Tricking Myself

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Now that I've settled back into my usual schedule, my subconcious usually wins the arguments to snooze the alarm a little longer, or that future-self will do the work on the weekend. Well waking up late doesn't leave enough time and the weekends have stayed pretty darn busy, and if they're not busy, I've been spending time playing games rather than working on my own ideas in Unity.

This week's motivation for myself: quit polishing ideas. An idea that seems perfect in your head is likely going to still need some work when you bring it into reality. The idea of perfection keeping you back from putting something on paper, a screen, or whatever the medium, is stopping the project from coming about. It's not going to be perfect when it is first started, but you can't actually begin to polish it until you start. Expecting perfection will likely lead to frustration, which is my most common obstacle and source of derailment.

I haven't looked back at my list of things keeping me from moving forward in a while, but perfection and frustration are both on the list. Some lessons I've learned from practicing pixel art and sharing my work with strangers is accepting when a project may not be perfect, but good enough to share. It's like not I have a finished project just waiting to release to the world, but I do feel some hesitation at the prospect that I may not like the finished result because I don't really know what I'm doing.

On the bright side, I got a monitor arm for my desk so I can bring my monitor close without making about 90% of my desk obsolete. It didn't really save any space, but it's a lot more convenient to move my monitor closer so I can stop leaning forward.

I'm likely to have to reacreate the scripts to interact with NPCs and use Inky. I should really do better about backing up scripts so I can move them between projects.

This week's distractions include: Cult of the Lamb and Dead Island 2. Cult of the lamb has some great animations and sounds. It's a pretty fun action game, but I find myself more interested in the town-building side and managing my cult of followers. It has definitely made me laugh. Everyone I heard comment on Dead Island 2 had good things to say about it. I didn't get far in the first one, but I did spend some time in Dying Light, which sounds like it has some overlap with the developers. I kinda wish it focused more on guns. I was finding myself not really enjoying the FPS melee action. After I sat back from my screen with a controller, I found it more fun. So far, it is also shaping up to have some good comedy in it.