Question to gamedevs: Do you play your own games for fun or only in the context of development?
Whenever I play my own games, I only see the flaws or compare them to better products.
Though I always wanted to also play my own games for fun, not just when I add a new feature, improvement or fix a bug.
How about you?
@dbdev I tried to do that after we released the PS4 port of Bus Sim 18.
However, I could not really enjoy it, for the same reasons you list. Knowing exactly what could still be improved, in some cases even knowing how to improve it, but not having the time to do that, is killing the fun...
So, in later projects I didn't even attempt it any more.
The project I am working on currently is quite different though, and I have lots of fun playing it. It cannot be played outside office hours though.
@soulsource Glad I'm not the only one. I guess for your second mentioned project, it is but also tied to work, so one will always think about what can be improved, I guess?
@dbdev Yes, but in this case I joined the project some month after development started, and I am not directly involved in the gameplay development, but rather on (server-) backend stuff and meta-progression.
I get to experience the regular gameplay more from a player's perspective than from a developer viewpoint.
@soulsource that sounds like a nice experience. 