Hi

I've been making games as a hobby for a long time, but it was some years since I actually finished a project. This is slightly frustrating, and I guess a pretty common problem for someone who isnt pushed by deadlines and economy to finish projects.

I have typically at least 4 more active projects at any time (and many more games I've started but pretty much never touch any more). My projects are all fairly ambitious (but not impossible to finish, all are 2d for example) as I don't find working on very simple games fun.

I think projects often loose pace after a while and I just gets fed up with that particular project/setting and it's just more rewarding to start a new one. I have too many ideas I want to realise (or sometimes just prototype). Do you have the same experience? Any advice?

Thanks a bunch!
Erik

Hmm, one thing I tend to do is work out roughly how long I think it will take, and I tend to only go for projects I feel I can actually achieve, that and I keep everything im working on written on a whiteboard so I always have it in front of my face reminding me to work on it.

But how long are we talking about that it takes before youre losing interest? if its like a week or two then it seems like the issue just may be the project isnt something you want to work on.. if its a few months then yeah, you may just need a break before getting back into it.

I don't do much game development in my free time nowadays, but I've got many other programming related projects going on, and my process is roughly the same. My philosophy is to try to remove or defer as much complexity as possible and get a "complete enough" version of the software as soon as possible.

Usually, my personal projects follow these four stages:

(1) I have a cool idea that I would like to realise, I spend an evening working on it. Many, not to say most, of my projects get abandoned after this stage. Maybe I'm not that interested, they weren't as fun as I expected or I simply don't have the time to keep working on them at the moment. In any case, I accept this as part of the normal process. I've got way more ideas than I'll ever be able to realise.

(2) If I keep working on a project after the first evening, I try to reduce the project to the bare minimum set of core features required to cover the principal idea or use case. Even if I have a lot of cool ideas, I try to push as many as I can to further stages, and have a minimum game/project that I can finish in a few weeks of intermittent work. I know that I will abandon many projects after this stage, so I try to set goals that I can accomplish and have a feeling of completition even if my interest/free time plummets.

(3) Now I have a working version of the game, but it probably feels more like a demo than a complete version. It's time to focus on the features that I need to make it feel like a finished product. Again, I try to focus on the features that are strictly required to make the game feel like a complete working version, and that I can hopefully finish in a few more weeks of work.

(4) At this stage, I consider that my project is "complete" and I add all the features that I wanted to have but weren't important enough to implement in previous stages. Usually, I will have collected a list of them during the previous stages. I keep working on that set of features, one at a time, until I lose interest in the project. It doesn't matter how far I get, because at this point I have something that already feels complete and deliverable.

As somebody once said, "software is never completed, only abandoned", and since chances are that I will abandon it sooner than later, I try to have something that feels complete enough as soon as possible. That doesn't mean that I defer all the cool and interesting features to the end of the project. However, most of the times I can identify one or two interesting ideas that are the core of what I want to do, and defer the rest to later stages.

Good points. And what about starting new projects? That seems to be my nemesis  I don't grow tired of my projects until after half a year or so, so they usually have some meat on them, but i get so inspired to make new games when I play other games!

10 minutes ago, suliman said:

And what about starting new projects?

Don't.

How about keeping a central list of all your projects. That should embarrass you sufficiently whenever you add a new one to it and the list is growing long, because the old ones aren't finished yet.

I have this exact same problem.  Lately, I've decided to look at it as the journey that's important instead of the finished project.  It's like anything, you build it up in your mind that there is so much left to do, etc, and it makes it worse and worse to keep going.  Instead I break it down into a small next goal like getting this part working.  Another thing I've been doing is break it up into main sections and then work on all of them periodically, instead of totally finishing one section before moving on.  It keeps it fresh.  And, like someone else said, just get a basic section working and then add to it.  For me, these are separate projects that will later be joined.