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~ZephoBot
Hello there!
I'm Zepho (but you can also call me Zeph). I'm a synth robot (the organic hybrid kind), highly muscular and pretty big!
Oh yea, I can also change sizes. >:3
I like muscles, bigness, hyper, cuddling and all that naughty stuff. 💦
Muscle | Hyper | Macro | Growth
Stats
Comments Earned: 715
Comments Made: 279
Journals: 33
Comments Made: 279
Journals: 33
Recent Journal
Running on Empty
5 months agoThis is a bit of a vent post, a personal life story, but also a call for advise. TL;DR at bottom.
For my life, I've been dealing with motivation issues. Either I do a thing and burn out after a couple of months/years, or I can't find the motivation to even start something. I recall this going back as far as the age of 7 when my parents had me join the boy scouts, that was all fun and games for a few months until I just plain refused to go and they had to find something else to keep me busy. From that point on it was basically rinse and repeat: judo, going to the gym, drawing. Nothing seems to last.
More recently I was embarking the adventure of making a video game by myself. This isn't a new thing for me, I'm a video game programmer professionally. My first job during/after graduating (2015-2018) was at a mid-sized game development studio that was reinventing itself at the time and went all-in on VR (remember this was around 2016, the best we had back then was the Oculus Rift DK2, not even the consumer model). I really liked working there, the colleagues were great and skilled, the projects were interesting to work on and I took great pride in what I made back then (even they were commercial flops). The only real down side were the travel times. Unfortunately, when my contract was up for renewal, new projects were uncertain and they decided to let me go. Honestly, I think they also thought I wasn't good enough, but this could be my insecurities talking here.
My 2nd job (2018 - 2020) was at a mobile games developer, and honestly I kinda hated it. Game projects were treated as cannon fodder: They'd come up with large amount of low-effort designs (tower defence with a minor twist), rush bare-minimum prototypes to soft-launch with microtransactions and any project could get killed at any point if certain metrics like the % of people making in-app purchases weren't met. It was a cold-ass business, completely devoid of love. It also quickly gotten to me that I was part of a business that thrived on exploiting the human brain with so many foul tricks to maximise profit. This might sound very harsh, but I stand behind it: Mobile games are a cash-grabbing cancer to the games industry. I grew a concience because of this, and together with a not-so-very-nice confrontation, I quit that job just as the pandemic hit.
So in late 2019, I've gotten the idea in my head to make my own game, and it would be something that I would love, not necessarily something with great commercially potential. At the time I was still living with my parents and I had saved up a lot of money to buy my own house. Unfortunately, because most of the population here think it's a good idea to keep voting for political parties that enforce poor neo-liberal policy, we developed a housing crisis over the years and housing prices were rising faster than I could save. Around the moment I quit my 2nd job I decided I wanted to make the game project serious (it was a hobby side-project until then). So I actually founded a company and would commit all my time and money into the project.
Developing my own game was a struggle. For the first time, I was not only doing the programming but also all design aspects, which was both new and very challenging to me. I tried a lot of things, and so much didn't turn out so well and had to be iterated on and re-implemented. Despite this, I actually managed to release the game as an early access title on Steam. This went on until June 2021 when suddenly it happened again: I was running on empty, the flame went out, the engine had stalled...
Just like that, since that moment, I am unable to open the project and start working on it again. I cannot believe this is already over 2.5 years ago. And since that point I am just wondering what is wrong with me. I will not mention the name of the game, since I actually feel ashamed about it: Yet another unfinished early access title on Steam. People paid for this, expecting a full release at some point and I am mentally unable to deliver it to them. I wanted to make something I would love, that other people would love too, but now it's just abandonware. There are a few things I regret in life, and releasing this game for money is one of them.
But there it is, and it's just another symptom of my problem: I cannot stay motivated to do something. This experience has maybe even worsened my situation in that I now give up before I even begin. Last year I wrote about picking up 3D animation (something that still sparks my interest). I asked delta-tango for a beginners exercise, and he told me to animate a breathing cycle.
It took me 4 months to start doing it. FOUR. MONTHS. TO. JUST. BEGIN. When I eventually gotten to it it was done in a week, but still. I asked him for another challenge after, hoping it would perhaps be easier to start the 2nd time. He asked me to practise rotoscoping. This is probably 5 months ago now and I still haven't opened Blender since. What is wrong with me?
I want to close this journal on a bit of a positive note, and a call for advise. The positive note is that if you're reading this, it means I actually managed to write a reasonably comprehensive journal. Even a seemingly basic thing like this is hard for me.
The call for advise, to hopefully make me deal with my motivational problems: Have you been through a similar situation? Are you doing better? What would be your advise? Should I talk with someone? Should I keep going or perhapse chase something else if I hit a roadblock like this?
TL;DR: I'm having motivational issues and need help. See paragraph above.
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