Finding a Reason To Keep Designing

Twice already.

Don't give up.
But don't force yourself.
And don't force others if they don't want to.

A pause from time to time helps a lot!

If your game design is not fun for others (because the feedback is mèèèèh!) Perhaps they can tell you, why?

The biggest thing to remember, which can an times be the hardest to stick to, is that this is a creative expression of your passion for the hobby of gaming. You love the genre enough to want to contribute to it, and that's a special thing! As for your specific concerns...

1. Everyone, even the "big guys" like Lang, Launius, Borg, etc. lose interest in some of their designs and shelve them for the future, or sometimes indefinitely. It's part of any creative endeavor; if you have lots of ideas, some crystallize faster than others, be it due to your personal excitement for the game, the scope of what you're trying to achieve, how the industry is moving, or any number of other factors. The important thing is to recognize those ideas that really excite you enough to push you through the considerable time and effort to make the idea a reality. Not every idea needs to get past that initial spark; indeed several maybe shouldn't...that's entirely up to you!

Prototyping is a big part of design, and you've got to learn to love it if you ever hope to bring your ideas into the world. It's the part that most excites me personally, as it means the game has come far enough from my scribbles and notes to try and play those ideas through. I also love making things in general and have been building toy prototypes in my career as a professional toy designer for that past 15 years, so I'm predisposed to this phase of game design, among others. It all goes back to choosing the right idea to pursue, as I can see the prototyping process becoming a real slog if the idea of getting to play through your ideas doesn't absolutely thrill you.

Lastly if your game group isn't into testing your prototypes, it may be because you yourself isn't selling the experience enough? You're overall tone here is a bit defeated, like you're not sure you really want to be doing this. No one will ever be as excited about your games as you should be, so you really need to sell it, even if you're dealing with people you've known for years. That familiarity may also make it easier for your group to say "naw, let's just play a "real" game." You've got to press them with your enthusiasm, selling them on why they'll like your game, prove to them you've put the time into making sure the game is at least mostly playable (playing the game yourself for hours on end to test), how being part of the testing process let's the exercise their creativity as well, how awesome of friends they'll be for helping you pursue your dream! If none of that works, try your FLGS and set up a session, maybe talk to them about creating a "Designer Day" where you and other designers can test prototypes. Set up a Meetup group for others like you who have designs and can mutually benefit from getting together...simply put there are many options beyond your group to keep the fire of creativity alive within you!

PS 10-20 hours to go from idea to prototype is really not much time at all, unless the game is very simple or derivative of another game. Most games take hundreds of hours to reach a final stage...don't let the time I rated put you off, rather just try and focus those hours towards ideas you're most passionate about...then the hours slip by like minutes!

Ok so I can think of three possibilities why this would be the case:

1 your games aren't that good

2 you're bad at explaining why your games are good

3 they're not interested in doing playtesting

Now, assuming #1 and #2 are false (I can't judge that without knowing your game or your pitch better), let's look at #3 some more.

Playtesting is work. It's not just playing a game, it's playing an incomplete game that has errors in and is not feature-complete. It involves the extra work of giving feedback, identifying problems, trying to make suggestion. This makes the experience of playtesting lower-fun and higher-stress than playing.

If players aren't into doing this favour for you then yes you can offers incentives to give the experience added value for the players. But some players really just don't want to playtest, they don't enjoy it and no amount of beer and pizza is going to convince them to do it - they wont have fun, whether they have that or not. They want to play a game and have fun, not do work for you.

Try to find extra playtesters, or get on tabletopia so you can do remote playtesting.

This could also mean that they don't find the appearance engaging. Presentation has a big impact on how easy a game is to understand and play so games needs to be very clear in appearance. If your design isn't intuitive and clear it can make it more tiresome to try to play. So I wouldn't dismiss this problem as something you can't improve on.

Even if it is just that they don't like the look of it, you don't need to invest in commissions or do a ton of work on design to make it look a bit nicer. There are loads of sources for free images or icons online that can be used just to make a nicer prototype. If making it look better helps get players to playtest your game, and you're not making progress because you haven't done that, then the way of making progress is to do it.

This all goes more for hard games. I think there's a bit of exponential growth in how much work goes into playtesting compared to how complex the game is.

It's also possible that you underestimate the complexity level because you're the designer. It's hard to know how complex a game is from a new player perspective when you know everything back to front.

Yeah that should be a given.

Focus on what got you into game designing in the first play. For the love of competition? For the love of bluffing or bartering? For the love of building with minimum resources or maximum resources but have strategy to figure out how much you need to build by starting with little income at the beginning of the game or however the story is told for the players.

For the love of a face to face communication across the table to see the reaction of your movement of a card, token, chit, battalion on the attack or defense.

