Karl's Blog

Speaking of motivation:

 

The Motivation and Creativity Page

Awesome post!

 

When a programmer is inspired to add a cool feature or a creative interpretation to an Atari 2600 game, it really shows and the game shines when you play it -

 

Defender II is awesome but Defender shines with it's outrageous orange and blue building scene and colorful laser bursts instead of the mountain range from the arcade and the alternate greyscale palette, you can tell the programmer was inspired and feel the creativity playing the game.

Space Game is similarly inspiring, because it is different.

 

Video Chess is another awesome example - the 70's mood ring "endless screens of color" effect the programmers added coupled with a decent engine make the game shine.

Andrews recent excellent Chess game shows similar inspiration with the creative addition of "endless colorful language" and the atarivox peripheral.

 

Use of peripherals is inspiring on it's own because it conjures imagery of 300 baud modems, dot matrix printers and disc drives, and the expansion module. 

 

  

Personally i find the hardest time to keep motivation up is towards the last 80% of the game. The first initial part of game creation my motivation is at a full time high and all i want to do is get back to it. Around the middle adding features and more gameplay brings on waves of motivation. The end with ironing out bugs or adding features that will break the game can bring motivation levels down lol.

Yes, I feel motivation is easily depleted.  I blogged about this subject too a while back. I must have deleted it later. But the forum bot saved a record of the text if interested. See if this link works ...