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[Jolli]

poor design skill

[Glyph]

I lack organization. Truly, I have written about 5 or 6 DO THIS ON THAT DAY OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES lists, and have always had to look back at my code to find out what an obscure variable means because I never record anything to my book. And laziness... I'm supposed to be making area 1 right now! Dangit, I have to do that. Goodbye.

[eddietree]

The ladies. 

[mirosurabu]

but that they still are largely ignored or unfairly ridiculed, usually by people who haven't played the game

That's certainly better than being completely ignored.

Also - YouTube feedback and any feedback in general which you can't "interact with" isn't real feedback. People change their minds and what they said in the past should not be taken into consideration today. The Internet comments are virtually never erased. They remain there forever. This allows your brain to give them more value than it should.

But you are right - I'm not at that stage yet.

Regarding what keeps ME from finishing my games - with design ideas I have at the moment, nothing really.

[gunswordfist]

i'm also suffering a little from wanting to do too many projects..

Theres probably 4 or 5 i want to do right now, 2 of which are serious but none will come to fruition without a damned engine >8(

I really need to get the editor sorted.. bah.

Yeah I got 6 projects I want to really do right now and I still gotta narrow it down to 1 from the 3 I think would be best to be my first game. And add in the fact that I just thought of 3 more in the last week and you got the possibility of me wanting to do one of those first and me wasting me time thinking about what I want to do first.

[lowpoly]

the biggest and of course saddest obstacle for me is always going to be art. I make art all day long at work and the last thing I want to do when I get home is make more art. This is why I have a folder with 30 or 40 prototype-level games waiting for that 1st art pass they're never going to see

the sickeningly vicious part of the cycle is, on some rare occasion a game will make it past that prototype stage and somehow I will convince myself to keep going despite the lack of/unpolished graphics. Eventually tho, I will start to doubt the project because I subconsciously know that I won't be happy with the game's art unless I put in the kind of effort I would professionally, so it's probably best to just move on to something else. And then we're back to square 1...

on the other hand, I'm really good at prototyping now, so there's that 

[Gravious]

the biggest and of course saddest obstacle for me is always going to be art. I make art all day long at work and the last thing I want to do when I get home is make more art. This is why I have a folder with 30 or 40 prototype-level games waiting for that 1st art pass they're never going to see

the sickeningly vicious part of the cycle is, on some rare occasion a game will make it past that prototype stage and somehow I will convince myself to keep going despite the lack of/unpolished graphics. Eventually tho, I will start to doubt the project because I subconsciously know that I won't be happy with the game's art unless I put in the kind of effort I would professionally, so it's probably best to just move on to something else. And then we're back to square 1...

on the other hand, I'm really good at prototyping now, so there's that 

lol! :D

[ChevyRay]

For me, this definitely used to be organization. I could get the basic engines up and running just fine, but their extremely convoluted structure made it nearly impossible for me to keep track of where everything works, and sometimes impossible to add or change a feature because it would impair said structure

Nowadays, and especially over the last 4-5 months, this hasn't been a problem at all. Actually, I tend to get boggled down more trying to make my games TOO organized and structured, and sometimes get a block from being unable to think of a way to structure something.

But my biggest obstacle nowadays is my obsessive-compulsive disorder. I get into terrible mental-loops whenever I feel strong anxiety (e.i. think someone is upset with me, am uset with someone, worried that my game won't be liked, think something bad might happen, etc.), and start to exaggerate negative consequences in my head. For example, if I'd had an argument with someone earlier in the day, I wouldn't be able to get anything done. I'd just repeat the argument over-and-over in my head, and would think up altered possibilites of the argument for hours and hours. These mental-loops basically don't end until I get a good sleep, or even better if the issue is resolved. If the anxiety builds up enough, I can't even will myself to eat or sleep, never mind resolving the issue, though. They were worse in high school, because I couldn't get any work done in classes at all when I was suffering from one, and I used to have infrequent panic attacks.

2nd biggest is definitely lack of creativity. I tend to overuse "tried and true" methods and ideas, and while I feel inspired at first, I often lose motivation because I can't think of what to do next, or because I don't feel my game is going to draw enough of an audience.

[Xion]

I don't feel my game is going to draw enough of an audience.

you can disregard this because your game already has me as an audience even before release, I can promise you this. And I count as 200 people. At least.

