After working hard on my game for several weeks I’ve found myself procrastinating more than doing actual dev (whether it is art, levels or code). How can I deal with that?
Work on a different part of your game, or just go away for a few days and do nothing. No computer, no TV, and just get out into nature.
After 1 or 2 days you will be itching to get back onto your project again.
try being several years into your game… I go months without even loading it. lol.
That’s why I’m afraid of. I need to get out of laziness as fast as I can or I’ll lose any motivation to do this game (doubts will start to pour in, etc.)
Set a deadline.
Break your project into tasks and give each task a completion date - if it’s not finished by that time, move onto the next one and then come back to it later. The completion dates will keep you focused - and hopefully motivated (you can see how far away it is from completion). If you really need a break, do another short project - even a few days can be enough time to get your mind back on track.
If you have no way to track your tasks, I’d recommend using Podio. It’s a great tool - very flexible and can be adapted to suit your working processes/style.
And don’t let the scope creep too much - stick to the original design. If it really has to change, then ask yourself why - “because it’s better” is not a good enough reason 
work with a partner and constantly berate each other for being lazy.
Also check out www.trello.com.
It allows you to organise your tasks on a board in a visual way that can allows you to drag them around, set due dates etc.
Much easier to get stuff done this way, and gives you a sense of ‘progress’ when you move stuff over to the completed list.
Doubts are good. Develop your critical thinking to see your project for what it is so you can attack it’s weaknesses with more confidence.
As for motivation, I swear on the 5 minutes rule. Whenever you think about your game, boot up Unity. You have to spend 5 minutes in it. Do some work, just stare at it, playtest to find more weaknesses you could by just thinking about it. If you don’t feel like doing anything after those 5 minutes, you can close Unity until you think about it again. No tricks here.
It plays on the idea that imagining work is much harder than actually doing it. Once you’re in Unity and looking at and maybe playing your project, your thinking will switch from “Ugh, there’s so much work to do and it’s so hard” to “Well, while I’m here I might as well add a few lines of code here and here…”
By the way, I think this working on a different part of the project is a dangerous thing. Happens when you have a mental difficulty to overcome. Usually involves learning something new. That’s tedious and requires energy, so you go back to doing something you know how. I’m guilty myself, in Photoshop I’ll keep making the base colors juust right instead of adding shading. Behind my piano, I will play the songs I already know and perfect the timing on each note instead of learning new songs. In Unity/C4D I will model the fifth redundant car instead of writing the AI like I should.
If you want to do something that reminds you of what you already know, that’s fine. But to make real progress you have to think about what exactly it is you don’t want to do, and then work on exactly that, per 5 minutes rule. Does wonders for me.
I have 3 simple steps :-p
-
Stop what you are doing. Visualize what you need to do, even if you’re not on your pc. Know what you need to do first.
-
Divide your work into smaller tasks. Figure out what’s the first, easiest, task you can start with.
-
Force yourself to start NOW, cheat yourself by agreeing it’s just one thing. Once you start, your brain wants to keep going.
Things that make you stop is not feeling motivated, and not knowing what you should do next. That’s why being organized is a great source of motivation, and helps you keep going. The more you plan it, the more you want to do it.
The bigger % of your time you spend thinking about something, the more involved you feel. So if you procrastinate (web surfing, facebook, etc) you’re filling your brain with random concerns… it’s better to face away from the screen, reset your brain, so you can start thinking about what you really have to do.
What I do is this:
Put the game on your tablet or whatever you have. Take it to a quiet room. Then play it and write down everything that’s wrong with it or any ideas that you have. Don’t worry about how hard these problems are or how difficult the ideas are to implement.
Then you have a big list in notepad. You can start organising this list into: Bug fixes, Nice to Haves, Must haves, etc. Now start with the bug fixes and get them out the way one by one. Next the must haves. Until you left with the nice-to-haves. Cross out the nice to haves! (Unless you got loads of time).
Just making the list will take a load off your mind.
Turn off internet when working.
How about a kick in the ass?
For me, it’s setting a deadline or getting away from the project for a couple days- and everything else, as suggested above, is even better.
But really, nothing beats setting yourself a grueling (but doable) deadline.
For example- one of my jobs is freelance illustrator. I have 15-20 days to deliver the product. In this particular one, my tablet started getting funky so I ordered a used, legacy model tablet monitor. It got here and I would have had about 5 days still to meet deadline. Then a myriad of issues- none of my pens worked, had to special order a pen, then needed a proprietary cable they don’t make anymore so I had to go to Radioshack and splice a USB and Svideo together, THEN Photoshop started crashing. I’ve had to system restore about four times now- including many hours of fruitless troubleshooting said various issues.
Long story short- I got a one week extension. By the time everything was fixed, I had two days (yesterday and today) to get 30 pages done. My arm is sore, everything hurts but I have never been so productive.
Also, I temporarily deactivated my Facebook so I wouldn’t have that distraction any more. And, as bad as this sounds- while you work, don’t listen to music. I love listening to music as I work but it has proven time and again that you won’t work as efficiently, and the same holds true for me. Also, if you play from Youtube or Pandora or something, constantly flipping to the browser just opens too many avenues for distraction.
Hope that helped some. :x Good luck!
Take a break if you have to. This can mean literally getting up and turning off the computer, or it can mean shifting focus from, say art, to AI, for example. In addition, I find wanting to show your progress to anyone who may be following your game is a great motivator.
@JamesLeeNZ
Great picture.
I find taking a break and walking around a bookstore, in particular the programming and game dev sections, inspires me to get back to work.
Another vote for taking a break in whatever form suits you the best.
It’s usually testing my games again and again and again which gets me. I stop seeing the whole picture and I lose excitement. All I can think of is all those flaws and bazillion things still missing. And progress can feel so slow. But after a good break I get this fresh mindset about whole thing and usually get stuff done with quite vigor.
this… however yesterday my internet connection was out so I started working again
One thing that can really make you procrastinate is to set goals. I know this might seem counter-intuitive, but when you set a goal you imagine that you can and will get xyz done by a given date and time. What typically happens is you then find out it takes a tonne more time to do what you are trying to do, problems creep up that you didn’t expect, you don’t like some part of it and you change your mind etc. Meanwhile the goal turns into a threat, because the more important you make the goal the more power you give to it. And the more power it has in your mind the more you will feel it pressuring you and acting against you, putting you off, deterring you, and telling you that you’re guilty for being off-target and behind on your schedule. This is an immense turn off and is enough to make anyone want to run the other way. In particular, be careful of goals that are too far in the future - those ones are the real big ones which will haunt you and say there's no way you're going to get to this goal, look at what you've done so far, there is so much still to do.
I think what I mean to say is, it’s not so much that having goals is bad, either long or short term, but the problem is our EGO tends to use them as a way to attack ourselves. We USE the goal to tell ourselves the ways that we are not good enough, capable enough, how we’ve failed and how we failed in the past and will fail again. And the more times this happens the more frustrated you’ll get and then you’ll feel like you’ve never accomplished anything and you might as well give up. This is all internal stuff in your mind, and it’s optional, but can be hard to get past. So set yourself definitely shorter term goals only, and let go of the project. Let it go in order to keep it. Because it’s the holding onto it which, paradoxically, keeps you feeling enslaved and wanting to escape. Plan lightly, set goals loosely, don’t take success or failure so seriously, and lighten the hell up.
You sir, have amazed me on multiple occasions with your well thought out and explanatory responses. This is exactly what I needed to read. As well as seeing James’ picture.
You should really write some self help books, or any books for that matter (Hope you don’t take that as an insult in any way because it isn’t!)