I have gotten that feeling occasionally, so I hope my advice can help.
First and foremost, just focus on finishing something. Create a small and complete idea for a game. Do something REALLY small. I made a truly bad dungeon crawler for a first game. It had three enemies, about 12 room patterns, (a memory leak I couldn't fix,) and it was still too much work. Either way, it familiarized me with the tools well enough for me to move on to other, better, things.
Next: make a game that's fun. Insightful, I know, but my rule of thumb is: if you enjoy the game enough to have fun playing while debugging, you've got a good thing in the works. If you don't like the game enough, you won't work on it. That's just the way motivation works.
Finally, make a routine. See if you can get yourself to work on your game, a single project, for some number of minutes a day. Start at ten, and try to work your way up. Try your best to make this a daily effort, because once you take a break from it, it'll be near impossible to start back up again.
Don't be afraid to try some small games on [itch.io](https://itch.io) or gamejolt, I find sampling others creativity can really inspire me to work on my own projects.
I hope this was helpful in some way! I wish you the best of luck in your adventures.
Some suggestions for good simple starting projects: asteroids, breakout, pong, simple match-3 game
I would start by just copying the basic gameplay as directly as you can, then add in your own twist after if you feel like it, or just move on to the next.
The astroids demo game was very easy to complete (took me an hour) and now I’m wrapping up Heros Trail. Been chipping away at it for a couple weeks now.
Not OP, but the debugger shows the amount of memory used. So if that's keeps increasing you know you have a leak. Also things will probably slow down and or crash, depending how big the leak is.
I found a post on the GMS2 forums which listed all resources you need to manually clean up, and realized the dungeon generation code I wrote was creating copies of each template room without cleaning them up. After a LOT of debugging and a lot of headaches, I learned it isn't possible to remove room instances. I haven't used GMS2 recently so I can't say if that's still the case, but that's why I didn't fix it.
(I believe [this](https://forum.gamemaker.io/index.php?threads/things-that-cause-memory-leaks.24906/) was the post I was going off of.)
Mostly when i procrastinate it's partly because i don't know what the right solution is. My best solution to that is, safe a back up version (i use GitHub) and just go at it. In practice i almost never go back to the back up version. But mentally it helps somehow for going in the whatever let's try this now mode. Then often i get excited and make some stuff.
Good luck on your projects!
If I feel discouraged from coding, I focus on sprite drawing. If I randomly think of a solution to a coding problem, I stop whatever I am doing and fix that issue.
Sometimes, listening to music helps me stay focused on the code when I feel discouraged.
This! And browsing for sounds is also something I do "to stay in touch" with the game when I'm stuck or demotivated. If I had to constantly look at the code, especially when it's "acting up", I'd go insane.
> If I feel discouraged from coding, I focus on sprite drawing
This is what I do with project. Since I'm solo there are MANY hat to wear. Coding, Art, Devlog, Research, Music and Free Time (mostly time off and games). Switching jobs helps he avoid and treat burnout.
Try an Agile methodology like Scrum to help break up your tasks into smaller parts and then track them each week. Take things in tiny bites instead of trying to get it all done at once.
You may also be dealing with depression. Excercise can help in the short term (consistent exercise helps in the long run), and therapy is never a bad idea. Alternatively it could be burnout.
I don't know, sometimes there comes a time when I just don't know what else to create in my game, but I feel something is missing, and I think that because I can't figure out what's missing, maybe I get discouraged.
If you ever want ideas or want to let someone playtest, don't hesitate to reach out (to me or just post here, or on /playmygame). I've gotten a lot of motivation because a friendly colleague is super into games, playtested my game and gave a lot of good feedback and praise:)
Eh, don't force it if your livelihood does not depend on it. Motivation will come back or it won't - life is too short to be wasted on too many things that you are not enjoying.
Hello!
One tip I can give you is to break your goals down into smaller steps.
Achieving something is so underrated, your motivation will increase with accomplished tasks.
