Dance like nobody is watching

Posted Mon 3 May, 2021.

I have released another of my older games as open source, this time for the Amstrad CPC: The Return of Traxtor.

The Return of Traxtor (CPC) on GitHub

Previously I released Castaway for the ZX Spectrum 48k. Both games are part of my first batch of "good enough" games (produced late 2015 and early 2016). I've improved my skills since then, but those games are from a time when I started to feel that my production was "OK".

What has surprised me most is that I didn't think too much about it: a quick read, clean up anything too ugly (I removed a couple of useless comments), write a README, test that it still builds, ... and things like that. And then I got a bit anxious because of the release, just to realise that... nothing changes.

It is true that some less experienced gamedevs have told me that they are excited about the release, and that they will check the code (I know I have learnt a lot reading others' source code), but in reality that the source code is available doesn't change how fun the game is, or my ability to make new games. There's no secret sauce in my code I'm afraid.

I suspect that there is a bit of "impostor syndrome", specially because I have always been very thorough when learning new stuff and in gamedev, and specially 8-bit systems, the important bit is the results and not that much doing things "the right way(tm)". Often I don't even know what is the right way! So there's always that feeling of not knowing what I'm doing, if this code that I'm writing should be written in a different way, but at the end the result is that it works (most of the time, at least).

But I guess there's always that fear to be criticised, or judged by your peers, or just to not be good enough. Which is total non-sense!

I'm still thinking about it, but I suspect that I should release the source code of all my games shortly after the binary release (perhaps once the game is "stable", or at least all known bugs are fixed). It wouldn't make any difference for me or the game itself, but perhaps it could help or inspire other people to make new games.

For now I'm going to keep looking to my old catalogue that may have sufficient quality to be released as open source, and moving forward, I'll try that my new projects are in a state that is worth releasing publicly. Sometimes I may be slower, but overall the result should be better as well. I mean, not that writing code that can't embarrass you is that hard, isn't it?

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