The most depressing thing about having a hobby project is that everything has precedence
over it. And I mean EVERYTHING. You'll only have time to work on your hobby project if
real life doesn't get in the way, and the older you are, the busier you get, so real life
pretty much BECOMES your life, especially when you're trying to balance your job with
your family responsabilities. After a few years of commitments, duties and compromises,
you get to the point where you spend precious minutes of your time reminiscing about your
teenage years, when you still lived with your parents and had much more free time on your
hands. And then you look at your life in the present day, and wonder if you'll survive
the stress long enough to make it to retirement, where you're likely to have more free
time again. In theory anyway.
Trying to get any hobby work done when you're in your thirties is like walking into your
boss' office and telling him that you need some time off. If your boss says no, there's
not much you can do except moan about it and get back to work. If he says yes, you better
enjoy it while you can, because you know you'll be paying for it later, one way or
another. Real life is your boss, and trying to shirk your responsabilities is almost
always a bad idea that you end up regretting later. That's the way our universe works,
and that's why we rarely hesitate to put our hobbies on hold when we have various duties
to attend to.
I believe hobbies are what keep us from turning into zombies. They are food for the soul,
activities that we look forward to, work that we actually want to do without a paycheck
because the end result of the chosen hobby is a reward in itself. However, hobbies can
also be a source of stress: We feel the sheer stress of unhappiness when we can't pursue
our hobbies because real life keeps getting in the way, and we also feel stress when the
hobby in question becomes so tedious that it's hardly fun anymore.
In that sense, working on homebrew video games is perhaps the hardest hobby of all,
because it usually involves months of tedious coding, testing and debugging. Homebrew
authors also feel pressure from people who anxiously await the fruits of their labours,
because releasing a new game is always a fun time (for both the author and the gamers who
play the "finished product") that serves as reward for all the time and effort invested
into the game. So when progress is slow it can be profoundly annoying because it eats
away at you a little more each day, and it makes the work even more of a burden because
the pressure to get the game done is like a dark cloud that hangs constantly over your
head. Team projects are even worse because deadlines have a way of turning into empty
promises made by people who underestimate the workload and overestimate their available
free time, and much angst ensues for all the people involved.
If you've been following the world of homebrew gaming these past few years, everything
I've said above is nothing new to you. You've heard it all before, and so have I. Opcode
Games doesn't escape this "hobby stress", and perhaps we even feel it a little bit more,
because we've released games in the past and our reputation for quality is already
established. So then, despite all of the above, I still feel the urge to ask: Why MUST
everything be so frickin' SLOW????
Of course, there's always a reason. For example, the Road Fighter box art displayed below
(in the Latest News section) was started in mid-March, and was finished in August. Why
did it take roughly 5 months to get a single box image done? Because our artist friends
Dale and Vu were swamped with work during the summer. They did a terrific job, and it was
well worth the wait of course, but taking these long delays into account, I can't help
wondering how many new titles Opcode Games could realistically hope to release on a
yearly basis.
When I came onboard as executive producer, the plan was to speed up the game release
rate. But I've learned that having someone to keep things moving along is no guarantee
that things will actually get done. Our current situation illustrates this rather well:
Assuming Road Fighter gets released later this year as planned, and Pac-Man Collection
gets released within the first couple of months of 2008, the next project on our list
will likely be Konami Sports Collection, which in essence is a collection of seven MSX
ports crammed into one ColecoVision MegaCart. Eduardo is confident that he will get it
done, and I share his confidence from a purely technical standpoint, but how long is it
going to take? I'll be honest here and say I wouldn't expect KSC to be released before
October 2008.
Eduardo himself will probably raise an eyebrow at that last statement, and tell me that
cramming those seven games into the MegaCart will not be as hard as it is for Pac-Man
Collection, and that he can get it done sooner than that. My response: Perhaps you can,
Eduardo, but take a look at the last couple of years, and you'll see that your track
record for getting software done is nothing to brag about. Also, work on KSC's box and
manual hasn't even begun yet, we'll need to purchase more MegaCart PCBs, etc. etc.
And that brings me back to my earlier point: Real life is our boss. Eduardo went through
all sorts of things these past twelve months, things which kept him from working on his
Opcode projects. You might say there's no reason to believe that 2008 will be as much of
an ordeal as 2007 has been, and you may be right, but I expect that next year will bring
its own share of unforseen problems, distractions, delays, and burdens. Also, I've noticed
that summer is never a good time for homebrew development: The more you do to make the
most out of your summer, the less free time you have for your hobbies.
Perhaps Opcode Games will never be able to release more than one game per year (or
perhaps two, if we really decide to pull out all the stops) but there's a lesson to
learn in all of this: You can't let a hobby become too elaborate, or else it eats away
your personal happiness. If it was solely up to me, I would remove most of the games
listed in the "Projects" section of the sidebar of this web site, and leave just the
ones that are close to actual completion. Perhaps then our future projects would become
less of a burden for us...
LATEST NEWS
As I mentionned in the text above, Dale and Vu came through for us and I'm proud to
present the fruits of their labours:
Pretty darn cool, wouldn't you say? As for the actual software, Eduardo still needs to
put in a pause feature, and he also wants to implement a sprite flicker routine, because
the original MSX game doesn't have one and that becomes a problem when you play in
"hard mode" (a.k.a. "Game B") when too many cars are on-screen at once.
As I'm writing this, I haven't heard from Eduardo in a while, so I don't know if
additional progress has been made on Road Fighter, but I'm hoping the game will go into
beta-testing in September, and while that is being done, Eduardo will resume working on
Pac-Man Collection for the next few months. I really hope he can finish PMC's software
before Christmas. If he doesn't, well, I'll start calling him "Eduardo Too Mellow". :-P
Oh, and for those who were worried that I might quit, rest assured I'll stick around
for a while longer. The impending release of Road Fighter is quite enough to keep me
happy. For now anyway. ;-)
