We've all been there, we WANT to work on our game, we WANT to open up the project and clean things up, make them better. We want to make the gameplay better darn it! 

But we get a sinking feeling, SOMETHING is festering in the back of our brains. "Don't bother, it's going to bring nothing but frustration." A bug is going to pop up, you're going to break something by accident. It's going to feel better today, but tomorrow everything will feel broken again. 

Game projects are massive, they exist is a space so large we cannot fathom them at any given time, and so believing we're going to finish a system or hit a milestone is nothing more than lofty ambition. We cannot quantify progress on these complex ventures. We only hope to somehow make portions of fractals of the entire experience a bit better at any given time.

The question is, WHY does our brain not want to work on the project. What is in between us and that "make awesome button" that stands between improving the experience?

Is it cumbersome exposed variables? Is it shoddily constructed logic? Is it endless edge cases you've let fester feature after feature? Is it spreading ourselves too thin across several elements of the game all at once.

It is ALL of these things, and if you are not mindful of them, they will reach a critical mass and some day kill your project. You must grow, and your pipelines and the way you perceive development must grow with your project in order to support the growing complexities of a growing game.

The best thing you can do if you're fighting with yourself to work on your game, is to make a compromise, "Instead of not working on the game at all, I will instead focus on some secondary element of my game that I find annoying and I will clean that mess up, and tomorrow, when I think of working on the project, that nagging voice in the back of my head saying this is all for naught, this will be tedious and progress will be a giant headache is going to be a little bit quieter."

Do this again and again and again if you can't bring yourself to work on that key feature, and one day you will wake up and there will be only you and that make awesome button, and you will have no roadblocks, no messes standing between you and making your game better. Improve your tools, improve your workflows, improve your file structures, your naming conventions, your scene organization. Make it a JOY to work on your project, make every corner spick and span and something to be proud of, so that every aspect of your game is slick as greased lightning.

Gamedev is a marathon, it's not a sprint. If you're burning out, and pushing so hard you empty out all your motivation each and every time you adjust your enemies, tweak your jump values, tune up level 3 and you are never taking a step back and trying to think of the best way to work on levels, the best way of making your abilities easier to work on, investing into yourself to ensure you're working on how you work, you will never go the distance.

Today I will be taking my own advice, I am a bit daunted by the prospect of building up the overarching gameplay of my game and will be spending today building up debug tools to help me test various levels of difficulty and give me the tools to change player power on the fly so I can feel what a low level player, a mid, and a high level character all feel like in terms of movement, damage output, and survivability. This will allow me to rapidly tweak and tune NPC difficulty, level layouts, player item, skill, and ability damage values among a lot of other things!

I will also be taking notes of all the things that are nagging in the back of my mind, "oh gosh, I really don't want to work on this stuff" and I will be examining why. And I will be working to ensure we work to make this pipeline is as easy to work on and iterate on as possible! 

We gotta get better at getting better!