What Motivates my Game Development?

September 16th, 2026

Recently I've been putting some thought into what motivates me as a developer. Since the release of We Love Fish Tanks in May 2025, I haven't been able to pick a new project and stick to it for any substantial amount of time. It's been driving me kinda nuts.

Of course it all starts with an idea, and I'm in no short supply of those. It all started with my idea of making a super ambitious Animal Crossing style game that was actually a meta narrative with branching dialog paths, alternate endings, a customizable character, house, island, with a bunch of Persona-style social links. Sad to say, that one didn't quite pan out, as I'm just one guy, and a game like that would take a decade for me to make, on top of the fact that I don't care for writing dialog that much.

That said, I took the bones from that project that I'd already made and used parts of it to put together an entry for the GMTK game jam later that summer - this ended up being E.V.I.C.T, and it was pretty mid. Didn't even do that well in the game jam, but it was fun, relatively stressful, and proved to myself that I could make a different kind of game than We Love Fish Tanks.
Once I was done with that, I floundered some more, and my priorities moved elsewhere for a while. Software development, then trying to start a side hustle related to my field of work, then finding out a loved one had an incurable form of cancer, and no longer caring about anything, before promptly dropping everything I was working on. It's taken me most of the year to get to a point where I care enough to put effort into anything even remotely meaningful again. Thanks to everyone who's been here with me through this journey.

In the early part of the summer, I injured my knee to the point where I could barely walk after doing something stupid, of course. This put me in an even worse mood, but eventually forced me to start finding meaning in the things I could do still, like sitting at my computer and messing around.

Since then, my knee has gotten a lot better luckily, but I was able to mess around with a couple different game ideas without the pressure of the idea being "the one". I find it quite hard to put my all into something unproven, or something I don't seriously believe will succeed. I tried making an anthill colony simulation, to mixed results, mostly vibe coded because of my apathy, my work ethic and my understanding of the systems that would need to exist weren't quite there yet.
Naturally, I dropped the project. I thought it would be a cool thing to get working, but I don't think I'm there quite yet. That said, I did pick up the super ambitious Animal Crossing style game again, pared the scope way back, and now I'm considering making a spiritual successor to We Love Fish Tanks, with some overworld stuff and better context/room for expansion in the future.

Got way off track here. I think what motivates me when I'm developing games basically comes down to a few things.

1 - I need to believe working on it is worth doing, and the game has a chance of succeeding commercially and quality-wise
2 - Making MVP demos is boring to me, I'd rather work on the final thing right away. I know there are good reasons to do this, but I do not care
3 - A game coming into focus to the point where I can see how things will work when it's all done really excites me
4 - It has to look relatively good while I'm working on it. Making assets first, and then making them do stuff tends to work well for me, counter-intuitively
5 - Finally, I need to keep a tight scope, with enough feature novelty to keep it interesting - though usually working on different parts of the game does this for me (models, sprites, music, coding, planning, etc)

If this didn't partially inform you on what motivates an undiagnosed ADHD brain when developing games, then I'll eat a banana in the next 5-10 business years