Hi all!

I need a bit of fellow gamedev advice. Years ago I made a game for the TI-83+. It was my first “real” game that I made….but it's also been the last one I actually finished. Well, I say finished, and that's what leads into this. TL;DR at the bottom…

Last year I was playing around with some game ideas I had but was getting right on the edge of burnout. I was losing momentum, but I wanted to get something out there just so I could have a truly finished project. I wanted something actually finished so I could say I actually finished something. But, as the burnout was creeping in, my mind kept thinking back to that calculator game that I've always actually kind of hated. Don't get me wrong, it's not that terrible, but it is terribly embarrassing. A lot of the graphics were either outright stolen from other games and B&W'ed or ones using my limited (at the time) drawing ability with the mighty Windows ME MSPaint. The story required inside info that no one but myself had and the bits that didn't were…awful. etc etc.

Even still, every now and then I found myself wanting to and sometimes even attempting to revisit it. Mostly as I've grown as a programmer and just being embarrassed at the personal, yet public, black mark that I can't seem to let go of.

On a whim, I decided to open up a new monogame c# project, imported the old graphics, and started playing around. I opened the old source files for reference, moved the old game map to a TMX Tiled map file, and then just started adding a bit more here and there. However, I got to the point where I wanted to add the combat system and being completely stuck. The old system was very much a product of its time and I had no idea how I should go about doing it with modern sensibilities.

Then, I had a breakthrough, and suddenly I was in love! This little system I devised was amazingly flexible, surprisingly robust, and was actually rather simple AND fun to use! It was great! I found myself basically remaking the entire game in less than a week! Having the original source certainly helped…

…and then I was adding some of the dialog in and thought “man, this is cheesy.” Some of the crap in there that I barely remembered what the hell I was talking about.

So, I rewrote it. In fact, doing it the way I now was gave me the option to fix the ending. Or, rather, endings. Well, I say endings. Basically the game just kinda stopped or continued based on how you'd progressed the game. The way I came up with now allowed me to have different actual endings based on the player's actions, but required a ton more work. But, I was having fun, so I rolled with it.

After that, I decided to rework the prologue's dialog because it equally awful. It was annoyingly brief and had a significantly different tone than the rest of the game. However, I was having trouble rewording it without it end up verbose as hell. So, a month ago, I pulled out my wacom tablet and started drawing up an intro…slideshow….trailer? Whatever it was, I finished it a few days ago, dumped it onto youtube, and continued on devving……..while having a new thought gnawing at my brain. I just spent a month and a half drawing this admittedly cool looking intro slideshow…and then looking at the rest of the graphics being just…bad. Not to mention I still had the stolen art for the sake of “legacy.” And then that excuse slowly stopped flying with me as it occurred to me how much had changed.

So, that brings me to my issue now. As it is, I'm staggeringly close to being good and proper done. There's still a fair bit of work, true, but it's more the sand and polish kind of work. And, then I think about those stolen graphics. And I'm thinking, yeah, I need to rectify that so they're not freaking stolen graphics. And as I think about that, I realize the ones that weren't stolen but still legacy are fairly amateur. So, I might as well update those as well, right? And if I'm updating all of those, I might as well add color to the thing since I cheated and used greyscale in the intro. Maybe add some shades of grey to them so it's not either black or white? Or, hell, go nuts and make them actually color? And thus render all the work I'd done for the intro moot cuz that was all b&g&w. But, if I did that then I could better distinguish the harder variants of the whopping 9 basic enemies through the game. And while I'm doing that I……………………

As you can see, the rabbit hole runs deep….. For a while now I've been going through this back and forth whether to stick with what I have, or to commit and spend more time and probably once again burn out and not finish it. So, I've decided that enough is enough and I need to make a decision before I proceed further on any other project. Yet, I'm at a cross roads and having trouble deciding as I find I'm talking myself out of AND into both sides of the coin. So, looking for some fellow gamedev advice. Has anyone else dealt with a similar situation? If so, how did you resolve it?

TL;DR: Should I just finish the game I have despite the warts and try to steer clear of the feature creep….or should I dive in head first and truly make the game “better” even if I'm diving into the shallow end and will probably never finish?

Thanks!