I've been making games for most of my life, ever since I was a kid. In my twenties I got a job as a professional game designer. After that I created a lot, in a lot of mediums: Web games, Palm Pilot games, card and dice games, conceptual games, board games.
One thing I've learned is that every game you make can't be your best game. Sometimes due to circumstances, your game is underdeveloped. Sometimes you try a new idea, and it doesn't work out. Sometimes you make a good game, but it falls flat anyway. Sometimes there are hits, and sometimes there are misses.
This is not to say that your effort has no influence. It's to remind you that there are circumstances and influences in the world in addition to you that affect what happens. Development timelines, funding, marketing, shifting costs and norms, what medium you're working in, who's on your team, publishers and distributors going out of business or being acquired, trouble in your family and personal life: all these can impact your project.
I remember a period of time when I was having incredibly bad insomnia, and was still developing web games. I got through my current one, The Journey to New Earth, and it worked! But afterwards I kept finding very weird bugs and also realized the game needed much more development to play well. So I took the opportunity to revise it.
My games on the Palm Pilot gained dedicated and excited players. Many players of Adventure Solitaire counted it as their favorite game on the Palm OS. And I made a modest living for a while. But then the Palm OS itself got overshadowed by new and exciting cell phone technology -- smart phones. So there went that for me. And yes, I could have ported them to phones, and then other phones, and so on. But learning each phone and OS is a big project, and I decided against it.
I ported one of my web games to Java. It took four months. Did anyone
play it? Maybe one guy. So much time, so little result. I ported some Palm Pilot games to Windows. Same thing. They'd been successful on those other platforms, but not on the new ones. So then I chose to make board games, in part to avoid the obsolescence issue for digital games.
Some luck's bad, some luck's good. Majesty wouldn't have been the game it was if it hadn't had several extra years of development due to switching publishers a couple of times, once at least because the then current publisher was going out of business. So that was some good luck that led to a great game.
I think it is helpful to think of your entire pantheon of created games as an iterative, interactive process of design. You can learn something from each one, and that experience contributes in some way to the next one. This view also helps you not get too attached to whether one particular game succeeds or fails. Work as well as you can on your current game, understanding that all the circumstances and events will have effects, and see what happens. And then make your next game!
