As I write this article, it’s December 2024. I wonder whether I should publish this article on my game studio blog or this one. I eventually decide to put it here, on my main (writing) website, because the article is very personal. I also decide to publish this article many months from now, as then it will make more sense and I will have time to reconsider its content.
Right now, I am almost done with all my game-related work for next year (2025). Just one major project remains: a collection of 5 boardgames around the same core. This project is Naivigation, which should be out by the time this article goes public.
I purposely left this Naivigation project for last, even though its planned release date is sooner than other (finished) projects. Why? Because I think it’s the strongest idea I ever had. It has the most potential for multiple games, it’s certainly the most playtested and accessible one, and I wanted to do it right. I also wanted to completely finish the “first batch” before the end of the year, because it just feels nice to have a clean slate at the start of 2025.
But I am struggling. I have been struggling for a while. Despite having basically all of December to make this thing, progress happened at a glacial pace, and I still had to rush a lot of things.
With all my previous board games, I could adopt a mind-set of imperfection. I knew they’d just be free print-n-play games. I knew that, perhaps, nobody would ever see or play them. This allowed me to just make a lot of stuff “as well as I could”, and that was that. I just wanted to get the idea out and to the people. Which is, for example, why I was “fine” with using generative AI for graphics.
Now I’ve made over a hundred board games. The quality has gone up, the size has gone up, and the amount of work per game has become massive. I’ve moved from amateur to professional, from “maybe this is fun I dunno” to “this is a good-looking solid game you will enjoy”, and it has taken years to make all that. And still … my situation hasn’t changed compared to ~5 years ago.
I still don’t earn a single penny on all that work, not even indirectly (such as “name recognition” or fans buying other works of mine). The only reason I’m not bleeding money is because I’ve always been extremely minimalist and smart about how I run these websites/projects. This obviously isn’t sustainable and removes any possible external motivation.
I still have terrible hardware and working conditions, mostly as a result of the previous point mentioned. I can’t draw any illustrations with a high resolution or lots of detail, for my computer would crash. I can’t hire other people because I lack the money. I can’t even showcase my games or get anyone to publish them, as that requires impossible investments too.
Because I am also still not able to get any joy out of anything. I’ve talked about this before, so I won’t go in-depth again, but the fact is that I’ve basically been living on discipline and good mental habits since I was 12 years old. I never gave up and tried a lot, but any feeling of “I want to do this” or “I enjoy this” is completely alien to me now. I can’t market or sell my games because I don’t believe in them, I am not passionate about them, I don’t even want to play them myself.
From an outward perspective, nothing has changed or progressed, but I now spend 100x the time and effort on board games compared to 5 years ago. This is demotivating. The work becomes repetitive without any clear path towards change or evolution. I was able to do it for years by telling myself that every project made me a better illustrator/designer/coder/etcetera, but I’ve hit the ceiling of that promise because of the reasons listed above.
All of this became abundantly clear when I worked on Naivigation.
The graphics are a mess. Half of it is manually drawn. Half of it is AI generated. It doesn’t really mesh. But I simply can’t do it all manually, nor do I want to do it all using AI.
The code is a mess. On the one hand, I have the experience and knowledge to write clean code that could be reused across all the games. I think 50%-75% of the code for this project is very professional and usable in a real physical production of the game. On the other hand, when you feel absolutely no motivation for a huge ambitious undertaking as this, you’re going to take a lot of ugly shortcuts just to get it done.
It took countless hours to create the 5 “big” Naivigation games. Many many days that I forced myself to take the next few steps, while more fruitful ideas and projects had to be shoved aside. And for what? For a mess!
The project kind of floats between two worlds. On the one hand, corners were cut and it’s more of a “prototype”. On the other hand, many parts are professional and polished and could be used immediately if the game was printed/published. Half of the art is manual work, consistent in style, colors, everything. Half of it is whatever nonsense the AI gave me before my free credits ran out.
But as you probably know, floating between two ideas is never ideal :p It means you don’t really accomplish either. It means you waste a lot of time creating an inferior product, compared to if you just chose one approach and stuck to it.
I had to change my approach. I needed to rethink what I was doing, instead of barreling into 2025 making the same mistakes every day.
And so I decided.
The board games on Pandaqi are never intended to be finished, professional products that could be published “as is”.
What does that mean? Let’s say that I stumble into a lot of money (somehow) and I wanted to professionally print my best board game(s). A proper box, proper components, a world-wide release, just a professional polished board game. Then I would not use the graphics, designs or rules as they are on the website. I would go over all my work and redo basically all of it to a higher standard.
