Retaining Motivation

Something that's always a challenge in any big project is staying motivated. At the moment my motivation levels are incredibly low, so low in fact that it would be a wonder for me to get up in the morning if it weren't for the simple fact that my bed is usually the heat of a furnace by the time I wake up.

I'm very motivated to work on Skyscraper. But the main problem isn't just staying motivated in general, but also staying motivated to work on the right things. For instance, it's extremely easy to just make a ton of music and artwork, and end up with no game, and no idea how to use the assets you've created. It's a bad trap to fall into for sure. What you want, ideally, is to program the ever living shit out of the game first, because - at least in my case - I'll run out of motivation to add new features to the game before I run out of motivation to passively push pixels into a sprite, or experiment with music until I get something vaguely listenable.

So what about retaining general motivation? Well, I find (not finding, auto-correct, can't you comprehend sentence context? I'm not an Indian scammer, you know...) that the best way to do that is to keep challenging myself. Of course, sometimes you just want to be done with the challenges and do things that don't have such a high bar for entry, like designing levels and adding content. Of course a great deal of care must be put into the design of a game, but it's not a mentally exhausting task like programming a script language.

In the end, if progress begins to stagnate, you will find yourself having less fun. The best way to get work done is keep up momentum. Perhaps it'll feel like pushing a boulder up a sharp cliff face some days, but in the end it'll pay off if you keep pushing. All fruitful work will make its ends.

And with that, here's your image for today:


Thanks for reading,
~zxin