Hardest part of a game, this is a very interesting topic. It's taken me nearly a year to understand what went wrong for me. For a bit of background, I have been working on my game Vitality for around 5/6 years now. Mostly in parallel with high school and University. However, after my final year of uni, I decided to spend a year to try and finish the game. That didn't quite go to plan, so 11 months ago I got a normal job in the games industry, now working as a developer technology engineer at Samsung.
At first I thought of all the obvious things:
- Lack of motivation
- Raw time it takes to get things done
- Planning/design
- Work environment isolation (was working with others, but remotely)
- Financial concerns (not actively making money, but spending money to develop and live)
And while all of those things are definitely factors, after evaluating it more, I knew that I was a very disciplined individual, who didn't rely on motivation alone to get things done, so that didn't quite feel right. Then, I also believed in myself that I could get things done. However, the real nail in the coffin was the mental factor, and this manifested in quite a strange way for me. Whether it was my interpretation of the situation, or genuinly what was happening, I constantly found that all of the people around me, my friends, my family and flatmates really had no faith or confidence in what I was doing. Having so many people around you make you feel like what you are doing is a waste of time and that assumption that you are dicking around all day long really starts to burn after a while. Family pressures to "get a proper job" (despite only using my own money and resources) and friends who seemed to have absolutely no interest in what you were doing and would constantly brush it off. Conversations starting with "have you got any plans for your gap year", and then I say, "I'm not taking a gap year, i'm working on my project", followed up with a "Oh?! You're still working on that?".
After a few months of this, you start believing them, maybe I am wasting my time? What will realistically come out of this? I found myself constantly trying to seek validation for all the effort I was putting in, and the hard work that I knew that I was doing. The horrible part is that when you work from home, any time you spend not working seems to get held against you. If you spend 5 hours gaming in the evening, suddenly people think you aren't really ever working. This whole process has basically given me pretty bad imposter syndrome and that's what really destroyed my ability to effectively work.
You could argue that it's my own personal responsibility to take that with a grain of salt and still continue to drive towards my goals and passion, though I guess I didn't have the fortitude to do so. I would also hazard a guess that many others don't as well, so I have a lot of respect for those indie's who do manage to finish their games, because while it seems "easy" when you are working on something, and so many people here are definitely capable of it, the reality is much harder and stressful. I also know that many other Indie's can suffer from different mental battles, but this was mine. It almost feels like what you need sometimes is just someone to tell you that you are doing the right. Oddly, I now consider the 9 to 5 full-time job as the "easy" option, because for some reason, people in society value that much more.
To lighten the mood, here is a meme that encompasses my post: