I keep remaking and restarting my projects

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
1

Hey,

I’ve had this problem for an absurd amount of time, and I need help. Bad.

Let’s say I want to make a shooter game (which I do).

In the beginning I have a strong idea, concept, premise, how everything fits together, how I will program it and structure it, etc.

When I begin actually programming and it sets in difficulty-wise, I am extremely strong with my programming, self-awareness, I structure properly, and make full use of some format or framework.

I create a lot of core features that all are very modular and easy to modify.

After a while, I get tired, and demotivated, self-concious, and lazy. Instead of finishing my gun system because I suck at making good particles, it feels bad, it looks bad, etc. I just use a freemodel gun system. This is alright for the first few days until I start to feel bad about using a freemodel.

“I’m a competent developer right? I spent so much time making these well-made systems, and I’m using a freemodel that bloats my game structure?”

So I restart, with those old principles in mind, but it doesn’t click. Lost all of the previous code, starting from base zero. And hey if I really feel bad I’ll change the game idea too, who cares? (Sarcasm, although I’ve kinda overcome this).

As I go I end up taking a lot of shortcuts. Again. If you’ve noticed it all comes back around. This time it’s using some programming or design shortcut to reduce my amount of work. Essentially lazyness.

As a practical example, I needed to make a cannon but I didn’t want to reprogram my raycast projectiles to account for explosions and explosive damage, so instead of using my proven system I made a new physics based server side projectile system because I didn’t want to do more work to make it work.

Help.

Thanks for reading!!!11!!

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2

Restarting is a sign of perfectionism.

Nothing wrong with it, its just learning from your mistakes.

Dont overthink it.

Even in your example I dont see anything really wrong with it, you are just evaluating and testing if there is a better way to do something.

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3

Yeah, I have this problem too. I have wayyy too many projects left unfinished in my account.
Some advice is that there’s a general stigma amongst developers that using free models and assets is bad (as you mentioned), and in reality it’s really not bad. It’s mostly the fact that a lot of those models have backdoors, and the “incompetence” of devs who use them is just because they don’t know enough about a certain topic, and therefore compensate by implementing a free system and, in turn, have a bad result. Because, again, they don’t know how it works. But try it sometime! You’ll amuse yourself with how much more fun the workflow will be.

Some more advice is to just go with the flow, “start before knowing how”. As corporate as this may sound, a creative process seriously helps with having more motivation down the line. In @dthecoolest’s words: Don’t think about it! Trying to make a perfect system might be more poisonous than you think.

About laziness… I have that too. A lot of it is just being within your comfort zone and not wanting things to fail, and spending way too much time fixing it. Truth is, things happen, and you gotta get out of your comfort zone eventually. Here’s a fantastic video that can help you advance in such.

Some other words:
If you want to have more fun, do it with friends and make sure to have a good time.
If you want to complete a deadline, have everything listed out so you don’t bite off more than you can chew.
If you want to finish your goals, stay consistent. An hour a day of blankly thinking and staring at code can be enough. But always make sure to try!

Hope this helps!

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