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[baconman]

Spending my time on this forum when I should be programming instead.

QFT!

[/size]

  (That, or playing... I mean, playtesting stuff I find here.)

[Derakon]

Sometimes it's just buckling down and getting something done that I don't really want to do. I spent a ridiculously long time roadblocked by font rendering, for example -- I was switching from SDL to OpenGL for my rendering process, and OpenGL doesn't have a built-in way to handle fonts. So I spent some time looking around for an existing font library that met my standards, couldn't find one, found one, couldn't get it to work, and gave up in frustration*.

Finally last Saturday I just sat down and prototyped out my own mini-font library. It didn't take all that long, really (mostly since I tossed all of the complicated parts of font rendering; instead I just constrain everything to be fixed-width with no special formatting or accented characters), and now I have font rendering again I can move on with the more interesting parts of game development! But I was blocked for over a month on something that was not very interesting to work on, didn't have a premade solution, and seemed (at first glance) to be complicated.

* I'm working in Python here, so while FTGL would be a good solution for C/C++ programmers, it wasn't an option for me. PyFTGL is the library I found and couldn't get to work; it doesn't seem to want to build in OSX.

[chris_b]

I spend way too long checking out every single little tweak to the game mechanics.

Eg. If the player doesn't jump high enough, then I'll modify the jump height, compile and spend 5 minutes jumping around my test level, rather than 30 seconds.

[Smithy]

My day job.

I take the covers off of old textbooks and then switch them with covers that say 'new edition.' Then they're resold to students for sixty bucks a pop.

Haha, take that, college students.

I'm livin' the dream for seven bucks an hour.

[InfiniteStateMachine]

life 

[Guard]

Perfectionism and over-ambitiousness are my also my bane. I want everything in my game. For example, I want TCP Movement and connecting players... that's damn hard for me right now - but my brain wants it in anyways.

[G-Factor]

Perfectionism and over-ambitiousness are my also my bane. I want everything in my game. For example, I want TCP Movement and connecting players... that's damn hard for me right now - but my brain wants it in anyways.

It's tough to balance polish with actually finishing the game. I think you get one chance to make an impression. If you release something that isn't polished people will be less inclined to play subsequent releases.

With my game I've made a conscious decision to hold back entire feature sets from the demo. It will not have a menu screen, it will not have sound or music. But everything that IS in there is going to be as polished as I can possibly make it.

If I need to sacrifice features or polish for the sake of completing the game, I'll cut features every single time. But I hear ya...doing so is very difficult. You just need to suck it up and do it or your game will never see the light of day.

Oh...and what's my biggest obstacle? Well...my friends convinced me to start playing WoW again 

[Paint by Numbers]

My biggest obstacle to creating games is just not feeling like creating games. I sort of get into rhythms where I will freely work on a game every day, then, if I skip working for one day, I lose my mojo and just don't want to work any more. I'll go through a day thinking "yeah, in a minute", and then just stop caring.

I'd just sit down sometime and do it, but my brain is so obnoxious. "Nope. I just don't feel like it."

[G-Factor]

My biggest obstacle to creating games is just not feeling like creating games. I sort of get into rhythms where I will freely work on a game every day, then, if I skip working for one day, I lose my mojo and just don't want to work any more. I'll go through a day thinking "yeah, in a minute", and then just stop caring.

I'd just sit down sometime and do it, but my brain is so obnoxious. "Nope. I just don't feel like it."

Unfortunately this is what separates the men from the boys. It's like exercising and eating healthy; if it was fun everyone would do it. A lot of people think game development is all fun and games (ha ha), but the reality is that it's a lot of hard work and often times you'd rather be doing something else like watch TV or going out drinking with mates. It's the people who despite this force themselves to work on their games instead of doing other 'more immediately fun' things that actually finish projects. That's the unfortunate reality but then again if games dev WAS buckets load of fun at every turn then everyone would do it and you wouldn't be as unique a snowflake. There's no 'why' in it...you simply have to buckle down and do it.

Here's two main ways I motivate myself

1) Think of how awful I'll feel if I abandon yet another project. The 'pain' of doing boring stuff in my game is less than the 'pain' I'll feel if I stop working and feel like I've failed. The lesser of two pains generally wins. You need to have this mentality.

2) Think of how awesome it will be when I actually finish my project. Getting people to play it, having it in my portfolio, having something I can look back at years from now and haave a chuckle.

That's why it is imperative that projects you embark on must be realistic because if the pain of working on it simply becomes too great, you WILL stop. It's human nature.




 

[GameRoom]

I just get really excited about another idea, although I usually finish the second game. Usually if I'm bored with a game it's going slow and it's not fun enough, so I guess it's a good thing. Also, after I finish a game I start working on 3 or 4 projects and abandoning them.

[Paint by Numbers]

Unfortunately this is what separates the men from the boys. It's like exercising and eating healthy; if it was fun everyone would do it. A lot of people think game development is all fun and games (ha ha), but the reality is that it's a lot of hard work and often times you'd rather be doing something else like watch TV or going out drinking with mates. It's the people who despite this force themselves to work on their games instead of doing other 'more immediately fun' things that actually finish projects. That's the unfortunate reality but then again if games dev WAS buckets load of fun at every turn then everyone would do it and you wouldn't be as unique a snowflake. There's no 'why' in it...you simply have to buckle down and do it.

