April is always a busy time of year for my family – with a lot of birthdays and events that fill up any available time. With that in mind, I shouldn’t be surprised to find that once again, game development wasn’t really the main focus of this week.
Where I’m at
I haven’t made any further tangible progress on any projects this week. Instead, I have made some (albeit limited) progress on understanding the cause of what’s holding me back.
What I Planned
My intention was to have the design for a simpler sim/management based game figured out. Once this is complete, the plan was to start some quick and dirty prototyping to make it happen.
What Actually Happened
So this week had even more distractions away from the game development arena. Work and life commitments are like that though, and I won’t linger on this too much.
When I did sit down to work in some of the little available time I had, a pretty blatant issue started to crop up – one that prevented me from getting on with the work as I had hoped. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far: I can turn concrete concepts into code, and I am able to come up with fuzzy ideas in my head. What I’m lacking is the ability to bridge these two well.
This seems to be a recurring thing, and I know that there’s plenty of things that I don’t know – but frankly I feel a bit lost about how to make the next step happen. What happens next is that procrastination steps in and directs my attention to other, less meaningful things (worst case: pointless YouTube videos, and best case: less pointless YouTube videos)
I’m aware that the tangible outputs for my efforts after 9 weeks remain pretty solidly at “nothing meaningful”. Unless you count these weekly review posts – given I thought I had little to write about this week, I suppose this even existing is a pretty good output. Perhaps that’s a bit of an overstatement.
I’m also aware that from the outside, this probably looks like a lot of fumbling around. It feels like it is too. I’m quickly trying things, deciding on a step, and then changing to do something else. Equally, I do believe that the creative process isn’t a linear thing. It jumps all over the place, has ups and downs, so while I will feel (and have felt) a little embarrassed to report that I’m changing my direction again, I shouldn’t let my idea for public perception change my actions. I’m not doing this for you (sorry) – it’s for my own benefit, so I should own that.
I spent some free time trying to figure out what the issue is, from some of those less pointless YouTube videos and an element of self-reflection. I think I have an idea towards the problem, and it’s time to stop self-reflection and focus on something I can actually take action on.
What Went Wrong
You could make the argument that the whole week went wrong. You’d be incorrect, though. Equally, I could state that I should have identified this particular problem sooner and worked on it, but I don’t think that’s fair either.
A lack of available time this week wasn’t helping things, of course. There is of course a problem here, but I don’t feel it falls under the “went wrong” category really and forcing something to fit doesn’t seem reasonable either. So I won’t.
What Went Right
If I must label something (and I really, really should) – I would say I did manage to narrow down towards whatever this blocker is. I don’t yet fully know or understand what it is, but I do know that it’s not motivation, it’s not purely time management. I don’t feel it’s completely ideation or implementation related either – I think it’s somewhere in between these two.
What Next?
I understand the next week will be equally as busy as this week with other work and life commitments, so I don’t expect to see any projects developing over the following week.
What I plan to focus on next week is understanding this blocker as part of the creative process and finding a way to work through it, even if that means project progress remains paused for another week.