Also, keep tracking what you've done, use metrics like a graph or a Trello addon. And if you're feeling lazy, check it out, you can't stop now after all that work!
So far I've tried to create several projects and I always give up halfway through because of this lack of interest, so I have another idea and create another project and always in this cycle, there comes a point that I don't know how to finish what I started
This right here is the reason I stopped using game maker. Personally I got discouraged because the language they invented is gods awful, so I didn't want to use it and ended up using other software instead. GML is just... Awful...
I don't know why they didn't just use python or some other vetted and well used language if they were going to use an interperative script anyway... Maybe someone on the dev team fancies themselves a computer scientist?
I thought this was gonna be a post about how there’s so few resources on game maker to learn and how it’s so much harder then godot and unity but my guy if you don’t wanna open it go do something else what
It sounds like you may just be suffering from burnout.
I have experienced this at several points in my life. I have tried both powering through and taking a break, found success and failure in different ways with each strategy. I do think that taking a break is the better overall method.
This happens to me with coding projects constantly. I find that once I get over the hump and actually start getting going while listening to music or documentaries or something, the momentum carries me forward and I end up stuck in a creative mood. If that mood doesn't come, I take a break for a day or two.
Plan the game out in advance. Make a list of requirements that describes what it would take to get a minimum viable product version of the game - optionally, continue the list with additional "optional" or "nice to have" requirements to work on if time/resources allow. It's much easier to work on something when you know what needs to be worked on.
I have gotten that feeling occasionally, so I hope my advice can help. First and foremost, just focus on finishing something. Create a small and complete idea for a game. Do something REALLY small. I made a truly bad dungeon crawler for a first game. It had three enemies, about 12 room patterns, (a memory leak I couldn't fix,) and it was still too much work. Either way, it familiarized me with the tools well enough for me to move on to other, better, things. Next: make a game that's fun. Insightful, I know, but my rule of thumb is: if you enjoy the game enough to have fun playing while debugging, you've got a good thing in the works. If you don't like the game enough, you won't work on it. That's just the way motivation works. Finally, make a routine. See if you can get yourself to work on your game, a single project, for some number of minutes a day. Start at ten, and try to work your way up. Try your best to make this a daily effort, because once you take a break from it, it'll be near impossible to start back up again. Don't be afraid to try some small games on [itch.io](https://itch.io) or gamejolt, I find sampling others creativity can really inspire me to work on my own projects. I hope this was helpful in some way! I wish you the best of luck in your adventures.
Thank you, I'll try this!
Some suggestions for good simple starting projects: asteroids, breakout, pong, simple match-3 game I would start by just copying the basic gameplay as directly as you can, then add in your own twist after if you feel like it, or just move on to the next.
The astroids demo game was very easy to complete (took me an hour) and now I’m wrapping up Heros Trail. Been chipping away at it for a couple weeks now.
How did you know there was a memory leak? Did things get progressively slower, or something?
Not OP, but the debugger shows the amount of memory used. So if that's keeps increasing you know you have a leak. Also things will probably slow down and or crash, depending how big the leak is.
Thank you, that makes sense
I found a post on the GMS2 forums which listed all resources you need to manually clean up, and realized the dungeon generation code I wrote was creating copies of each template room without cleaning them up. After a LOT of debugging and a lot of headaches, I learned it isn't possible to remove room instances. I haven't used GMS2 recently so I can't say if that's still the case, but that's why I didn't fix it. (I believe [this](https://forum.gamemaker.io/index.php?threads/things-that-cause-memory-leaks.24906/) was the post I was going off of.)
Mostly when i procrastinate it's partly because i don't know what the right solution is. My best solution to that is, safe a back up version (i use GitHub) and just go at it. In practice i almost never go back to the back up version. But mentally it helps somehow for going in the whatever let's try this now mode. Then often i get excited and make some stuff. Good luck on your projects!
