In my last year of school, I wasn''t too ambitious with what I tried to do and produced a Tetris clone in 5 days and a program that drew magic eye .bmps - my brother (then 14) designed it, I could hardly see the pictures.
But last year I bit off more than I could chew making a platform engine which isn''t tied to a grid. The game it supports ( see www.chariot.net.au/~theloves/pzsinfo.htm )is only partly finished and I am no good at estimating how long the rest will take. That''s the problem most of us suffer from at the start of a project I think.

I''ve finished a dozen simple games, but I''ve started hundreds, and thought up thousands more than that. I wrote a connect-four applet in an hour yesterday. Had animation and all sorts of fun stuff. It was a great way to spend an hour, but connect-four is...well...if it can be done in an hour, it can''t be that impressive, can it?

I used to think that my problem finishing things was that I always came up with new ideas for games. So I decided to buy a notebook and write down the game ideas to get them out of my system. Several notebooks later, I realized that the problem has always been art. I finish these little games because they don''t require too much art. I can draw some quick backgrounds and some nice looking checkers in a quick amount of time, but drawing an animated guy walking takes about an hour, and that doesn''t included anything but a single guy walking.

Designing a game is easy (unless you want to design a good game). Programming a game is easy, even if you want good code. But art is just something that completely stalls me. By the time I''ve finished that guy walking, I''m faced with the prospect of drawing that guy punching, jumping, shooting a gun, and all 300 of his closest friends. That''s when I go watch some tv.