Dev Diary #1 - Why in the hell are you building a VR game?
Welcome to the first installment of my dev diary series for Earf, a streetview-based VR game. This series won’t really follow a set format going forward, so you should expect a more free-flowing format. I do plan on touching on progress updates, sharing early gameplay sneak peeks, and occassionally doing deep dives on technical challenges that I’m dealing with as I go.
But first, the most common question I’ve heard from friends and family…
“Why in the hell are you building a VR game?” #
Because I want to. In other words, passion. And I think that we as technologists sometimes forget that that’s enough of a reason.
It’s so easy to fall into the endless loop in our industry of trying to come up with the perfect project to work on. The perfect idea that will change the world. Solve world hunger. Make yourself billions of dollars. Send ripple effects throughout the industry and forever change computing. I’ve been there, and it’s crippling to say the least. It’s hard to really go deep in a project or idea because you’re constantly self-evaluating it against standards that are simply unrealistic. Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish that people would openly and honestly say they are building a project just because it is interesting to them. That’s it. No other explanations needed. Let people judge.
And so this is where I find myself. I’ve explained countless times that yes, I know VR is a small market. Yes, this is not a VC-backable business. Yes, I do not have the skills and background match required to build a VR game. Yes, I realize I have no art background and that assets are king in game design. And finally yes, I very well may be wasting my time building a game when I could be working on something that matters.
But this matters to me. It is scratching an itch deep in my monkey brain, unlocking new learning opportunities I haven’t had before, and firing me up to build on a daily basis. And I’m having a blast building once again for the first time in months. I am building a game I wish existed in the world, and that’s it.
And if people don’t get that, then fuck ’em.