Devlog 0: Surviving past the initial high of a new idea

#gamedev #motivation

I get easily excited about new ideas I have. I like to think of myself as a sort of a creative person. As such, new ideas are always exciting. And at least for me they come spontaneously. It'll start from a little seed: a cool thing I have seen online or a game that I have played, etc. And from there it sprawls into a fun little project-to-be. So the beginning is easy for me. I think about it in the shower. I jot down some ideas on paper. I do some research. And a simple seed of an idea turns into something that might be a fun side project, that I can work on in my free time. I work full time as a software developer, but I have a bit of a passion for game development. So most of my ideas are about games. I think about interesting mechanics, cool gameplay, engaging storylines, etc. However, this particular post is not going to have anything game-specific, so if you are not into this kind of stuff- feel free to keep reading.
As I said, for me starting is easy. I've been stuck at "starting" for years now, so I constantly have a few game ideas, just living rent-free in my head pretty much constantly. What I, and I believe many others, actually struggle with is to actually continue the serious work, after that initial idea high has worn off. Every new idea is exciting, but this excitement eventually fades away and what you are left with is a bunch of unorganized thoughts and an empty space, where your motivation used to be. So in this blog post I will explore things that I have tried before and why haven't they worked for me. After that I will share what my current method is and how I intend to keep it going. So, without further ado, let's begin.

If you listen to/read/watch a lot of people talking about motivation when working on something, chances are you will eventually get to a point where you will be advised to actually begin work. And this is somehow true for me as well. The furthest I get with a majority of my ideas is a few scribbles in a notepad and a few lectures or blog posts gone through as a research. Most of them are left at the "taking up space in my head" phase. Truth is- if you want to do something, you really have to eventually start working on it. It is kind of the first threshold and you really have to try and push through it.

However, passing through this threshold is kind of hard and scary. While the idea is in your head- it is idealistic. It's perfect: achieving everything you ever wanted it to, a pleasure for everyone that has seen it, basically best next thing after world peace. But nothing in this world is perfect [needs citation]. And by ripping the idea out of your mind and shplatting[1] it into the real world, you rob it from this idealism. It is now, as everything else in the world, flawed. Unfortunately, I don't really have a cool trick that you can use here. Just free up a couple of hours of your time- maybe by shifting around your regularly scheduled weekend slacking off, or maybe by combining it with your Friday after work beer drinking- and push yourself to do some actual work on your project. Beginnings are hard, but if you find a way to keep going, this beginning might be the first step of your perfect idea turning into a slightly flawed (but still awesome) real life thing.
So, you have begun. You have set up some stuff, you have done some housekeeping tasks. Everything is ready to go ahead. What now???
As stated above, I struggle with doing some actual work on my side projects. So, I am no expert on this. This is why, I'll begin with what experts say and how did it go for me. Good? Good! Let's go.

