The past week has been quite paradoxical. On one hand, I seem to have done more than ever before. I've been getting up at 6:30 and really knuckling down to get some work done. On the other hand, I seem to have worked on everything else except my game. It's not even playable at this point, yet every time I open up the IDE I just stare for a few minutes before wondering what on Earth I should do. It's quite disheartening, and it almost feels like my coding mojo has left me. Not a good sign.
I'm not sure whether it's a proper rut, or if I'm just struggling because nothing fun is happening. It doesn't seem so long since I was able to code up a nifty demo in a few days, and yet I've been at this for several weeks and have virtually nothing to show.
Perhaps I should dye my hair black and write some poetry.
Moaning aside, things are going well in other areas. I'm getting to grips with a few project management applications, which I'll be writing about in the future. I've also been polishing up a few of my libraries so I can release them into the wild. Writing unit tests and documentation aren't the most entertaining tasks on the planet, but someone has to do them.
So what's in store for the next few weeks and months?
I'm cleaning up some of my internal resources so I can release them to the public. They're not exactly earth-shattering, but I find them useful and sharing things is always good. I always imagined this site as somewhere I could share my tools and code, so it's about time I actually started doing it.
I'm also working on some interesting blog topics, including the next article in the "Game Design Lessons" category. I'm also preparing a few surprises in a few months, and I hope you'll stick around to see what they are.
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I know what it's like to be faced with the blank page, and it can be fairly intimidating at first, but knocking a big task into small ones can be quite a good way to go at first - I'll want to write x number of words, for example. I don't usually make it but it's a good way to get started.
I like the idea of putting inspirational quotes at the top, too. My favourite at the moment is "wouldn't it be great if this [book, game or whatever] took off and did well? Well, it won't unless you finish it." That helps me to recommit to what I'm doing, and reminds me that, unfortunately, the quickest way to get something done is just to do it.