I've been working on a roguelike for, I think, about 14 years now. It's gone through several rewrites, different languages, different UIs, and it's never come close to being done. These days, I tend to think of it more as a garden: something for me to putter around in but not as much a product (though I would love to get it to a point where other people can play it).
I really like the garden analogy. It's something I usually feel obscurely guilty about just puttering, but I probably shouldn't. Personal projects are supposed to be a hobby, not an obligation.
You are the GM of a team. You play against 31 other players in a professional league. You sign free agents, draft players, deal with injuries, choose plays for your team to run, when you want. Every real day, is a game "week" so you play a game a day, unless it's the offseason.
You have a salary cap you have to deal with. Trade with other human players. Try to win the Championship.
A season lasts a real time month from start to finish. The players are all fake, they grow up. They make pro bowls, and try to make the hall of fame.
We have leagues that have run over 70 seasons at this point.
You are correct. There is no visualization for what happens, but there are summaries (box score) and play by play data.. long text file with lots of details for hardcore fans.
If you're not a huge football fan, it will be an over complicated mess to you, in all honesty.
It's a hardcore game. I've been trying to make it easier, but given the difficulties in the engine (vb6 and classic asp), it's been difficult to create a structure that makes sense. Plus as a hardcore fan, I have a lot of blindness on how to make it easier.
I really relate to everything he said in his documentary. Do you rewrite tons of work? Do you re platform? Tons of issues.
It was started in 2004, so that's a lot of old crud and bad coding.
The community helps some times with javascript plugins, and sometimes full windows utilities to make all the data easier to take in, but it's still a mess.
I need to figure out ultimately what I want to do with it, but it's a fun game, a good premise, there are other competitors with similar challenges. I don't know... :)
I wonder if all developers could be roughly split into two groups: those who have lots of small initial projects and those who have mostly one big project (also unfinished but with more progress).
I'd put all people, including non-developers, into two groups. Those who finish their side projects and those who don't. The size of the first group is very, very small.
You must be careful about that distinction - some projects are never "finished". Especially in the case of code, where the traditional definition means less "complete" and more "unsupported and unmaintained", i.e. analogous to "dead".
Doesn't that tie to his point about ambition? People with side projects with huge ambitious goals don't complete them, because the goals are so large.
My side project is a fully realistic nfl simulation that mirrors the exact details of a real football game. The ambition is what never makes it "complete". I have a functional, effective football game. But is it a true accurate simulation? no. Is that even possible? Probably not.
