Fangame - Development Challenges

Development Challenges

Despite the good intentions and dedication of fan-game-makers, development of many fangames ended in abandonment. Notwithstanding the legal issues faced by these fans-turned-developers (see Legal issues), numerous development challenges are faced by these individuals when attempting to develop a fangame from start to finish. These failures are related to the lack of development experience, time, resource, money, interest, talents, and other factors. It is unclear what proportion of fangames attempted are never successfully created and released.

Excluding mods (which are technically not true fangames), the vast majority of fangames that have been successfully completed and published are adventure games. This likely reflects the longer history of this genre related to other genres and the availability of many free third-party tools or engines to make these games. Most importantly, there must an unwavering passion by a core group of fans which extends over years to overcome any obstacle encountered during the project's development. This sacrifice is best described by Britney Brimhall of AGD Interactive, regarding their 2001 released a remake of King's Quest I, "I think a lot of people don’t realize when they initiate a game project just how much sacrifice it will require. Whereas most people enjoy writing a story or making a piece of artwork, most would not enjoy writing hundreds of pages of dialogue or drawing over one hundred pictures when they could be socializing with friends or playing video games."