I don't. It's been years since I finished anything, really.
I swirl in an endless vicious cycle that generally starts off by me getting extremely excited by a well-thought idea and the classic "this is the one". Then I put whatever project I was working on behind, work nonstop on the new one for, like, two weeks max. And in the end, if I stop for one day, I never come back to it. I have tons of folders containing unfinished GameMaker projects, over 80.
Some miraculous times I go back to the project, years later even, only to be horrified by the spaghetti code mess and start over from scratch instead of doing a
code surgery. I have two games that I've redone from scratch FOUR times. I am not kidding you.
Then I demoralize myself by thinking the exact opposite of what I thought at the beginning: "this is NOT the one", "this will never be liked", etc. It also doesn't help that the people I surround myself with never give me feedback or show interest in what I do, despite me showing them, so it's pretty sad.
Often the stare depends whether I need money or not. It's a never ending limbo of me trying to decide whether I want to make "an average game I can make fast to get revenue and/or exposure" or "my dream game that'll take 2+ years to make". I never settle and others' opinions on this generally screw me up.
I've become obsessed with Game Jams in the last years. They are a time and place where I can make games and wrap-up fast. I am confident that I am a very decent programmer so I generally rank decently whenever the jams are competitions and it's really gratifying. But 24-48 hour games are not really great material and will never be something that will either grant me success or money or whatever. In the end, they delude and distract me from making the games that matter as well.
How do I stay consistent at what I do? How do I figure out what I
really want to make?
Dunno man. I came to this thread for some answers.
TL;DR: I am unable to settle down for one project. Help.
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OK, please stick with me for a possibly lengthly response:
I'm going to make tons of "artist"/"art world" analogies here because the symptoms of your trouble —the nature of this "trouble"— relate/relates directly. What you are suffering is common with very creative, passionate people. Make no mistake regarding the following: Not every creative person is "passionate." Notions surrounding ideas of creativity itself/creative people are often romanticized. In your case it is true. This combination is can be incredibly potent, resulting in very positive outcomes, but it can also result in terrible frustration, misguided products (games, art, designs, books, etc.)... The earmark, if you will, which tells us that you're not just passionate, but extremely so, is this mania you exhibit when starting a new project. You get an idea, theme, set of ideas, etc., and become feverishly inspired. The inspiration is so powerful that it starts as a huge, flowing wave. The consistency of this "wave" allows you to work at a heightened and intense, yet even pace. This means that your emotions, zeal, technical restraint, all of it, are steady (for a time). All of the sudden, and very unexpectedly, you calm down; and the disparity between how you just recently felt vs the way you now feel is so great that it is in a way disorientating. It is in that disorientation that you begin to search for the interest that you had when you were just working, but you can't locate it —at least at the level that you were experiencing. Then, it becomes "all or nothing" for you... If you can't revisit these things you were just working on while feeling the same things that you felt at the time, you begin to point fingers in the wrong places end end up wanting no part of it... or... You look over what you'd done and become overly critical of it. You judge those things through the lens of a person who is a lot more calmer. You start to think that this thing and that thing —whatever they may be— are somehow deficient, "problematic" because they don't give you the same feelings you had when you made them... Consider this: When a woman gives birth and is experiencing all of the intense emotion, wonder, and highness of the event, does she say "meh" the next day when she looks at the baby simply because she's returned to her regular level of emotion? No, but it must be hard to reconcile the difference (emotionally). The higher you rise, the harder you fall. "TRUST YOUR FEELINGS, LUKE." Do not return to recent or older projects, judging them based on the criteria that you don't feel now the way you felt when you made them. Judge them on their own merits, and the fact that you did feel so strongly —and for good reason. You may think that you're revsiting these projects with a clearer mind, so whatever you see that strikes you as problematic must in fact be problematic. This is often wrong. Apart from some necessary tweaks or what have —and which are almost always required with things as technical as coding— the fundamentals of what you originally made should absolutely stay in place. Did you ever see the movie, "Mr. Holland's Opus?" This guy was the same way, but was an author. He wasn't alleviated of this burden until all of his pages blew away in the wind. "He could not stop writing," he said. A professor I knew burned all of his paintings from his studio in a huge fire. DON'T YOU DO THE EQUIVALENT, LUKE... Here's why: In their two cases (one fictional, one not), they had not become frustrated enough to voice their struggle prior to wiping their slates clean. This means they've only wiped the slate clean to allow for more of the same disfunction. So to summarize the advise for this portion of the response, Trust how you first felt when creating "whatever" and to "whatever" extent. Upon returning, ask yourself about the merits of the work itself, putting aside your new "feelings" vs "the original feelings" ("circle of despair"). Yield to "technical perfectionism," if you must, but not emotional perfectionism. PARSE THESE. Yield to the former upon new inspirations, yield to the latter upon revisiting the work.
For this issue about not knowing what you really want, or want to produce, or what you really care about: This is largely linked to the above, but there are some aspects that are singular and need to be addressed on their own. First off, and before we get into a back and forth in this thread regarding specifics of your projects, my advise is that you not share any of your interests publicly at this point. You are too sensitive right now, and you are in desperate need of your own approval of your work, not anyone else's (approval of it). In the art world, "studio visits" were the worst things that could happen with an artist feeling similarly to yourself. The reason being, if someone else can "see the forest through the trees," but you can't, you will become more and more isolated (in that/ "your" forest) and no way out. That aside, you are a manic creative. So am I. So was Francis Bacon. So are tons of the best painters there ever were, and many people I've known personally through the years. Many painters have a saying: "You spend your whole life making the same painting." This is true. You say that you don't know what you want to make, —and you're not lying— but if you were to pour over all of your work (these many unfinished project folders) you would most certainly find a number of recurring items. These could be anything, and it doesn't really matter what in regard to my point. The point is that these items exist throughout, and I would bet any money on it. No matter how different many of your projects might be from one another, there are commonalities. And this is where we look refer back to the fist issue... How did you feel when you first had whatever idea/ideas about those projects...? So two questions: Going through all of your work, what notes would you take regarding these "threads?" How did you feel when you were first working with them? My guess is that you have a bunch of folders with stuff that you can recognize as being very similar across the board, BUT, BUT... you stopped working with these things because you thought something was wrong, or heaven forbid, not good enough with them. But you sure as hell did them over and over, right?. See the cycle. And let me slightly ammend something I wrote at the end of the first section about evaluating previous work on the merits alone... Don't even do that YET, because you're not strong enough to "parse." Start out trusting first. When you start reigning in this mania more to your advantage —because of course their are advantages to creative mania— then you can start that brand of nit-picking, but not before. Just believe what I've advised here.