SIDE PROJECTS:

Most of the time I'll just run into useable music that could be a soundtrack for a game and put it in a folder somewhere as "game to make" I'll sometimes come up with title/concept ideas or a mood board. To me these are the side projects themselves, I don't actually make a game for them or anything really tangible. Just something to daydream about and to have some available ideas on the shelf somewhere. Though ultimately I find music an instant validation in whether I think the vibe of the game can be created.

I'd like to participate in something like this one day: https://itch.io/jam/i-wasnt-gonna-make-this-anyway-jam

I try to restrain myself from side projects as the Legion Saga remake started as a side project and ballooned into my main project now.

However, I don't always have the motivation to push through the less glamorous parts of development but I don't want to ruin my streak by not doing development stuff. That has caused me to play around with some side ideas... I'd like to keep one side on the back burner for this reason currently I actually have two... The Twilight Blade and Radiant Edge... *shifty eyes* So point being it isn't easy to just set aside an idea completely!

On a related note I often join game jams to procrastinate on them by working on my main project! So Game Dev will find a way!

I usually only work on one game project at a time, sometimes ill make some short films on the side but when you have a lot of things on the go none of them end up going. I would like to start making small Game Maker games in between Shooty and the Catfish episodes going forward since I plan on leaving RPGM once im done with the series.

So, with 15+ years of gammak under my belt, my opinion on this is that side projects are a lie. Every side project I have ever started has either monopolized my interest and attention to the point where it replaced my main project, or just gradually withered on the vine from being ignored. And yes, the implication of that is that my displaced "main" projects wind up dying on the vine from being ignored. I think more than half of the "main" project I've ever had were side projects at first.

I try to do what LockeZ described I guess I just lack the discipline. The folder with the games I've started since returning to this hobby/scene last Spring is called "I Have A Compulsion". There are 6 theoretically active projects in there, but I have 7 theoretically active projects total: my "main" project, The Staircase, lives outside the compulsion folder. Of these projects, two are already finished, one is the one I'm working on now, and the remaining four (including my "main" project that I'm not working on at all because I'm working on my "side" project) will most likely never be finished. The folder is called what it's called because I think I literally have a compulsion to start new game projects.

To me, the first 24-48 hours of work on an RM project are pure joy, and not too far after that point, it becomes pure unpaid labor. So it's clear it's the "new project joy" that I'm addicted to, so to speak. But with 4 projects that will almost certainly never be finished, the effort put in to make them is at least mostly wasted (it's never a complete waste of effort, I find, because even now, as someone who's been doing RPG Maker longer than some of the people doing RPG Maker nowadays have been alive, I'm still constantly learning things).

Anyway, with my compulsion and general lack of discipline, I think the best I can thing I can do is to keep myself mono-maniacally on one project at a time in the hopes of actually one day finishing it.

I had two side projects at all during my whole RM-life. I canceled one of them and the other one is on hiatus since I don't know exactly when. That said, I don't think I was so sucessful having side projects.