Here's two main ways I motivate myself

1) Think of how awful I'll feel if I abandon yet another project. The 'pain' of doing boring stuff in my game is less than the 'pain' I'll feel if I stop working and feel like I've failed. The lesser of two pains generally wins. You need to have this mentality.

2) Think of how awesome it will be when I actually finish my project. Getting people to play it, having it in my portfolio, having something I can look back at years from now and haave a chuckle.

That's why it is imperative that projects you embark on must be realistic because if the pain of working on it simply becomes too great, you WILL stop. It's human nature.

Yup.

[JamesGecko]

I have discovered a new and exciting obstacle. I've now gotten a (non-game related) programming job. Development is fun in itself, and games can have some really dull parts as far as code goes, so I'm actually enjoying my work at my job more than my work on my game engine. But I write code all day. When I return home, I really don't feel like writing any more code. Level design or (crappy) pixel art work maybe. But no development or logic or anything that looks like code.

I may have to make stuff over the weekends in Game Maker or learn Unity or something, because otherwise none of my ideas will be going anywhere fast.  

[J. R. Hill]

Laughing at my "brilliant ideas" then realizing they aren't as funny as I think they are.

[superflat]

I spend way too long checking out every single little tweak to the game mechanics.

Eg. If the player doesn't jump high enough, then I'll modify the jump height, compile and spend 5 minutes jumping around my test level, rather than 30 seconds.

Yes.  This is one of my bugbears.  I sometimes think it's worth it though... Sometimes.

[Muz]

A few things...

Lack of planning.
I make a big game idea. I put in like 2 months into it. And I dead end on something I thought I'd plan later, almost always on a coding problem. The worst dead ends are the design problems... basically, when I sit down 2 months later and start thinking, "Why would this be fun?"

Too much planning.
I don't want to fail another project on lack of planning. So I spend a few years writing it up and never actually making it. Not so much a problem, though, at least planning takes me one step closer.

No motivation.
I try to make "something small" just for practice. That small thing is kinda not fun enough, and I let it die. Or in the most recent case, I picked up a project I loved several years ago, with the skills to run it through. But I sort of forgot what I loved about it, and scrapped it later because I just wasn't into it.

Coding.
Sometimes coding sucks. It's like, I want to do something, but the computer doesn't understand what I say. Stupid computer. Then I have to sit down and think of how to tell the computer how to do its job.

[SHilbert]

Anything that's so trivial I know I can complete it isn't interesting, and as a result I only work on things that are overly ambitious.

Also, I am a perfectionist and can be kind of indecisive at times (especially with gameplay, where you can't measure if it's objectively faster/more efficient like engine code.)

[Gagege]

^That.

[TheLastBanana]

I spend way too long checking out every single little tweak to the game mechanics.

Eg. If the player doesn't jump high enough, then I'll modify the jump height, compile and spend 5 minutes jumping around my test level, rather than 30 seconds.

Totally with you on that one.
Currently I'm working on a game that relies a lot on beat-'em-up-style animated attacks. I'm probably not doing graphics for it, because I just don't think I'd be capable, but programming without a placeholder is really difficult. So, I'm using a spritesheet from Advance Guardian Heroes as a placeholder, which includes most of the animations I need. Emphasis on "most". Now every time I go to implement something else, I have to cut sprites out of the sheet (which is a pain, because it isn't done in a proper grid), align the sprites correctly, and in many cases, splice them to fit with my needs. I can hardly bring myself to add anything else at this point, because I just don't want to go through that process again

[moi]

I spend way too long checking out every single little tweak to the game mechanics.

Eg. If the player doesn't jump high enough, then I'll modify the jump height, compile and spend 5 minutes jumping around my test level, rather than 30 seconds.

I don't think you're doing everything wrong there, it's a good idea to test every feature you implement more than 30 seconds if you can, especially when you have to fine tune sthg such  as platform movement.

Totally with you on that one.
Currently I'm working on a game that relies a lot on beat-'em-up-style animated attacks. I'm probably not doing graphics for it, because I just don't think I'd be capable, but programming without a placeholder is really difficult. So, I'm using a spritesheet from Advance Guardian Heroes as a placeholder, which includes most of the animations I need. Emphasis on "most". Now every time I go to implement something else, I have to cut sprites out of the sheet (which is a pain, because it isn't done in a proper grid), align the sprites correctly, and in many cases, splice them to fit with my needs. I can hardly bring myself to add anything else at this point, because I just don't want to go through that process again

So obviously you ned to find a way to automatize your pipeline.
Sometimes it's okay to waste several hours/days to write a side program that will save a you a TON of time later on.

[TheLastBanana]

Unfortunately there's not a lot I can automatize here. I could set something up to cut the sprites out, but I don't foresee using enough sprites from that sheet that it would be worth it. Aside from that, it's really only things that can be done by hand (such as reordering sprite frames to look right or editing them manually).