My friend asked me exactly how many games I'm working on. Five. Five games that I've touched in the past month. I just realized how many that is and how far away from completion most of them are.

There's a point in making a game where all you have is an idea. There are probably several game ideas floating around in your head right now, some well-developed, some just a concept. The ideas don't really mean much until you make a prototype of the game, and that's where the fun lies. "How do I turn this idea into something playable?" "How do I make it fun for me to play?" "How can I do this thing that I've never done or seen before?" This part is interesting to me.

Adding menus and interfaces is not interesting to me. At all. There's isn't anything to learn from replacing programmer art with nicer sprites. I think the reason I have so many games in the works is that I really just don't want to spend time adding the art, so I don't give deadlines to artists. Also, I'd feel like a dick if I told some person on the internet that I only know via pms or skype to do something by a certain time, "or else." The only way I could follow up that ultimatum is to kick them from the project, and that just hurts my progress even more. Plus they're all nice people. So I give them a "whenever you want" attitude and move on to the next interesting game idea that pops into my head.

But with five projects I don't think I should really add any more. I want to, but then when I do get art, more projects will get delayed and more ideas will come up in the meantime. Writing down ideas for the future is counterproductive since that constantly reminds me of the fun that I could be having instead of making another menu.

Having a completed game does feel nice, despite all the crap that goes wrong behind the scenes. But I wish I could upload a prototype and have people rate the inventiveness of the concept or the execution rather than how good the artist is and how buggy the game isn't. Getting feedback from the forum is nice, but that's usually 3-5 people commenting rather than hundreds that could say something useful but never visit the reg lounge.

Most people probably don't want to play a game that doesn't even have a win/loss condition, but I think it's fun. The game itself may or may not be fun, but seeing a new game concept and trying to piece together the code behind it is fun for me.

And that is my excuse for being lazy.