Motivation

In our opinion, the worse enemy for hobbyist/independent game development is lack of motivation…

It’s sometimes hard to have a hard day at work and get home and still have the energy to go program/draw/model/etc…

Lately, work for us has been very hard, loads of projects that have to be ready in the next month, and we’re a very small team… Add to that the fact that we live in Portugal, where the economic conditions are very harsh at the moment, leading to big worries in responsible adults (such as ourselves, *cough*), and the fact that we’re doing boring stuff in the game (for example, I’m doing the refactoring on the editor to comply with the recent wide-sweeping changes of the resource manager of Spellbook).

The end result is that our motivation has sunk very low indeed, and we’ve been struggling to find ways to get it back…

One of the ideas we had internally was to make another game, a short form game, in which we could focus on just making something quickly, in about two weeks or so. We would then use that game to get some attention to Grey (so the effort wasn’t wasted in terms of our pet project).

Another idea was to try to make another parts of the game, which are more enjoyable (like rendering work, etc), but in the current state of the editor (broken due to the resource manager changes I’ve talked about) won’t allow us to go for that easily…

Yet another idea (but quickly discarded) was to just put Grey on standby while we recollect ourselves, get this phase of our jobs out of the way… Problem with this is that my experience tells me that if we put something to the side, it will be harder to get back into the mood to get back to it…

So, we’re still thinking on what we can do to boost our motivation, so if you have any ideas, just let us know!