The struggle between work, life and personal projects. Chasing the White Whale.
My battle to stay motivated when I’m so inherently lazy.
As I said in my first post here, I have tried, failed and abandoned my idea for a 2D homebrew video game three times already. This will be my fourth attempt at tackling this ambitious project and I must admit at times it does fill me with dread. Already I’ve been asking myself if I can really do this, or how long will my motivation last this time? Not the sort of mindset you need to start with.
Yesterday I told my brother that work had begun once again on my game and he actually laughed out loud. He described this project as my personal white whale. It was such a great slam and undeniably true. His assessment of my inability to complete a project really hit me in the gut. Goddammit he wasn’t wrong. So I asked myself what causes me to abandon my goals? Is there a pattern or circumstance I can identify and address?
The first two attempts were made back when I was working in very low paid jobs. All I could get at the time was work that had very long hours and required little to no skill. The anti-social hours I worked were very hard on me. I was isolated from my friends and felt very alone. Working through the night and sleeping through the day. Looking back I’m not surprised both of those attempts failed so miserably. I had nothing left to give. Low paid shift work is a black hole for ambitions and very difficult to escape from once you’re in it.
The third attempt started then stopped round the time I went back into education. To escape those low paid slow deaths I was stuck in I decided to do a degree in Multimedia which was a big step up for me. To get the best grade I could meant I chose to pile a huge workload onto my shoulders but left little time for anything other than sleeping and eating. The game never stood a chance under those conditions.
Start over
So now I’m done with university. I no longer do those awful jobs. I’ve uprooted and started over in London where I work for a great digital creative media agency. Life is certainly better and the roadblocks that hindered me before are no longer an issue. I still have my little bouts of depression and misery but I’m working on that by focussing more on the things that make me happy. Such as regular exercise, running, and my art. So hopefully now I can make this work. Right?
All said and done. The reason I think these projects die is that I look at the whole thing and get scared by the sheer scale of it. There’s just too much work. So instead I’m focussing on smaller, more manageable chunks of work. Such as this basic looped gif animation for a W.I.P character. At this stage he’s obviously still very raw, and I know the anatomy needs a lot of work. Still I’m happy with the way he’s coming together right now. My main criticism is I feel that both of his arms look off. The animation needs to be reworked. So I’ll focus on fixing that next before going forward. After that I’ll start adding details such as his face and clothes, adding secondary animations to any items he’s wearing and loose fitting cloth. Then I’ll bring him into Photoshop and pixel him up! So much work ahead. But it’ll be worth it.
Stay tuned.
