models will squirting gasoline all over each other in slow mo or something - and how THAT scene served as a model of the emotional spirit that the rest of the movie should aim to be like. Emotional prototyping!

Anyway, thanks, Daniel/sirleto, for connecting “kyle” to “gay” in Human Brain Cloud. That was real nice.

my name is daniel (nick: sirleto), i’m a 26 year old game developer from germany. working in the industry for aprox. 6 years as assistant producer (etc.) and technical artist … and studying bachelor of computer science since in the 3rd year now.

i know precisely what you tried to describe with this love-to-the-game-blindness. i have seen this with 10+ people on a larger project and also with only me on my own little adventure (working on it for aprox. 2 years freetime).

my best tip for this (if you are alone or a small company), is to simulate a big company. what happens there, is that everyone has his wishes and looking at the product, only 50% of the people can be satisfied, some will never be. so when you put them together and let them talk, the satisfied won’t let the unsatisfied keep their “unrealistis dreams” and slow them down to what is possible. and the unsatisfied won’t let the satisfied stick to their love and tell them what truly sucks and could be changed. so this two groups will level themselves to a usefull ground where everybody sees whats good and what not about the product.

and in a small team, where hopefully everybody loves the game, you don’t have such a choice. so you need to change your point of view by trying to stick more and more to the game (typically you dream about that anyway). and now allow yourself to do that (on paper) and look where you would come. and when you start to realize that this is not possible (but you’d love to have it) you will feel less satisfied with the current state of your game.

and voila: this is the point where you typically are able to tell what truly is good about your (tiny) game and what isn’t.

cheers,
daniel / sirleto

ps:

what i did in the past:
www.gameprogramming.de/renkel

what we (me and buddys) do together:
www.ceeu.de

game reviews from a gamedesign perspective:
http://gamedesignreviews.blogspot.com/