How to come back from a failed project?

Hi guys,

It has been a while since i have been involved in the RPG Maker community & lately i have been spending a lot of time thinking about my game & all of the time and resources i have put into trying to make my dream game a reality. I have been working on one specific game for a few years, the game has had drastic alterations as the story & mechanics evolved and i re-started several times as i narrowed in on the fact that i am only a talented artist and need significant help in the programming aspect of the game. I taught myself digital art just to create a large amount of custom content for my game which i used to sell myself and the idea of my game to attract other talented RPG maker users to help make my game a reality. I was lucky to find a highly talented programmer who was capable of creating many custom scripts and functions to the game and combat system, unfortunately i knew going in that my programmer would be starting his career as a doctor and was on time constraints to finish his end of the project. As wish most things in gaming timelines tend to not be met and my programmer tried to set myself and our writer up to finish the project, however neither of us was ever able to understand the complex scripts or event calls that he used and after a few months of staring at the game & breaking it every time we moved something came to the realization that we can not finish.

It was a horrible feeling knowing that i spent years working towards all-inning this attempt at the project & realizing that it will never move past a certain point of completion, we had 80% of the game evented along with our combat and quest system & all story necessary maps, the game was probably a few months from being in an early alpha state. I literally put my wacom tablet away for over a year i was so disappointed at not being able to finish & frustrated at myself for not being able to understand the programming aspects of rpg maker (some might say it is easy, but everyone's brain works differently). Last night i logged into deviant art and saw that i am still pretty popular on there for my RPG maker content despite not having logged on in over a year, it got me thinking about my project again and how i miss doing the art work, however i am still struggling with coming back from my failed project, i am looking for some advice from people who have had their game making dreams crushed and stuck it through on what to do?

I apologize for the wall of text....

I feel like i have a few options perhaps some people can offer me more suggestions...

-Scrap all the code in my game & setup the maps & graphics in a blank project and begin looking for a new programmer who may not be as talented as my last & may or may not see the project to completion
-Cut my losses on the project and just look into using my assets on a new fresh IP
-Stick to what i am good at and open source my tiles to the community and just add to the tile-set when i feel like doing art or get a request for certain add ons.

What i do not want to do is let all the files i have rot in internet obscurity as they can definitely be utilized by someone to create something amazing...

Help me out with some advice!!

link to my custom tiles if anyone is interested: https://www.deviantart.com/champgaming/gallery/

Make what you want to make! Destroying what you have is the worst Idea ever. EVER!
It seems as your maps are looking really good, and I am not sure how complex you want your games to be, but mostly combat systems are really important to be original. I couldn't make up what was and wasn't finished by your old Dev yet, but searching for a new one would definitly work if your custom plugins and scripts don't work yet!

TLDR: Never Give up! Keep going and Make it the best you can!

all projects are failed ones until proven otherwise.
if you keep working on it, it doesn't matter if it takes you longer than expected to finish it.

if that happens, *then* at the next project you make, you'll factor the working time in the projection.

Thanks for commenting back guys! Sorry to hear you had it happen twice Jake...The words of encouragement are definitely helpful & i am sure that you are right about setting the bar very high, i am very detail oriented and have very high expectations of myself so it never motivated to make a simple project. It is great that you are learning coding!! I do not have the brain power for that stuff, but i can do killer art =)

Let me tell you a story of my own project wich is currently still unfinished and I don't have even single playable map...

Warrning! Long text ahead!

My project started 15th February 2017 and first three months was learning basics and some more advanced tricks in RMMV. I started making notes in paper notebook (PC can fail and crash data). When I analysed how RPG Maker MV works and what are default mechanics I started making
research how can I extend his possibilities and I found plugins by - IHMO - two best plugin devs, Yanfly and SomeRandomDude.

I Took what I needed the most from them and combined into single game engine - you may say even - a framework. When this was done It was time to design characters and story plot / twists. This wasn't too hard to come up with story, since in my real life a lots of things (weird and common) happens. So I took a piece from "here" and "there" mixing into one.

Now I have a tool to make a game and story to tell. So I planned my day that I could spend approx 2h - 3h per day for making my game playable... Another 4 months was strict map making - giving them a living community - and eventing with story. I was really happy when first Act was complete and ready to publish, after few days I decided to fix minor bugs in maps to avoid problems with getting to another locations due errors in my events.

When all was completed and few of my friends played Act 1 and they said "there were no problems with maps" and they reached to conclusion of Act 1 I placed playable demo here on forum...

No one downloaded it... No one wrote review... It took me two days to get back to normal and I took a long vacation from RMMV...
Accidently I found interviews with professional and experienced game developers and all of them says the same thing...
Quoting:

Several months passed and I opened again my project and simply played through. I opened my notes and scratch few things, updated remains and added another things, but there was so much stuff that basicly I had to start over again... As @JazzGotBlues said - Destroying what you have is the worst Idea ever. EVER! - Right! Absolutely right, but in my case there were no other choice...

Concluding. Game developing is not just code, images and story, game developing is also overcoming weaknesses, both as your own and game engine you are using, searching for best ideas and implement them, resigning from one thing to another and finally assembling them into fully pledged product... In other words it's like making a dinner, you won't make spaggethi without pasta or sause. Finally... If your project fails, analyse it, check where it failed, fix that and try again, and so on and so on, until you are successfull or simply give up, because it also may happen. There is also one very important thing to remember I forgot to mension somewhere in the middle of my thoughts, don't overdo it in other way, because you may loose something more important than spent time in game dev - I don't believe i say it - a real life, because no matter how though it may be, life still is beautifull and it's not worth loosing it on sitting with intensive game making.

