I made no real progress on Eldritch 2 this week. That’s fine, it’s a side project, and sometimes other things in my life are going to take priority. But part of why I’m writing these devlogs is to hold myself accountable. I don’t want to go weeks without real progress, or I’ll never ship this game. But also, it’s impossible to stay in game jam mode all the time, so I have to accept that there will be weeks when I just need to give myself a break. I’ve been doing this long enough to recognize patterns of behavior in my work, and I’m in a lull right now. When I can rest and refocus, I know the work will happen fast.
My goal of finishing a prototype in June still sounds feasible, but depends on breaking out of that lull. Most of this prototype is stuff I’ve done before and that my engine already can do, and I’m just procrastinating because it’s the kind of work that feels like work to me. I keep trying to find ways to make content creation more fun for myself; but mostly I’ve frontloaded the fun (to me) parts of writing systems and tools, and now I need to actually make content that exercises those systems and tools.