The Anatomy of a Cold Case Game
Why we abandon our projects, and how to bring them back
First, I want to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
And reminder: only 7 days left to submit your entry to the Cold Case Jam!
Cold Case Jam is a unique event that encourages mystery gamedevs to revisit abandoned projects and finish them (or at least make substantial progress).
Its name is derived from the concept of a real-life cold case — mysteries that have gone unsolved for a long period of time — but applied to abandoned game projects.
My goal was to encourage developers to not just start games, but actually finish them. And so far, we’ve already received one submission from a previous Mystery Game Jam participant, so that’s really awesome to see!
Personally, I really wanted to work on one of my own unfinished projects, but the truth is that I’ve had so much going on that there just wasn’t any time to do much of anything these past two months.
One such incident was, ironically enough, my furnace going out and leaving me in freezing temperatures for nearly an entire week. That was not fun!
Anyway, I suppose my desire to work on a “cold case” made me do a lot of reflecting on all of my old projects. I dug deep into my own history to really examine why I gave up on my projects and whether I’m truly committed to bringing them back to life.
I hope to share some of these insights with you in today’s article.
The Anatomy of Abandonment
Most abandoned projects don’t die in one dramatic moment, but fade quietly over time.
The project you worked on every day is reduced to once a week, then once a month, then maybe once a year if you’re lucky. You stop opening folders, stop looking at files, and eventually stop thinking about it at all.
Usually developers talk about this problem in terms of getting stuck in development and being unable to ship the game. But few people ever talk about the process of giving up, or if there’s a way to revive a project that’s months or even years old.
Now, I’ve actually done that, multiple times over.
I’ve had to abandon my second Detective Butler game many times:
In 2013, I was trying to force a sequel without any compelling ideas.
In 2014, I finally had a compelling idea and resumed work.
In 2018, I had to pause due to limited financial resources.
In 2021, I tried to resume but lacked the passion I once had.
In 2022, I rediscovered that passion through a new perspective.
In 2023, I put the game on hold to focus on Mystery Gamedev.
And now, with masterclass-level clarity on the mystery genre, I’m ready to get back to work it as soon as I can.
As you can see, there are a lot of reasons why you might stop working on your game!
So to understand why projects get abandoned, you have to start with motivation.
What keeps you motivated?
Most people rely on extrinsic motivation. They need some kind of practical nudge: a deadline, a paycheck, public accountability, external praise, or pressure.
Extrinsic motivation lowers risk, which limits pain. It gives you a reason to keep going even when the work stops being fun. If your project is tied to income, a contract, or social expectations, you’ll push through boredom or discomfort because there’s a tangible reward awaiting you on the other side.
The tradeoff is that extrinsically motivated work rarely goes far beyond the minimum requirements. People work in proportion to the reward they’re promised. When the pain exceeds the potential reward, they pull back and give up.
Intrinsic motivation is different.
It’s the desire to see your creative vision become a reality so strongly, that you’re willing to prioritize your project and sacrifice other parts of your life to work on it.
And it’s also the willingness to keep going, in spite of all the setbacks and obstacles in your way. It’s the willingness to endure short-term pain for a long-term payoff. If you are truly motivated, then you will exhaust months or even years of effort and sacrifice, under the belief that it will all be justified when the project is finished.
The only downside — and it is a big one — is that your tolerance for pain is so strong that you’re unable to see the warning signs of a flawed project early on.
You keep going despite the lack of signal.
You delude yourself into thinking that it’s going to work out.
And so that’s what we call a high-risk, high-reward strategy: you could be wrong, and the cost of being wrong is very high.
Balancing motivation with scope
As someone with highly intrinsic motivation, I’ve felt this pain badly.
I’ve invested countless hours into projects that have completely flopped. I’ve built dozens of games that people have never played, either because the ambition was too great, or my perfectionism got in the way.
There are two reasons why I would often abandon a project:
A project that’s too small isn’t interesting enough to begin. There’s not enough room to genuinely explore any ideas. You can already see the end from the start, so there’s no curiosity pulling you forward. You abandon this project to work on something more interesting.
A project that’s too big isn’t safe enough to finish. The risk grows faster than the reward can justify. Sure, it’s packed full of ideas, but there’s a good chance it’s more than you can actually handle. You abandon this project to work on something you can actually finish.
In both cases, you lose.
Well, not entirely. Hopefully you learned something you can take with you to the next project. But if you don’t learn to properly scope your projects, you’ll always end up abandoning whatever new project you start.
Confidence comes from repeated wins. So when you rack up repeated losses, you train your brain to expect failure, losing confidence in yourself and resulting in burnout.
Eventually, you may get to a point where your repeated failures to finish a project culminate in your failure to even start one.
Why Mystery Games Get Abandoned
That was a lot of psychological generality, so let’s bring this back to mystery games.
Looking back at my own work, the reasons for abandonment fall into five recurring patterns. Let’s go over each reason, and how to counteract them.
