Building a Healthy Mystery Gamedev Habit

How to consistently work on your Mystery Game and avoid burnout

Making mystery games is a fun hobby, but burnout will turn your dream job into a nightmare.

Whether you’re spending months, years, or even just weeks making a mystery game, the feeling of burnout is almost inevitable.

Without first setting yourself up with a healthy habit, you run the risk of crashing and burning your project (and yourself) into the ground.

What Is Burnout?

Burnout is when you feel so drained, overwhelmed, or unmotivated that even tasks you used to enjoy feel tiring or pointless.

In game development, this might look like avoiding your project, rewriting the same part endlessly, or losing confidence in your original vision.

As a result, you end up feeling less motivated, more irritable, and your productivity and quality of work both go down.

You end up caught in a downward spiral, so deprived of energy that your project remains stuck in development forever.

Maybe you decide to scrap the project entirely and start over — but then you get burned out on the new project all the same.

Why Does Burnout Happen?

Speaking from experience, burnout happens when you treat game development more like a sprint than a marathon.

You convince yourself that if you just push yourself harder, you’ll be able to make up for lost time or inefficient progress.

You desperately want to meet your own self-imposed deadlines, but your project’s scope endlessly creeps bigger.

What first started out as a fun idea — and initially gave you a strong burst of dopamine — has become something you just want to finish up and move on from.

Indeed, it’s tempting just to abandon the old project and chase a shiny new idea — but without changing your underlying habits, the new project will still end up in the same bad spot.

Risks of Burnout in Mystery Gamedev

Mystery games aren’t simple.

They demand intricate planning, where things that seem confusing on the surface eventually turn out to make perfect logical sense.

Compare that to platformers, shooters, or other action games, where you can often design levels just by moving around objects in the environment to see how they interact with each other.

In such games, you can easily see the scope get bigger — the worlds become huge, and the game slows down to a crawl.

But mystery games have more subtle complexity:

• The underlying logic behind everything in the story must make sense

• The gameplay and story systems interact in many complex and conditional ways that are hard to keep organized

• Testing puzzles and balancing their difficulty is hard, tedious, and uncertain

• Much of the fun comes from revelation, which as the creator, you can’t experience — so it can be tedious and boring to play through your own game

I’ll go ahead and say I’m working on some tools to solve some of these problems — but until that time comes, you need to set up a system to deal with them yourself.

My Experience

I’ve experienced burnout many times as a game developer, but most notably it happened while working on my sequel to Detective Butler.

The first game was a fairly short and simple experience — designed that way on purpose to make it easy for me to finish. It only took me 2 years.

I was on the right track with that game, and I shouldn’t have changed a formula that was already a proven success.

If I’d been smart, I would’ve just made another short and simple experience, since it wouldn’t have taken nearly as much time or effort the second time around.

But nope — I chose to ramp up the ambition way too high.

I got excited from learning a new game engine, and started adding feature after feature… without regard for the story.

Once I realized that those gameplay elements weren’t necessarily serving the story — and that the story wasn’t necessarily serving the gameplay — I knew I had a major problem.

I had invested tremendous amounts of mental energy into creating dozens of gameplay mechanics, but by the time I got around to working on the story, I had little energy or motivation left to actually utilize them in a fun way.

By that point, I wanted to just finish the game and move on… but I couldn’t.

Between bland characters, boring twists, and plot holes that made my story look like Swiss cheese, I was far from finished, and I knew it.

I was already 3 years in, and with such a long roadmap ahead, I had no choice but to put the project on hold until I could scale it back down.

The burnout was real.

I worked on a bunch of other projects — many of which had nothing to do with game development at all — for about 5 years, while trying to think of a way to salvage my story.

Then one night, inspiration finally struck, and my burnout had finally ended.

Today, that game more closely resembles the first game in scope, while the majority of my focus remains on a greatly simplified story.

And while that might sound like a happy ending, the truth is that it cost me at least 3 years of development time that could have been spent at least a little more wisely.

Here’s what a healthy gamedev habit looks like

Now I’m going to tell you what I wish I would have known back then.

Here’s how you can deal with burnout — and maybe even prevent it entirely.