The Sunk Cost Fallacy is a cognitive bias that occurs when individuals continue to invest time, money, or effort into a decision or endeavor because of the resources already committed, even if it no longer makes sense to do so.
Yes, an LLM summarized that but I am in the midst of this particular crisis 
I used to be something of a regular contributor around these parts but I vanished for some years after becoming overwhelmed and consumed by a new career in Aerospace AI (yeah, not the silly chat bot or virtual assistant nonsense kind) thus my contributions both in the community and also my Cardano project diminished.
Suffice to say I had the opportunity to take a break and go on a short tour with my band last month thinking it would be great to get away from computer science and disconnect for awhile and have some fun that did not involve any robotics or coding. Ironically, I ended up talking to a guitarist from another band who was working on a solidity smart contract literally in the van on the road between venues.
This was kind of inspiring but mostly reminded me about all the progress I was making and new things I was learning back when I had more down time post C19 when there was literally nothing to do besides computer work at home. He seemed vaguely interested in helping me bring my project over the finish line but I have not setup or shared any source code yet as I am not sure I even have time to pick it up again myself.
All told I probably only invested a few paychecks over the course of 5 years because I only really paid for the artwork which I could not do myself. The real investment for me was the time coding up a web based game that could teach basics, fundamentals, and most of what the average user needs to know about blockchains as a “Learn-to-Earn” model unlocking tokens over time.
The design is done. It took many iterations to get from an initial RPG concept to a more casual edutainment game as I discovered how limited on-chain data storage and fee structures were regardless of how creative you get with code and side-chain or off-chain integrations. To that end I eliminated almost every complex exemplary feature down to simply minting and burning of playable characters.
The back-end is mostly done. I can mint and burn tokens on-demand that represent a distribution of playable characters that also have the utility function of unlocking content in game. It also includes a Cardano only AI powered chat bot for providing additional context for the in game courses and curriculum. The only part that is missing is deploying the infrastructure since developer mode is faster on localhost for obvious reasons.
The front-end is maybe half done. The real-time battles using off-chain or on-chain characters is good enough but probably could use some juice. The school has basic dialog for course content and the aforementioned AI chat bot assistant to get hints and context in game. The endless scrolling platform for driving content between school and battles could use more interesting puzzles. The only thing that is really completely done is the Cardano wallet integration to facilitate interactions with the blockchain via the back-end game server.
I would guesstimate another 6 months to launch on testnet (preview/preprod/whatever) given that I really only have 8 hours per week to dedicate to this project maximum. Then maybe half that to work out bugs and adjust based on any feedback before deploying to mainnet? At which point good luck everyone as after making all the repositories public for posterity I probably will move on to something new and interesting in VR/AR or elsewhere in technology …
The question really is do I actually want to spend the rest of my free time this year trying to finish what I arguably already abandoned?
Would you rather just move on to something new and interesting now? Is the thought of this unfinished project holding you back? If you just walk away now, would you care?
