I plan on writing about this more, but I came across an interesting video on YouTube by a video game developer which talks about motivation vs momentum. In his video, he speaks about how it is easy to begin a project on file, and quickly lose momentum. This does not necessarily mean you have lost the motivation, it is certainly still there, it’s just the momentum that is gone.

Take my COTW remake I am farting around with for example. For probably three or four days I was able to make great progress on a map editor. I started to mess with an algorithm to generate the dungeons, and since I don’t really understand it I just kind of petered off. I left visual studio open on my computer for a few days and I would poke at it a bit, but eventually I closed the program and that is basically it.

To put it in the context of this video, what I should have done is stop when I got frustrated and either worked on something else, or taken a break. The next day I should have picked it up and done something else that was needed to be done. It’s just like writing a book or building something, there is always something different you can work on until you are ready to come back to it. Like I could have worked on the program that will be the game itself. There are tons of things that need to be done there, like tons. I could have written it up so it read in a map and translated it to the in-game world. I could have written up the movement for the player character, or making it so the character can’t walk into walls or through objects or whatever. Tons of stuff to work on, and I’ll probably try and pick it back up today.

For now, I have a number of back-days I need to work on for this, so here we go!