The Never Ending Cycle

Simon here. I notice I have basically been absent for the past month or two. Let me explain.

I have basically fallen in a cycle that goes like this:

• I have an idea for a project I really want to do bouncing around in my head
• I realize I should just start making it, so I do that
• I run into some kind of bug that’s not easy to fix
• My motivation starts going down a bit
• Nevertheless I keep working on the project
• I semi-finish the project, at this point you CAN TECHNICALLY call it functional but it really isn’t
• I start asking myself: “what should I work on next?”
• My motivation plummets more because I can’t really choose, at this point it’s just polishing the heck out of everything until I can call the project finished
• I get a new project idea, reducing my motivation for the old one to almost zero
• The cycle repeats again

With this cycle I make and learn a whole lot, but the problem is I never actually finish anything. The result of this is that I don’t share the project, thinking I’m going to finish it and share it then, which never happened for most of the projects I made. It’s a never ending cycle. A cycle of never finishing anything.

Tbh I don’t know what the solution is.

• One would just be to bite the bullet and share all my unfinished things. I don’t really feel satisfied with that though, I don’t want to end a video/blog post on some arbitrary point in the dev process, I want to end at the end. But the problem is, that never happens. My mom always warns me about this, but I didn’t listen often. I don’t want to make a full series on just a side project, so I wait until I’m finished and then I make a video. But that never happens.
• Another option would be to power through and finish things. I did that a few times, for example with Key Quest. The reason I did that then, though, is because I was in a team. I was basically forced to finish projects because Neva and Abhay (my teammates) wanted me to. That was one of the big reasons why dev took so long for that. We even started working on a new project, but I was too bored to finish it. Eventually, I thought, “if I stay in here, I will need to keep doing stuff for my teammates, and not how I want to do it”. So I left the team, and the rest of the team also broke apart. So that didn’t go well.
• I could set some sort of deadline, where I’d have to finish the project by then. I also did that once. I entered a game jam. The thing is though, the jam was only 48 hours, and I also joined as a team (which was actually required for the jam I joined). So I ended up not finishing the jam either. Maybe I’ll try this again and choose the jam better, who knows.
• I also noticed that the main part of the cycle where I lose motivation is when I run into analysis paralysis. The part when the project is “barely functional” and I think “what should I do next?”. So I thought I’d target that part of the cycle specifically. So, when I ran into that part with my latest project, a cell machine remake, I made a todo list. Or, at least I tried to. I had to go somewhere, so I couldn’t finish it. And then, when I came back, guess what happened. Yup, I lost motivation to finish the todo list lol. This might actually be the answer, but that’s one of the problems with it. In order for it to work, you have to write the entire list in one g-

Wait a minute.

Some of these solutions are actually good solutions. Maybe I should try one of them! But then the question is, which o- UUGGGHHHHHH…..