Two days after switching back to my stacking chair, a $45 investment I dub, "The Taskmaster," I've an hour and a half of medium-intensity exercise and brain-numbing contemplation as to the nature of my procrastination to show for it. It seems to be working.

By the way, the result of said contemplation is remembering what it all comes down to: as the local shoe company would say, it's time to just do it. It deeper than selling shoes, it's a Zen understanding: dualism is an illusion, there is no second me pushing me to do something, there's just me choosing to do something or choosing not to. There's not even such a thing as a future - I'm either doing something, right now, or doing it does not exist in anything but my imagination.

A Broader Perspective Of Game Development

By and large, being a computer game developer - whether independent or on a larger scale - is being a specific kind of entertainer. If you don't enjoy creating art, it shouldn't have any appeal for you, and the products you create a likely to be completely soulless.

Of course, if you're programming, you're actually operating on a soulless backdrop: these over-glorified adding machines we call computers. Computer game developers have a fascinating pursuit: we seek to bring life where there is none. Perhaps this is what all artists do - it's not like a canvas has a rich inner life, either.

That said, if you're trying to decide on a game to play, right now you're being confronted with an extreme glut of mixed signals.

You've got the big-name game developers flaunting major brand names (or what they hope will be a major brand name) and they accomplish this by largely trying to conform to other people's expectations. Seriously, the reason why the big-name games seem like such shallow pieces of crap is because they were designed to please shallow people. The main reason they do this is because they're working with big, expensive technology and they're not going to recoup their investment if only a handful of people are so very hardcore as to want to play it. Unfortunately, having a big budget has little to do with whether or not the game will be good.

The ultimate problem with being a big-name game developer is that you're such a disposable commodity, your fate is to be used and dumped on the street. Hurray for Corporate America. A lot of people are wising up to this, so what they're doing is going into business for themselves. Examples of these people are in flash game portals or browser-based game creators. They're basically kids self-taught or fresh out of their gaming schools, existing in such numbers as to completely bury what indy developers used to be.

Then you've got me, on the opposite end of the big-name developer: a highfalutin, artsy-fartsy, arrogant son-of-a-bitch, who completely undermines capitalism in that he doesn't care if he makes a dime (though that would be nice), seems to be going solo on the grounds that socialization is hard, yet thinks he can make a better game than a big name developer out of 32x32 tiles and a whole lot of duct tape. He's right. (I said, completely biased.)

Of course, as in any scenario where you suggest something is either one thing or another, there will be so very many exceptions to the rule as to render the rule a complete fallacy which should be tossed out the window, spend some time as a public toilet, then burned and fired off into the sun. For example, some big-name developers seem to actually know how to make deep, satisfying games... they just seem to be an exception to the rule, and don't seem to stick around very long (probably because the hardcore alone can't fund them).

So, where are we?

We oft complain that our games might only be played by 2 players, on a high, unless you're riding the coat-tails of some popular IP to get people's attention. However, considering the sheer vast number of alternatives to play out there, is it really any wonder? It's bad enough that games are devalued to the point where you can play all you could want, for free.

Instead, I would say my goal is this: there's so much crap on the market right now that it's actually easier for me to create my own then to try to find the one game out there that does exactly what I want it to. As statistically probable as it is a game like that may exist, it's just that much more work to find.

This might seem like a lesser assignment but, if you ask me, this actually gives us a major advantage. The vast majority of developers out there are developing because they hope to make money out of it. Consequently, their games emerge as having the wrong motivation: they're machines to print money, not games. If you want to make a game because you want to have fun, then your game actually was developed under the right motivation.

When push comes to shove, isn't that what this is really all about? It doesn't matter if your game is played by 2 people. It doesn't matter if you're the only one that plays your game. Making your own game gives you the opportunity to truly, and finally, bring about a game that was created purely for the joy of being played.

If it's really that good, you might be surprised to discover, you've created something that other people want to be a part of - but don't be surprised if they never show up because, after all, finding your game against all the other noise out there is hard. You'd have better luck going to message boards and advertising... but that sort of misses the point. The point is that, so long as your intent is pure, you're developing the game to be awesome in and of itself, even if nobody plays it but you.

Right - I've ranted enough - time for that "just do it" thing I was talking about earlier.