Expert tip 1: start doing work regularly. Turn working on your idea less into something that you do whenever you feel like it and more on something that you do on a regular basis. Begin treating it like a task: water the plants 3 times a week- check, start the vacuum cleaner every morning before I leave for work- check, work on my super awesome dream project twice a week-check. Truth is- you won't always feel like it. Sometimes you'll be tired from work, sometimes you would rather be outside, sometimes you might be slightly drunk from overestimating how much beer you can drink after working a whole day, but you should try and push through. It is a task and you HAVE TO do it. The same way as if you don't water the plants- they will die[2], if you don't do actual work on your idea, it will eventually sink into oblivion with the rest of your unfinished world-changers. And good thing about this method is that it should theoretically become easier, the more you do it. There will inevitably be the initial dip in motivation, as the last drops of excitement dry away of course. But as you continue working like this, your brain will start seeing this less like a chore and more like a habit. And habits are easy. Our little monkey brains are used to them and as such- they require much less effort. Habits are things that you might actually do without even realizing it. After some time- it should be just like the pocket tap ritual you do after exiting the house to check if you have gotten everything- effortless. So, how I failed this? Things started good for me. I was doing semi-regular progress. And I have done that more than once, believe it or not. I would usually go around and start doing work. And doing work is cool as you get to actually see something. It is far from ready, kind of cobbled together from stuff you've done and things you have found on the internet, but it kind of works, and you kind of like it. Seeing something done is motivating for sure. Thing is that this motivation wears off quickly for me. Even worse- each time it is less and less. I would usually get to a point that I am not satisfied with the day's work, but I will leave it at that, just because I am tired. So I really slowly, but surely, start to brake the regularity. At first I will not work a certain day and do it on the next one instead to catch up. Than the catch up period will start to expand. I'll maybe do it two, three days after. Eventually catching up stops altogether and I am left with working much less regularly now. Next step of the collapse is when the regularity disappears altogether and I am left with working whenever I feel like it. And in the end, I just stop feeling like it.
Somehow I have never reached the point where the chore stops and the habit forms. And as such I just eventually run out of motivation juice and abandon all work.
Expert tip 2: OK, so obviously regularity is kind of a key. How do we achieve it then? Well how about we throw some organization into the mix? We plan and organize our tasks at our job. We start with something big and general and abstract and slowly break it down into small and specific tasks. Then we prioritize and plan them. Finally we put them all neatly into a to-do list/board/excel spreadsheet and start hacking away. We mark the ones we currently do as "in progress" and then we mark the completed ones as "done". Stuff starts to pile up in the "done" category and we feel good about ourselves. We haven't been fired from work (hopefully), so this obviously works there. So why not try it here as well? Or in other words- how did I failed at this as well? First of all, whatever tool you use at work, it has most probably become an integral part of your process and day-to-day work. You get to the office, you make yourself some coffee, you sit down, you open the tasks spreadsheet. But unless you track your quarterly performance at dish washing using project management methodologies, chances are such an organization tool is not a part of your free time. Unfortunately, this is the time you have to work on your passion project.
What I would do here is I would do a very good initial phase: I will organize my research notes in an easy to read way using some tool like Milanote. I will write down my main goals and desired features. I will brake those down into some high level work items and I will further brake those down into specific tasks I can work on. I will put this tasks somewhere. I will start working on them for a short while and then... I will abandon them all. Checking my task board is not something I do at home and as hard as I try to do it, I eventually stop. This is how the internet has ended up with quite a few orphaned task board, scattered among different sites.
More expert tips that I don't have that much to say about but have still tried and failed with: Working vertically rather than horizontally. What this means is rather than focusing on one specific thing and polishing it to perfection before moving to the next, to focus on creating an unpolished but kind of working initial version of the complete thing and than to slowly start building up based on this skeleton of a project. This way you will always have something working, which is much more motivational than a very good looking but quite useless part of a non-existing whole. I fail at this by never actually finishing the skeleton.
Put deadlines. Deadlines are scary and they make us do things. There is an excellent video here by Ted Urban (creator of the completely awesome blog "Wait But Why"), explaining much better than I could ever do, how our brain reacts when faced with a deadline and how this helps it push through the procrastination. How I fail at this? I do get scared towards the deadline- true. However, this deadline does not carry a lot of weight with it. In my life I have deadlines which if I don't meet, make me suffer serious consequences. Fail to meet this deadline and my driving license will be taken away. Fail to meet that deadline and I won't be able to use my debit card. Or the scariest of all- fail to meet the ultimate deadline and they will cut off my internet connection[3]. Compared to these, my arbitrary dream project deadline is just... meh.