We all get over whelmed of the information we try to put into our game projects to stream line the rules, movements , the strategy, the playtesting, artwork, the box designs and so forth and so forth.

Then we get to the point where during the game production, playtesting etc we feel depressed or blah because we think as game designers or game producers the thought, " What have I got myself into? Its taken so long to create and develope. Will it be good to show off my potential as a creator? Will I or the game be enjoyable in the long run even if it does well in playtesting or being bought from store shelves or from online retail?"

That was an example of situations.
Well. Some are true statements.

What I do. I call friends or are into the same hobbies I am. Explaining to them the same situations.

They tell me,"Dude, look at all of the progress you have accomplished. It shows. Keep on going."

So find support from friends and family other than your playtesters or in such groups like bgdf.

Don't give up. Do what you love. Find the source of your moment that gave you the bite into creating what you have created.

If your overwhelmed or exhausted. Take a day or two off from game designing. Refresh your creativity. Come back to the project. When you take time off , you re-energize your thought process of your project from a different perspective.

Hope this helps you all out.

Stormy.

If one of the issues is the difficulty of getting face-to-face playtesters, perhaps you should explore some of the online options?

I have had mixed success, but so far I have achieved more online than offline. I am running two "play-by-email" games of my own game at the moment - one of them uses Slack rather than traditional email, and the other uses a mix of Google Groups and email. It has required a lot of work on my part, but it has been very valuable overall, leading to significant rule changes. If anyone wanted to go via this route, I would recommend Slack over email.

I also have a mod in Tabletop Simulator (TTS) and have taught the game to a few people that way, getting useful feedback. I now have a pool of people who know how to play. There are always people online looking for TTS games - check out The Red Dice, which is a TTS gaming club that mostly gets together on Discord to play TTS. ( http://thereddice.enjin.com/forum ) We are about to put aside time for a full online game on Tabletop Simulator, but that has been difficult to get going - mostly because of my own busy schedule rather than lack of willing players. If my weekends were truly free, I think I could get in one or two games per week.

My game is way too complex for PnP, so that's not an option I am afraid.

I started with some fairly crappy physical prototypes, but the opportunities to actually playtest with them seemed limited. Now that I have played it a bit online, I am ready to get a couple of decent-looking physical prototypes made and take one to my local gaming groups. I'll probably wait to see how the current "email" games turn out before doing that though.

One thing I found very useful was making a 2D Java implementation. In some ways I prefer it to TTS (which is a 3D physics engine), but the 2D version lacks multiplayer support. I have used the 2D Java version to playtest face-to-face while travelling on a train, and used it extensively to self-playtest. I am now using it to provide visuals for my "email" games. Obviously, that requires some coding skills, so it is not an option for everyone. If your game is simple enough, though, a quick 2D digital prototype would be easy to put together. A TTS mod would be easier to create, but would not enforce any game logic. You don't need any coding skills to get a TTS mod up and running, so I think it is a good option for game designers with limited access to enthusiastic testers in the physical domain.

I often reach a point of near-despair in most creative projects of reasonable size that I tackle. When this happens, my wife usually reminds me that every half-finished project looks bad, and it will be fine when I finish. She's usually right. And as others have said, if it isn't fun, put it to one side until you feel like working on it again.

What I have found as my hobby time has become more limited is that it is worth deliberately tackling smaller projects because I am more likely to be able to get them done in a reasonable time period, so they are less intimidating. With games this works particularly well, because not only does prototyping it take less time, but people are usually much more willing to spend 10-15 minutes testing a microgame than 1-2 hours testing a full-size game. And smallness and simplicity do not necessarily mean a lack of depth; I think they offer a way to learn to design depth into a game in an economical fashion. It's like writing a short story rather than a novel.

I find that my ideas always start complicated, filled with the types of mechanics I like in games. From there, the best thing to do is find the one thing the design does really well, and shave off everything else that doesn't promote that thing. Subtraction is your best friend, as it allows your game's mechanics to breathe. If you find yourself adding to your designs to make them better, this usually muddles the waters and hides the essence. This means hacking off bits you conceptually like in order for the real game to reveal itself, which can make your game end up in a place far different from where you started from. But that's okay and way preferable to forcing something into the design that has no place being there.

I'd guess that for many designers, it's more fun to come up with new stuff than to refine older stuff. And the farther into the refinement you go (say, late playtesting) the more it's drudgery.

Playtesting should NOT be like work, because the designer ought to get the game into decent shape before inflicting it on anyone else. How often do you play your games solo before persuading your group to play? Several times at a minimum, I hope. If not, if you haven't soloed it at all, then no wonder they don't want to play it again, it's just a broken game when first played.

And if you don't want to play it solo, why would you think anyone else would want to play it?