The games on the website are just “the best I could do right now”. The work on them is just “enough to play the game and explain the idea”, but never intended as final or perfect.
Because that’s the idea: people can find the games and play them for free. They can have fun and explore these little games I made with no strings attached. That’s the important part, and that’s the part I can do.
But if a publisher found such a game, then was impressed and asked to publish it, I would 100% agree to do a massive update on the art, rules, etcetera. Because what I put out on the website is just a prototype, albeit slightly more polished than most.
It’s version 0.9, so to speak, hoping for someone to pick it up and make it a version 1.0.
Every single project I ever made is the best I could do with my terrible circumstances, and it’s waiting for a team member to complement me and bring the stuff needed for a professional release.
So that’s the decision. From now on, board games will be smaller and less polished. I will keep them barebones enough that I can actually do all the art myself—but also that doing so won’t take more than a day or two. I will be fine with very barebones work on parts of the game that most people will never see. (Such as expansions or really anything in the rulebook beyond page 3 :p)
You will likely not notice this until 2026, though, because all earlier games were already finished. For Naivigation specifically, this simply means that all other games (not the 5 major ones) will have a much more simplified style. Just cartoony vector art, a few lines and solid colors, that’s it. And once I’ve locked that down (a year or two from now, I suppose), I will update the major games too. Because consistent and clear art is way more important in a board game than having some cards look awesome and other cards look shit.
You might have a few final questions by now.
Why do you even make these games? If you don’t enjoy it and can’t even be bothered to playtest them half the time? When you enjoy nothing, the entire idea of “motivation” or “find a job you enjoy” is irrelevant. It’s just not a factor. Similarly, testing games for “fun” is a bit silly when you don’t really have the ability to feel that 99% of the time. Once in a while, I can give my game to others and look at their faces/reactions while playing, and that’s really the only useful testing that exists.
In the end, you have to do something every day, so I chose something I’ve done all my life and am reasonably good at.
It’s just better to keep going and to keep getting out of bed every day, than sitting still or waiting for “joy” to arrive again. And, well, if nothing else matters, then I choose to do creative work that creates rather than destroys. To do work that is, logically speaking, very fruitful. Board games are by far the cheapest and most accessible way for loads of people to have fun, socialize, get together in real life. They’re also the best way to learn and stay mentally fit. The proven positive effects of board games can only be understated. I can make these games and distribute them for anyone to print and play, basically for free.
How can you “decide” to make worse games that look more ugly? Don’t you care about the quality of your work? Well no, I don’t, that’s the issue. Like most creative people, I get loads of ideas and I need to get them out of my head. That’s one of the only clear feelings I have always had, and the one that remains. To not create is to not live. I can’t accept having unrealized ideas just wasting away somewhere. A great game that could’ve brought joy to many—but I was too lazy to make it. An amazing story that could have helped kids deal with some tough issues—but I never wrote it.
In the ideal world, of course, I would work on whatever idea for as long as needed to make it some perfect masterpiece. In practice, however, the choice is really between “make something imperfect” and “not make anything at all ever again”.
I was about to give up the entire Naivigation project. Despite having tested several of them already (a rarity!) and knowing they are a lot of fun. Despite having spent 100 hours on it already. Because, well, I felt no joy from making it through all those hours, and I knew I had equally long still to go. The only reason I ended up properly finishing it, was because I could tell myself: “Just make it look good enough to play. Just 100% expect all of this to be redone if the games are every published commercially. Just get it out there—who knows, in three years time, my situation is better and I can easily update it to something much better.”
I think that final sentence is the key thing to remember all the time, especially when you do creative work. You can’t edit a blank page. You can’t fix the issues in a non-existent ruleset. The Naivigation games might look a bit wonky or have large untested sections when they “come out”. But if there is ever a point in the future when they get popular, or someone wants to publish them, or I wake up with the strong desire to improve them, then I have fully finished projects waiting for me. Improving them would be just a few days’ work. The opposite of diminishing returns—“magnifying returns”?
Yes, for 10–15 years now, I’ve been building stuff while waiting for magnifying returns. It hasn’t happened yet. I’ve done a lot of really good work, it’s all finished and there for me to revise in the future, but currently it’s the best I can do. So I need to scale down my effort in this area, change my approach to lose less time and energy here, to actually keep this option open.
Here’s to hoping I can finally feel joy again in 2026, and if not, that others can get a lot of joy from the Naivigation games (and my other projects),
Pandaqi