Sunk Cost

Hello friends. I hope that today’s blog finds you happy and healthy and doing well. This week I wanted to talk a little bit about sunk cost fallacy.

So for the past several days, I’ve been trying to finish building out the rest of the map. I have it to a mostly functional state—no, I haven’t finished fixing that bug yet but I’ve noted it and I’ll come back to it later—and so I wanted to make progress on building out the rest of it functionally. And because I’m so much of an artist at heart, I decided to get working on the artwork!

Unfortunately, after spending about a half dozen hours working on the art, I decided I didn’t really love the direction I was going in. I didn’t like how things were matching up together and I didn’t like the vibe. (As I’m writing this now, I realize I should have worked on building out a prototype first with temporary assets and then switched them out later on, after I built out the functionality. But alas, I didn’t. And here we are.)

So. I have these assets that I spent quite a bit of time (a full work week almost) on and they don’t really work for my game. Should I try and salvage it and make it work? Or just toss it out? Sunk cost fallacy tells me I should just make it work and keep what I have. But honestly, I think that’s a terrible plan.

Just because we have sunk a ton of time and invested our time or money into something, that doesn’t mean we should continue to invest time, energy, or money into something that obviously isn’t working. That doesn’t mean that we should abandon at the first sign of difficulty. No, all things worth while take effort and investment. But at some point, I think it’s okay to realize that it’s time to let go. At some point, we have to realize that we are just “polishing a turd.” And we should be okay with abandoning it with no looking backward.

Since I’ve now entered a sort of creative block with what to do with the potion making station (again), I decided to just work on some bug fixes and I’ve also started working on character design!

Anyway, I hope that you have a good week this week. I hope to have some prototypes finished by the end of the week next week! (I'm going to build out the rest of the map using temporary assets and then just move on until I know what to do design wise.)

And remember, it’s okay to throw it out if it’s not working anymore.