Much good advice and experience here, thanks folks.
I’m one of those people who started a lot of projects and became disillusioned and hopeless too. I agree with the above, that it mainly came down to not really understanding all the work/pain that would be involved way beyond my original idea of what I wanted to achieve, ie choosing a goal/scope that was way too large with totally impossible timeframes. Once you start to see yourself failing to achieve the huge leap needed to get to the goal, and it taking a long long long time to make even tiny steps toward it, you start to feel really guilty and depressed about it. ie… “look at how much of a failure I am, I haven’t fulfilled my plan”. The more guilt you experience as a result of this failure the more you feel totally put off about the project and don’t want to even have anything to do with it - a natural reaction to try to be kinder to yourself and not make yourself so guilty… . but totally counter-productive at the same time. The original problem is and always was, the pipe-dream of something you could easily envisage but had barely any practical likelihood of getting finished in any reasonable timeframe. Unfortunately this can mean that all those really cool ideas are often the ones that need a tonne of custom development time way beyond your tolerance or patience. And then that in turn can mean that you end up with what seem like the smallest, simplest, tiniest and thus least impressive ideas being the only ones that you seem to have any hope of finishing… and that in itself it also somewhat depressing as you realize you just don’t have the drive/ability to pull off the highly competitive super amazing game concepts all by your little self.
It can be good to fail, though, and to learn from that failure. For me it turned out to be more of a spiritual lesson in letting go of trying to do everything myself. No matter what task you’re doing or what your interests are, going it alone is really hard. If you can open up to letting yourself get help and not be a total island of super-impressive multi-talent, maybe you then have more reasonable chance to finish something using other people’s art assets or pre-existing models or scripts or tools or whatever. Certainly trying to start from scratch, from a total clean slate, and do everything all by yourself, is THE hardest challenge of all. You don’t have to stay in that place of total stubborness and sacrifice.
One other thing that really set me on a spiral of self-destruction was trying to use the wrong tool for the job. I was not able to accept Unity3D as it is, its strengths, what kind of games it is best suited to. I wanted to make the kind of games I was trying to make before Unity came along, mainly 2d games using a workflow that was very different to Unity’s 3d-focussed workflow. It was like trying to push a square peg through a round hole. The kind of games I wanted to make always always always required me to do a lot of custom scripting and unconventional use of features because Unity really wasn’t the right tool for the job. Unity isn’t great at everything. But it is great at some things, mainly 3D things, and mainly with a particular workflow. I had to pretty much, very slowly, surrender the game ideas I had that did not fit well with Unity and start looking at what kind of games Unity CAN accomplish with the least pain, what kind of features those games might have (e.g. 3d physics, shaders, models, etc), and accept that these are the only types of games really suited to work most easily in the Unity environment. So I suggest giving serious consideration to whether Unity is really the right tool for you because ideally you have to be willing to accept it on its terms and go along with its way of working, otherwise you’re going to be constantly frustrated and disillusioned.
For me I eventually had to admit to myself and realize also that I had gone along with all the hype and excitement and buzz of the developing technologies and the game development crowd and the supposed promise of being successful making games and that whole dream. There is considerable momentum to this whole game development thing, people see/hear of others doing it and want in on it, especially when the big tools like Unity tout democratization and ease of pain and empowering anyone and everyone to be capable of making games which really is unrealistic and something of a fantasy. Not everyone can make or enjoy making games no matter what the tools are like. I had to look really deep down in my heart to see that game development was not what I really wanted and it never really had been - I just got caught up in the fantasy of it. It took a long time and a lot of unhappiness and constant failure before I came to that acceptance and let go of it. It might be that game development is not really what you want, but only you can know that.
If and only IF I were to ever try to make games again it would be totally focussed on what I want to do for fun and not to please any audience or to participate in the heavily competitive and money-focussed game development rat race, and only the kind of games that Unity is really really suited to with its various strengths. And even that is open to question.
