PERSONAL

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Waning Motivation

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,912 words

I took half of last week off development, and intended to get back to it mentally refreshed at the start of this week. I'm definitely not mentally refreshed though!

It's not so much about the game itself; I love what I'm making, and I want to complete it! It's just the nature of the long creative process, I suppose. It's tough to focus that mental energy on the same spot for months at a time, especially if you're not getting directly paid for it. Though Atonal Dreams itself is a fairly new project, it's essentially the same as Divine Dreams, which I've been working on since the start of the year. So for (almost?) every week since then, I've been returning to this same project every day, and obviously that's going to get tiring!

Back in the Flash game days, I'd jump around between different projects all the time. Most unfinished, of course. MARDEK 3 took as long as it did because I spent a huge chunk of the development time working on other stuff. That just led to a lot of unfinished projects and 'wasted' time, though, so I told myself that if I were to get back into this games development thing and actually make a career of it, I'd need to stay more focused on one project at a time, until it's done. (Seems this is completely typical for indie devs, from what I've read!)

I did actually manage to focus like that with Sindrel Song! But that 'only' took a few months to complete. Perhaps there's a limit to how long I can focus on one thing, and that didn't exceed that limit, but I'm beginning to hit it with this?

Sometimes, I get so excited by the creative progress that I hate going to sleep at night, and leap eagerly out of bed in the morning to get back to working as fast as I can. I spend the whole day madly focused on bringing my ideas into being, and it feels wonderful! I wish I could be like that all the time. Sadly not, though, and that energy is spent eventually; my mind wanders. (This too seems to be par for the course for creators of all kinds.)

It's frustrating how long games take to make, though, since that burst of creative energy doesn't last long enough to sustain them completely. I often wish I made things I could complete in a day or a week, rather than months, but I'm on this path now so I'm not going to suddenly drastically change it.

In ∞ the previous personal post ∞, I showed some graphs I'd made of how my mood fluctuates throughout the day. I made those using some multipurpose tool I built for myself months ago, and another purpose of that tool is tracking the tasks I do and need to do, from games stuff to chores like 'have a shower'. I press a button to start a task, and another when I've finished it, and they're graphed like this:



I chose this day for the image because it contains an interesting variety of tasks: music/sound stuff (sound effects, I think), particle effects, coding, 3D modelling, bug fixing, idea generation at the end there, and playing a game for about an hour. So annoying seeing that huge slump though, hours of nothing, straight after an unusually high/focused mental state too. There's no predicting the mental weather!

The total time I spend on these tasks is shown at the top there. I set myself a goal of 6 hours, and the bar is full when I reach that, but it fills again to 8 hours as an ideal to aim for.

I've talked about this a few times before, I think, but it irritates me how people speak of 60-hour or 80-hour work weeks as some kind of ideal to strive for, and if you're not working yourself to death every day, then you're some awful slacker who needs to be looked down upon. Most people who hold this opinion likely don't due to some admiration of work ethic exactly, but because they're presumably forced by employers to be at work for hours totalling something like this, so anyone who's not similarly shackled by the system elicits scorn. If someone has to work two soul-crushing jobs just to keep themselves off the streets, it must be frustrating seeing someone like me being so 'lucky' as to get away with working less, and on something like games development no less (because my parents are supporting me). I can understand that, and I'm very aware of it whenever I talk about the amount of work that I'm doing or able to do.

Whenever I wonder about that though, I wonder how much work people are doing during the time they're 'working'. I probably said months ago that I was talking with my step-dad - who used to manage people - about that, and he said most people don't get more than a couple of good hours of productive work in during any given day even if they're 'at work' for 18 or 22 hours a day or however long it is that normal people work. Technically I'm 'at work' from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, since there's no distinction between my work and home lives, so this is a record of how much of that time I've actually used productively.

I suppose it all depends on what you're doing though. There's more possibility and potential for procrastination if you're an office drone than if you're a surgeon!