[Core Xii]

I would say, the sheer complexity of implementing a game in every technical detail.  Any one component isn't all that bad, but getting a game-embedded GUI has been a nightmare (which is not done, only deferred)

Oh man I've been postponing writing my GUI system forever. It's just such a boring necessity.

[Lynx]

Less boring, more nightmare of organization and structure.

For some reason people who do GUI packages for pyglet get frustrated with their efforts as somehow not fitting well into pyglet's system of event dispatchers and batches.  I'm just going to wing it and not try to overimplement before I get something useful - it's a first project afte rall.

[David Pittman]

My biggest obstacle to my current project is sheer scope. Every time I think I've got it wrangled down, the scope of my project balloons up again.

I started down this road two years ago with my grand masterpiece game idea ("Game #1") and quickly accepted that it was far too ambitious to do alone. So I readjusted my goals and developed a concept ("Game #2") which would play nicer with my limited art skills and would be more procedural and less designed. But that idea grew from a small demo into a full-fledged narrative-driven game in its own right, possibly even bigger in scope than Game #1. So I sliced out a small piece of it to define a smaller, leaner game ("Game #3"). In developing Game #3, I'll be building systems and content which will also eventually be used in Game #2, sort of like if Link's Crossbow Training was made before Twilight Princess. But as I get closer to Game #3 being playable, I'm starting to feel like it's going to be underwhelming and needs more AIs, more levels, more narrative--i.e., all the things I cut out from Game #2 to make it a reasonable goal.

At least I actually am making some kind of progress. I'm at 1130 revisions in my SVN repository (in just under two years, so I'm tracking ~1.5 changes per day). I have my engine at an alpha level and am just about to be able to start really digging into content finally. Sometimes though, I just get into a rut and go for days or weeks without working on anything. If I don't have an immediate task, the project as a whole feels incredibly daunting.

It's also difficult when I have a nebulous goal (like "TODO: AI", without any technical implementation or creative direction defined). Creativity is not boundless potential--it's the lines drawn in the potential that bound an actual goal. That's a challenge, to pare down the infinite into a subsection that will suffice my needs.

[One of the Beatles]

can. not. program.
that's it

also, no time.

[pixeltao]

The graphics is the biggest obstacle. Ironically, I'm an artist but I find it smoother and more satisfying to code for a game than make the art for it.

And often, lack of creativity leads to anxiety, which leads to even less creativity.

[Jolli]

don't havveee enough slaves

[DragonSix]

I gather good feedbacks from players, but I'm never happy of the results, I always doubt of the impact my games have on them. And so I have yet to finish a project.

So much time lost... But still I learned a lot of things.

[Kneecaps]

TIGForums.

[Melly]

TIGForums.

It's like a fucking drug, I tell you.

[Terrorbuns]

Hmm... biggest obstacle to create a game? For me, at least, is getting past the initial excitement of making it. I mean, I might have all the graphics available, all the music and sound effects (which I generally lack in most of my games sadly), and still sometimes can't even start on coding. I tend to lose interest, get bored/distracted, become unmotivated because of the overly-ambitiousness of the project, and just pure good old laziness.

Also, a lack of graphics hinders me a lot. I have countered this by making "low-end" graphics. Also because of this, I've become somewhat decent at "spriting". Yay me.

I love making my worlds come to life, so actually COMPLETING a game (I've only completed 5 games to date, almost 6) is such a wonderful feeling, yet after I finish, it's like "well... what now?" But yea, oh well.

EDIT: Oh yea, and the internet. IT'S ADDICTING D:

[aeiowu]

There are two kinds of sufferers in this world: those who suffer from a lack of life... and those who suffer from an overabundance of life. I've always found myself in the second category. When you come to think of it, almost all human behavior and activity... is not essentially any different from animal behavior. The most advanced technologies and craftsmanship... bring us, at best, up to the super-chimpanzee level. Actually, the gap between, say, Plato or Nietzsche and the average human... is greater than the gap between that chimpanzee and the average human. The realm of the real spirit, the true artist, the saint, the philosopher, is rarely achieved.

Why so few?

Why is world history and evolution not stories of progress... but rather this endless and futile addition of zeroes? No greater values have developed. Hell, the Greeks years ago were just as advanced as we are. So what are these barriers that keep people... from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question, and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic -- fear or laziness?