Working on a game alone can be an exhilerating experience.
There are no limits to what you can do. No ideas are too far fetched, and no excuses are good enough. The concept of a roadblock cannot exist because you can always jump over and resolve it. A bug in the engine that pops up while designing levels can immediately be squashed by quickly stepping over the offending code, and updating the parameters in the function call. If the graphics need to be spruced up, just add some jazz into the vector engine, and everything looks absolutely fab. You get to choose how everything is done, and you get to choose how to do it.Working on a game alone can be a daunting experience.
You have to say no to all the great ideas, and instead sit and work on the boring parts of the game. All your attention has to be diverted from the task at hand if a bug in some forgotten corner of the codebase suddenly decides to pop up. You struggle to get into the flow when you suddenly notice that the z-ordering in one particular set of interaction of graphics is messed up. Everything that looks bad, or doesn't work quite right, reflects upon you, and only you, as an artist and coder. You have to choose what to do, even while you have to do everything.So yeah. Working on a game alone is polarising. I go through periods of manic frenzy, where a lot gets done, followed by a depressed lull, where even correcting a typo in the documentation feels like an accomplishment.
The end of June went really great. I had a deadline around the beginning of July, and progress just flew. It was amazing to see the things all line up in perfect synchrony, and everything that needed to be done, just got done.
Then July hit. The buzz of successfully hitting a deadline quickly wore off, and the monotony began again. Every day was a slog. All the distractions beckoned, and I often succumbed. As the progress got slower, my mood got worse. I kept deciding that I was going to get back into things, but kept just pushing things forward.
August passed by in a similar haze. I had a few family commitments, and those felt like they would be great reset points. They came and went, while progress on the game stagnated, and my YouTube watch hours skyrocketed.
Then came the 31st of August.
Foot-borne Violence inflicted on my Posterior
I wrote in my journal; Just take things one damn day at a time. Life is in the today, in the now. Live such that every today is something that you can be proud of. That’s the goal. Remember. The game is only a way to that. And suddenly there it was, the switch has been flipped again. All of a sudden, we are back in business.
I had been so scared. Completion of the game seemed so far away that putting in any work seemed meaningless. Like no amount of effort would amount to progress of any sort. And that is a scary thought, and definitely does not motivate you to actually work. These two months had been wittled away living in that fear.
Then somehow, the Universe sent me a reminder. I choose to live my days like this. The opportunity to get to do work that I enjoy and find meaningful every single day is a blessing. The distance from the finish line had scared me to the point that I could no longer appreciate the magnificient views that I had the privelege of running through.
Once that mental switch was flipped, suddenly, it all made sense. Working on the game became a joy again, and an overwhelming sense of peace and contentment has taken up residence within me.
I don’t know how long this will last, but I am grateful to be blessed with my current state of mind. Let’s hope we can make some overwhelming progress before the pendulum has a chance to swing back again.
That was just a quick update on my mental. I think developing games (or any longer term projects) is as much about the mental as it is about the craft itself. Hope this helps =).
(Especially you Future Sam, remember; You chose this life. You have to also choose to enjoy it.)