(I made ∞ a Twitter poll ∞ about this, and from the few votes so far, it seems 3-6 hours of productivity a day is the most common.)

Anyway, I mention all this because that tool also displays a graph like this:



These bars are essentially the same as the ones above the day/tasks/moods chart (though different colours for some reason), so they fill with teal when I reach 6 hours, orange when I reach 8, and any time over 8 hours doesn't show up. (I should really add day-of-the-week markers so then I can see which of these correspond to weekends, which I try to take off and as such don't aim for the 6 hours.)

I'm mentioning this because I decided to take some time off Atonal Dreams about five days ago, which was immediately followed by four days of hyper-productivity, one of which had the highest average mood (the coloured dots) all month.

Taking time off for me doesn't mean sitting around procrastinating or playing games. Instead, it means I've been possessed by some other creative idea I feel compelled to explore and help manifest, and giving into that is both enjoyable and extremely productive. Stifling it just leads to frustration and poor focus, as I'm constantly thinking of what I'd prefer to be doing instead.

These past few days, I've been playing around with some other ideas I enjoy, but which I wouldn't want to share with anyone (at least not in their current state) because introducing others' judgement into the mix tends to sap some of the joy. Imagine if you were graded by an exam board every time you played a game! It's important to get feedback on projects like Atonal Dreams because I need to know what I'm doing right or wrong, what people like or don't, if I'm going to be releasing for an audience, but sometimes I'd rather just make things for myself. They offer opportunities to improve my creative skills (I learn a lot from making things like this and later incorporate that knowledge into public projects), and to try to scratch very specific personal mental itches, and both of those are valuable in the long run.

Honestly, I'd rather continue spending this week on this fresh and exciting thing rather than forcing myself to get back to Atonal Dreams, because I don't want to resent that project and eventually give up because I feel suffocated by it. But then I also feel bad because I'm already behind with my progress predictions, and at least a few of you want it to reach the point of playability. So I don't want to be selfish and disappointing.

But it's because of that lagging progress that I feel maybe I do need a bit of a longer break from it. Perhaps it's better in the long run to take time off to gradually miss it and start longing to work on it again. Maybe.



I'm going to be having another brain scan tomorrow, so I suppose that's another thing that feels like a disruption that'd be hard to work around. I was meant to be having them regularly, every month or so, but the minor inconvenience that was a catastrophic global pandemic sort of got in the way a bit there. So it's been months since my last checkup, and I'm not looking forward to this one for a couple of reasons. One is that lying completely still in an MRI scanner for half an hour is very much a test of mental discipline because I constantly have to fight off panic attacks, and I'm concerned that it's been so long since the last one that all the practice and desensitisation I had from regular scans might have faded at least a bit. Another is that it might find that the tumour's started growing again, and then what? Would that be it? I don't even want to think about it, but there's a non-zero-percent chance of that outcome, which of course my neurotic demons tell me must mean it's 100% likely.

I won't find out anything about it until... next week, I think, maybe? Whenever I see the doctor next. Maybe that'll be over the phone; it's unclear. I hope not, though; I hate talking on the phone. One time I was talking for a few minutes on the phone to a woman who turned out to be one of my doctors, but I'd been assuming the whole time she was just a receptionist doing some admin since she never introduced herself! Another time I was called twice on the same day about some appointment or something (I forget), but the number was different each time, and the second time I asked with some confusion why 'the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing' because it sounded like two different departments were both contacting me to arrange the same thing. I still remember the polite "I'm dealing with an idiot/brain-damaged person here" tone to her reply, and only later realised that she was likely the same person both times and had called the second time to tell me about the outcome of the first conversation... or something. Annoying how I cringe about the feelings that evoked, but I remember none of the details of what either she or I even said (why was it not clear to me that the second call was a follow-up to the first??).

ANYWAY. Maybe I'll at least take today and tomorrow off, and see how I feel about everything on Wednesday, after I've lost tomorrow to the brain scan!!

Also, I haven't been in the Discord for a while, nor have I finished setting that up publicly. Sorry about that!