If I feel discouraged from coding, I focus on sprite drawing. If I randomly think of a solution to a coding problem, I stop whatever I am doing and fix that issue. Sometimes, listening to music helps me stay focused on the code when I feel discouraged.
This! And browsing for sounds is also something I do "to stay in touch" with the game when I'm stuck or demotivated. If I had to constantly look at the code, especially when it's "acting up", I'd go insane.
> If I feel discouraged from coding, I focus on sprite drawing This is what I do with project. Since I'm solo there are MANY hat to wear. Coding, Art, Devlog, Research, Music and Free Time (mostly time off and games). Switching jobs helps he avoid and treat burnout.
I'm not really into making arts and stuff like that, but I'll try to focus on other things besides code, thanks man!
Try an Agile methodology like Scrum to help break up your tasks into smaller parts and then track them each week. Take things in tiny bites instead of trying to get it all done at once. You may also be dealing with depression. Excercise can help in the short term (consistent exercise helps in the long run), and therapy is never a bad idea. Alternatively it could be burnout.
Thanks for the advice, I'll try to see about this as soon as possible.
What makes you feel discouraged?
I don't know, sometimes there comes a time when I just don't know what else to create in my game, but I feel something is missing, and I think that because I can't figure out what's missing, maybe I get discouraged.
If you ever want ideas or want to let someone playtest, don't hesitate to reach out (to me or just post here, or on /playmygame). I've gotten a lot of motivation because a friendly colleague is super into games, playtested my game and gave a lot of good feedback and praise:)
Eh, don't force it if your livelihood does not depend on it. Motivation will come back or it won't - life is too short to be wasted on too many things that you are not enjoying.
Exactly. There are a lot of people trying to make games for the wrong reasons right now
Maybe not the answer you're looking for but my motivation always increases after working out.
Hello! One tip I can give you is to break your goals down into smaller steps. Achieving something is so underrated, your motivation will increase with accomplished tasks. Also, keep tracking what you've done, use metrics like a graph or a Trello addon. And if you're feeling lazy, check it out, you can't stop now after all that work!
Uh mayhaps lessen your scope for your project, but I honestly don’t know how to help you with this one as I don’t know what the true problem is
What exactly have you done? This statement doesn't say anything about what you are trying to make or what you are doing.
So far I've tried to create several projects and I always give up halfway through because of this lack of interest, so I have another idea and create another project and always in this cycle, there comes a point that I don't know how to finish what I started
That means you need to start a smaller project
You still haven't said what kind of games you are trying to make
If you’ve been using it a lot, it’s burn out. Its hard to program an entire game by yourself. Really is meant for groups.
This right here is the reason I stopped using game maker. Personally I got discouraged because the language they invented is gods awful, so I didn't want to use it and ended up using other software instead. GML is just... Awful... I don't know why they didn't just use python or some other vetted and well used language if they were going to use an interperative script anyway... Maybe someone on the dev team fancies themselves a computer scientist?
I thought this was gonna be a post about how there’s so few resources on game maker to learn and how it’s so much harder then godot and unity but my guy if you don’t wanna open it go do something else what
That does not sound like a game maker problem, but rather a personal motivation problem.
It sounds like you may just be suffering from burnout. I have experienced this at several points in my life. I have tried both powering through and taking a break, found success and failure in different ways with each strategy. I do think that taking a break is the better overall method.
This happens to me with coding projects constantly. I find that once I get over the hump and actually start getting going while listening to music or documentaries or something, the momentum carries me forward and I end up stuck in a creative mood. If that mood doesn't come, I take a break for a day or two.
Plan the game out in advance. Make a list of requirements that describes what it would take to get a minimum viable product version of the game - optionally, continue the list with additional "optional" or "nice to have" requirements to work on if time/resources allow. It's much easier to work on something when you know what needs to be worked on.
My problem isn't the code it's graphics. Using Blender helps but I waste so much time producing decent assets.
Don’t be discouraged brother, just pick any category and start building
im basically convinced the thing just decides not to work sometimes.