Now I just thought, maybe start with something simple, short RPG projects, a stories/games that you can make in few days, if they will be successful you may start planning something big (why I didn't come up with that earlier?...)

The problem lies with trying to make your dream game from the get go. It has been advised, especially for beginners, to never do that.

Your second mistake- starting over. You'll never finish if you continue to start again.

My advice: Learn RPGMAKER. Do and follow tutorials. Get comfortable with the software. Do the tutorials again. When you learn the basics, learn other things. Do parallax mapping, learn how to Script and learn about Plugins.

When you're ready, then make your game.

I'm making a game off a tutorial. It's shaping up quite well. It's not even close to what it was before. I wish that I could move some code, but who cares.

@richter_h <-- this guy had revived the project after being crushed hard and went hiatus for about one year.
His motivation to set his foot back on the project was simple. He searched his game title on google, and asked: "Do I dare to leave this project to lie in ruin?". After all, the search result was full of his game.

Now, instead of trying to be famous and make a great game ever, he just wants to finish the project.

You make it sound worse than it really is. You hit a roadblock, left your project for a bit, and now want to get back in. It happens to many people. That's quite different from your dreams being crushed.

Why would you even consider scrapping all the code and starting over? You said yourself, you're about 80% of the way there. Not understanding a few script calls is no reason to scrap them and start over. Unless they're really, really bad, and nobody can tell you that except someone who knows how to code.

Just find a programmer who can understand what's been done, and either guide you on how to use the scripts, or change them to make them easier to use.

I'm not sure if you are taking a shot at me here or not...And i think you are thinking of me in the wrong light, i definitely have some decisions to make in the coming weeks but i do think it would be a shame to let my custom tileset rot in internet obscurity if i decide to call it quits knowing that there are others who are working hard on their games and would love to have access to these files...

And yes i do want to finish my game....there is nothing wrong with aiming for completion, i think to anyone who has followed my project casually they can tell i put extreme care and attention to detail into my side of the work.

This is all great and encouraging...My thought with scrapping the code was that i am not capable of that level of work in the RPG Maker engine i was able to attract some pretty talented people to work with because art skills are in high demand & the complexity of the calls are well past what i could ever understand...so i was deciding if i needed to re-imagine my game in a form that was within my capabilities.

Sounds like a good opportunity to offer a trade commission where you can offer your artistic skills in return for a coder who can make the scripts do what you need them to do. Once the scripts are reconciled and you're capable of using them, you'll have the route you need to get to 100% completion, right?

That's a possibility, but I'd honestly do it as a last resort.

The scripts were made according to how you want the game to run. What level of work ARE you capable of, and how much of your vision would you have to sacrifice if you went down this path?

See if you can find a programmer to just take a look at these scripts and see how complex they are. See if they can alter them so they're easier for you to use, without changing their functionality too much. Heck, zip up your project, load it up to dropbox, and send me a link via PM with some information about the scripts and what you find hard about them - anything your programmer sent to you as instructions. I'll take a look at them for you.

Are all of your custom scripts done by just this one programmer? Or do you have a mix of others in there as well, with him just doing the stuff that you couldn't find elsewhere?

wow shaz! That is a super kind offer bro! I will be constructing a PM for you in the morning with all pertinent information, it was all done by one programmer and we made some pretty big changes to the combat system, which works very well in our tests, along with quest system, animated portraits & some other stuff.

Even if you can't find a programmer for what you need, do you think you have enough to put out a demo with a big "to be continued" at least? That's what rpgmakers used to do back in the early 2000s. Put out what they had and if people liked it, it might help drum up some help and encouragement to continue.

Honestly, I think I might be saying that only because I checked out your devart page, really liked your style, and want to see what you made...

Unfortunately it was probably a few months away from being able to start having a few people play test it an early alpha build, currently only the story mode works, as the combat system was completed but the encounters not yet added.

I was working with stridah here on that project and made most plugins that are being discussed here.
Most are usable and in need of documentation and/or UI jobs. Some aren't finished, and only work on the back end, completely lacking UI.

Should someone else take up the job, trying to make sense of things will probably be hard at first, I've worked on my own and didn't document much, as I was doing all the work in editor and scripting.
That means there's only the minimum of documentation, that mostly served as a reminder to myself.

I don't really have anything to add to the topic in general... I guess this post is just to say that, should someone want to finish the job in question, I'm available and will answer any questions to the best of my abilities.

I'll be replying to your pm shortly stridah.

Your dream isn't "crushed" until you publish it, only to find out that its getting mostly negative reviews on Steam or wherever. Pick it back up, get familiar with it again, and keep at it, as 80% is a lot to just throw away. If it's truly your "dream game," then it might be better to find another programmer (or take a month or so and learn the basics yourself) rather than ripping out all the custom stuff. Going in with minimal script customizations, especially for the battle system, is going to result in a rather bland, uninteresting product. Hardly suitable for a "dream game."

When everything fails, Start over new !!!
Use some of the memories and ideas of the First Project on this new project. That's what i would do.

PS : A Game is all about Inspiration and Motivation. You will never have the same inspiration or motivation of an old project, So might as well think of something new and start over new !!!

A project only ever fails when you give up on it, otherwise it just evolves.

That's my take on it anyway.