The worst part of being an indie game dev

I've been working on an indie game for the past year and I hit rock bottom. I had come up with a dope idea for a game: running a medieval tavern with your friends. I fleshed out a lot of the components, built a fun environment, set up customers, added serving mechanics, decorations, lighting, npcs. I even had the room temperature IQ idea to add multiplayer, but hey, people said it looked great. There was a lot of excitement, constant discord pings asking when I was releasing it, but I became really bored with the project, and lost all interest.

Music in order of play -

About me -
Hi I'm TJ, a developer who is passionate about learning gamedev. I primarily develop games on the unity platform using C# but any code is fair game. I’m still learning a lot but hope you’ll enjoy my

Software Used -
Unity Version: 2021.1.22f1

PC Specs -
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
AMD Ryzen 7 2700x
32GB RAM
Way too much caffeine

#unity3d #indiedev #gamedev #indiegame #gamedevelopment #devlog #madewithunity
#indiedev

[jamesrobertson]

One thing that really helps me is what I call the 1% rule. If you have a 0% day you will never ever finish. If you can convince yourself to have a 0.1% day you will finish eventually. I can almost always convince myself to start by telling myself "I'll just spend 15 min and see what I can do" and then I end up working on it for hours. Sometimes I just make a minor change and I am done for the day but more often than not it gets me going.

[cactus]

dealing with coder’s block is really hard. motivation is something that’s very difficult to fully pin down, i’m happy to know you figured it out and i’m excited to see progress on the game in the future. good luck! ❤

[TheMonyarm]

Sometimes you can't get the motivation needed. Im in such a position myself, i've made a design document for my game, but i just can't get myself to sit down and work on it.

[ckwallace]

Breaks are really important in the development process. Not only can it help clear your mind, but you might even come up with a new approach to problems you've been encountering. Happy to hear you found your inspiration again! you're inspiring a lot of other people with your work. keep the content coming and good luck finding that right balance!

[SebastianGraves]

Great video man. I feel you on the motivation thing. There's so many project ideas I want to give my attention to, but refuse to do so. Sticking with something to the end, is undoubtedly the hardest challenge for most game devs.

[whereswaldo]

4:50 Love the little muaahhh. It was a nice touch.

[pixeldustinteractive]

So happy you're continuing, breaks are really important and difficult to force yourself to take. Cheers

[carlstigaxel]

TJ listen, the world needs this game. IT MUST HAPPEN!

[automatic_sandwich]

Excellent video once again bro, so looking forward to where this game is headed!

[obrooks]

Nice tip about refactoring! I hadn't considered that as a way to combat burnout. It's a win win win. Good stuff

[Yeerok]

Your game dev videos have been a huge inspiration for me to get into game dev finally. Been wanting to for a long time just never did.

[FanaticChain]

This was a great video! I hoped to see some funny commentary on the
Spoilers:









Funny bar fights, but knowing that you’ll continue the project is far more important

[birdboys]

hype that you're back and excited for the future

[fourplenty]

great insights, sometimes breaking down what the core gameplay is all about, helps getting back to the core features required

[grzesfu]

+1 for the wave function collapse tutorial! I've seen Oskar Stalberg's talk and I think I understand the concept, and I admire your dedication to try it out - which is probably the best way to learn, but it would be great to see a complete guide on how a simple version of it works end-to-end.

[dillonshea]

I get finishing games is hard but 7 projects sounds like a buncha nothin', I had at least like 40 ideas for games but I never finished even one, though I'm doing it in RPG Maker so the idea is to really utilize what the engine is good at and making them unique that makes that game, that game, if you kinda get what I'm talking about, and making a bad RPG Maker game is really easy, making a good one takes some real frigging time
one real important thing is to NEVER GIVE UP breaks definitely when things get foggy but NEVER EVER GIVE UP A GOOD IDEA.

[swalscha]

Nice to see you back with this project, keep up the good work (and motivation) 💪

[gallow_]

Your stuff is really inspiring as someone that's recently gotten into Unity myself, and your humour is on point 👌

[TinyTank]

As this video came out i started to make a new project. Time to see if i can make it past the mental block lol. Games looking great i cant wait to be able to test it! Keep it up! We all love the work!

[michaelclark]

This happens dude, sorry to hear. I build mobile apps and get through large chunks of it and suddenly lose motivation, even when friends and family are excited about using it and asking me about it.