Had a GREAT day of dev today, no hiccups, solid chunk of work dialing in a few level design stuff and some mass upgrade and item refactoring.

While working something struck me. We focus on the end result of these systems. I have this long list of upgrades and abilities and items, and I had it in my mind "It'll take me a few day to develop these items, and set up upgrades, and once this design is implemented and tuned the game will be fun!"

And I'm usually pretty good at estimating how long it will do these design tasks, and i'm very satisfied when I get them done and dev flows very smoothly. But what I am VERY bad at planning is the sheer volume of dev to get random crap on the back end to support these final tunings.

So i'm sitting here thinking, I just need to spend 4 hours setting up prefixes and suffixes for items and i'll have a slew of really cool things to slap on items, as I spend 80 FRIGGIN WORK HOURS setting up the back end that actually plugs these things into the gameplay system, fit into items, and link into proper UI elements and all that crap.

So this is one component of burnout that hit me really hard last month. I almost made this post with teh intent to PURELY talk about all the elements on my mind that are contributing to burnout, but i've moped around enough lately in my dev logs, so Imma just keep this upbeat. When you're in the depths of writers block everything weighs on your mind, the little minor pains you feel in your hands and arms and legs are so damned distracting, and your mind wanders to all the craziness giong on elsewhere and the last thing you want to do is think about ANYTHIGN regarding the project. Then the next day you wake up, you make soem breakfast, you think , "Should I start working on the project" and you think, "Why the hell not?" And it's such a bizzare thought.

Burnout is like having an entire refrigerator full of fish, and you've become REALLY GOOD at preparing, seasoning, and cooking fish, but you're SICK TO DEATH Of eating that GOD DAMNED fish. Then some agonizing ammount of time goes by and one day you wake up, and you have a real hankering to eat some god damned fish, and you open the fridge and it's just PACKED with fish and you're like, YES! TIME FOR ME TO DO WHAT I MUST DO! 

That's what it's like to return to a project you've been working on for years after long periods of sever burnout. 

Made TONS of progress today on the short todo list of the crap I need to get done before I send this off to close friends and family for some outside feedback which I haven't had in a LONG time. I know feedback is important, but i've just had so much shit to do that didn't require feedback i've kinda just been deving in a cave for many months now making lots of big progress, so excited to push this out there. 

I'm HOPING people will think it's finally not dog shit, and actually coming together to be a full, cohesive gaming experience that warrants further dev, OBVIOUSLY. HERE I GO AGAIN SAYING THE SAME OLD SHIT. Oh well, these are the thoughts that just cycle in my head all the time.

I think if I can have a couple more days like today, I'll finally have this demo ready. Which is a little crazy, because I felt like I was 2 days away about 3 months ago. So it's crazy how gamedev works. 4 years ago I thought I was 2 weeks away, so by whatever metric of time dilation happens with gamedev, at least I feel as though I'm making progress! 

Whew, got some little bits of dev each day the past week, but today was the day I really slammed out some work and feel good about it, like my old self, like the burnout is gone, and I'm about to handle shit for the foreseeable future day after day getting tons of shit done.

Feels good man.

Quick Edit: There is no magic bullet for overcoming burnout, you can wonder forever about how stressed you are, about the astronomical odds, about the haters, about the size of the boulder, the height of the mountain and that you're shouldering it alone. You have to counter it all in an instant, "RIght now, this moment, I'm about to replace all the nonsense by getting to to work. Fill your mind with the task at hand, there is no future, there is no past, no regret, no burnout, you have a system to work on, and when you finish the game will be better, it's fucking simple".