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In school, deadlines seemed like my mortal enemy, in a way. Deadlines cut into the mental peace I tried to maintain in that crummy "gaming" rocking chair on the floor of the living room, Playing video games. Ironically, now I have to give myself deadlines to make video games that other people are able to play them. The problem now is I know the only one enforcing my deadlines is me, so I end up bending my own rules.
Recently I've been trying to think about different ways for me to "trick" myself into making more of the game sooner for that reason. The topic of one of my Devlogs a little while back was "discipline" and that definitely plays into it. Were it not for the self-discipline skills hammered into me as a child, I may have very well given up on making a second game some time last year, but it alone hasn't been enough to meet my own deadlines. And I don't think they've unreasonable. At the start of 2024, I made a goal to have a 3 chapter demo out before 2025 came around. Given that Chapter 1 was nearing completion and there were already a few assets ready for chapters 2 and 3, it seemed an attainable goal, but in December of 2024, I ended up releasing a 2 chapter preliminary demo, with effectively none of Chapter 3 ready at all. When I first made a project timeline, toward the middle of 2023, I had expected to finish the game sometime in 2025. I no longer believe that.
It's important to adjust your timelines as events don't play out as expected. For my part, I vastly underestimated the amount of time and energy it would take me to make tiles and sprites, and there was no predicting the kind of emotional states I would end up in at various points, or the various other projects that I'd start doing (like this website). But yet, Despite my failures to reach my expected deadlines, I still create new ones, because I know that, without any semblance of the time it should take me to make projects, I will be working on them until the end of time.
I'm far from a god of efficient time management, but here are a few tips I use to try to get myself working, maybe they will work for you as well:
Like I said, these are just things that work for me. People are all different, and I have a very specifically screwy brain, on account of the Autism, so it's important to find out what options are out there so you can start finding out what works for you.
One last thing. I saw a clip recently of Brandon Sanderson, the one terrifying author who seems to be writing out a new novel during his sleep. He said something to the effect of "if you haven't written three novels yet, your job isn't selling books yet, it's finding out your flow." I think that applies reasonably well to just about any artform. I'm only on my second long-term video game, I hesitate to include the game jam projects since they aren't really full stories at all. I', still figuring out my workflow with this. The webcomic is a similar story, doubly so since My workflow is very different from my illustrator's workflow, but neither of us have made a webcomic before.
That's all I have this time, still gotta figure out how to end a blog post, too, I guess. For now, I'll use the one I use on YouTube: See you next time, until then, stay safe out there, and look out for each other, because no one should be alone when the going gets rough.