Thursday, April 25, 2013

Too Many Options!

Creating is hard. I'm sure this isn't news to anyone who's ever tried to make anything (so, everyone), but tonight has just been an abject lesson in that fact. Earlier, I figured I could work on one of my many ongoing game designs. They're all in pretty early stages, unsurprisingly. I've gotten to the point in each of them where I've realized how many things would have to fall into place to make it work as I want it to, and how interconnected all of those things are, and then I pretty much just freeze up and write a blog post about it.

It's my perfectionism at work, certainly. I know that there's no way you can make a game (or write a story, or learn a coding language or whatever) whole-cloth, all in one fell swoop. All the pieces work together, and you just can't do all that at once. What I need to do is isolate one piece or system of the whole and work on that, but for whatever reason I'm horrible at that.

It's like me and drafts of papers. With the exception of my Comps (where it was forced), there wasn't usually a lot of difference between my first draft and my final draft. Most of the editing took place before the words hit the page, and that's not bragging - any time I saved in the revision process was more than made up for in the writing process taking twice as long as it should have. Sure, the first draft was close to final, but it was arduous to write and was almost certainly less efficient than just pooping something out and fixing it later. I just can't operate that way.

There's also being paralyzed by choices and possibilities. It's probably related to me looking at the whole rather than the parts - I can't even focus on just making the game; I end up thinking about outlandish things like distribution or whether I should turn it into a computer game. I'm putting the cart so far in front of the horse that the wainwright is still working on the damn thing by the time the horse shows up.

This was basically my night, as I summed up on Facebook:

12:04 - "I should work on my game design!"
12:27 - "Out of curiosity, could any of those game-making software suites help with actually making this?"
12:58 - "Probably not. Maybe I should work on learning a programming language, that could be useful."
1:44 - "Oh god, there are a lot of these. And Java is different that JavaScript? I'm in over my head here."
1:52 - "I should just focus on making this a boardgame. Then I don't have to learn 8 new languages and paralyze myself with too many options."
1:58 - "I should feed the cats instead!"

And now, better just blog about it! I know most of it is discipline and that I'm lacking outside motivators (since this is not presently my livelihood, which is good because then I'd be in real trouble). Also, I'm apparently becoming quite skilled in dodging a difficult task by contemplating other, equally difficult tasks rather than realizing that whatever I do make is going to suck at first, and that that's ok. I've been getting that advice since sophomore year of high school, and while I know it, it's never really sunk in.

Again, I'm sure this is by no means unique to me, but I still grapple with it periodically, whenever my creative impulses become too much to ignore. What I need to do is either buckle down and work on one of the game design docs or start learning Java and just acknowledge that the game will be a broken mess for a long time or that I will be a garbage programmer for years. Both options are, unfortunately, very difficult for my perfectionist brain to accept.

And I realize that I mused on this exact subject seven months ago. I'm so good at realizing why I haven't accomplished anything!

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