It's a weird dynamic, you WANT to get better at making your game, you want to be able to dissect your game and see what you can do to make it better, you want debug tools so you can throw yourself into the broken and bad elements of your game and execute the sliver of gameplay relevant to your given task, but the further down the road you go, the more painful this process becomes as gamedev becomes a hyper-tedious string of commands you execute over and over and over again. The better you get at making your game, the better you are at making this scenario tedious and repetitive. Those few seconds you wait for compile times, wait for the game to boot up, wait to press a few buttons to get your debugs up to speed become a higher and higher % of your workflow, and you do this again and again and again, playing the same 3 second snippet of gameplay over and over and over watching the same little hiccups and boot times. 

So it's not JUST that you're tired of your game, you're tired of playing your game in a stale debug state, a tedious environment where you are specifically setting yourself up to see the worst aspects of your project, in the fastest period of time possible.  It's like water torture, with a constant and never ending drip of annoying little technical issues on your UI, your items, your exp systems, your stat systesm, your upgrades, you debug tools, your fish setups, your input systesm, your interactable purchase items, your item drops, your environment assets, the terrain, the in level points of interest like shops and NPC spawners, your attacks, the new bosses that all need unique NPC abilities and item drops and spawn locations, never ending tuning to tweak abilities, figure out if the player attacks are too strong, or if NPCs have too little health, and if they do have too little health is it the Zone HP modifier, or is in the fish, and if it is the fish, is it a global health value, or is it a unique set of fish that need their HP raised?

The reason for this post is I'm always trying to isolate what it is that makes us not want to work on our games, what's burning us out, what destroys that spark of fun for working on our projects. And I think once you get better and better at developing your project if you maximize your efficiency as a developer and you're doing everything yourself, the process of game development simply becomes inherently flawed and unsustainable and this is the obvious reason people work on larger teams. You always here about these stories of developers who just out of nowhere drop their projects and in the past several months I'm really starting to understand why that happens. The better you get, the more hellish you make this entire process. It becomes almost unpalatable as you code, debug, test changes, and manage the entirety of the tasks in your lonesome, it becomes incredibly unfulfilling later into development as you fix the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and there's no end in sight, no prize in sight. Endless bugs, endless possibilities, a never-ending slog to make the game as fun as you know it can be surrounded by half formed ideas that nag at you constantly as you wish you had developed systems in a different way that would have made this entire process far easier.

So whatever, like I said in a prior post, "You can't think your way out of overthinking". I don't have a team to work with, so fuck it, time to just put my head down and get this tedious shit done, and in a day or two i'll be able to work on more interesting things. I think I'm going to push forward a bit today with a bit more work, but it's such a f*cking slog. I'm so tired of going through the same tedious motions, but I'm so close to a playable alpha with all the core elements online and working from items, bosses and now unique camp spawns, and I need to start getting this game out there and getting feedback and HOPEFULLY some form of support so this doesn't have to be such a hell ride.