Share with friends and family. When you spend sufficiently long time on something, you'll get used to it. And as such you will stop being that impressed by it. As a product of that, you will loose motivation to continue working on it. Your friends and family might be able to provide this motivation. They haven't seen that much of what you are working on. So share little bits with them. Seeing their positive (hopefully) reactions might be just what you need to keep going. How did my friends and family fail me? Well while people have been supportive of me when I show some bits of work, I get used to this reaction quite quickly and it just stops working for me. I stop getting motivation; ergo, I stop working at all.
Try to avoid distractions: distractions fail to avoid me.
Have any of the above methods worked for you? Awesome! This means that you are now working on your dream project and we are all excited for the big announcement, once it is ready. Congratulations!
Are you still reading? Good, we have scared the pesky actually-achieving-something people away now. If you have spent the roughly 10 minutes needed to reach this point in the post (closing on 30 if you also visited the various links) and are still here, you are probably a procrastinator of the highest of levels, just like me. By now you might be wondering if I will ever reveal if anything works at all. After all you have just wasted 10 minutes, you could have spent working on your world-changing idea, reading this instead. You deserve, nay, need an answer. Otherwise this would be another waste of time, just like the 10 minutes you wasted scrolling you Facebook feed before that or the 10 minutes you wasted watching a video of someone on the internet explaining something you have already forgotten before that. Worry not! I have a method to propose. Does it work? I don't know. Why have I waited all this time to tell you this now? Wait a bit more and you will see.
Putting a project into the real world is scary. You are turning a shining idea into a muddy real-life thing. But there are things much scarier than that. The first X-Files movie if you are a kid[4] for example. As a bit of an introverted person, social exposure is kind of scary for me. I don't have crippling fear of talking with people or anything, but opening up and sharing personal stuff with people is kind of uncomfortable for me. Personal stuff, like my awesome ideas, that until now have only been collecting dust in my head. What is even scarier for me is raising people's expectations and than failing miserably to meet them. This sucks! And this sucks more than putting an idea I have into the real world. So how does this relate to my "ultra-effective motivation method"? Well, if you look at the top of the post, you will notice a little something. It has a number in the title. A number, implying that this is just the first in a series. A series I will be posting online for everyone to see, effectively attracting attention and putting pressure on myself. While this one is more of a general post, others will talk more about interesting problems that I have encountered and how have I solved them. Thing is- to solve problems, I have to actually do work. Some might ask- how is this different from just sharing with family and friends? The answer to this is scale. I will post this everywhere where I am at least a little bit active online. Family and friends will see this yes, but also colleagues, old classmates, people I've seen once at conferences, people I have forgotten I know. And a big juicy post, promising that I will be showing off something I work on will certainly put me under a lot of pressure.
So to come back to the question- is this actually going to work? I still don't know. I guess that you'll know if I continue posting these. So check back soon. And keep doing so and this might be just the thing I need to actually do something.
While this post doesn't give definitive answers to anything- it gives ideas, which I hope you can scavenge something useful from as well. Is this going to work for everybody? I seriously doubt it. But make this an experiment for yourself as I am making it an experiment for me. Find what scares you more than putting your perfect idea into the world and incorporate it into the process. Make it so failing at doing work on your project means that you'll have to face your worse-than-that fear. Yes the first step will not be easy, as you'll deliberately have to do something that you absolutely don't want to do (or at least set yourself up for doing so in the future). But hey, if I can do it, you can do it as well.
Finding the motivation to work on a personal project is hard. Job is different. If you are lucky you like your work and at the end of the month it pays. And to quote Homer Simpson: "Money can be exchanged for goods and services". Working in your free time means that you'll have to squeeze this work around your job, your personal life and your sleep schedule. This task on itself is daunting enough. However, rumors seem to say that some people have done it in the past. So this means that there is the slightest of chance that it is actually possible.

[1] While this word itself does not exist per se, I think you should be able to understand its meaning from the sound it makes when it is being pronounced.

[2] Funny things is- I once tried to motivate myself by using an app- which lets you water a virtual plant each time you do some regular task. The result was that my virtual plants died.

[3] As I am writing this I actually have to update my online banking payment details, or I won't be able to pay my internet. I have around 16 days left at the time of writing to do that.

[4] Especially the very beginning if you are me

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