Iteration
A big difficulty I have with making things is that I'm not very good at iterating on ideas.
Even when I have a strong impression of an idea, I'm definitely not thinking about every small detail. The process of realizing an idea is where it is put to the test, and this is the part I have difficulty with.
Sometimes I get lucky and the original idea was solid enough from the start that figuring out tiny details as I go is easy.
If I'm not lucky, then something needs to be changed in the design, which can cause problems in a couple of ways.
Sometimes, I simply don’t know what to do. I have a vague idea of what I want, but no clue how to get there. If I didn’t already have an idea of what to do, It’s hard for me to gradually arrive at some conclusion. Usually, I end up stumbling around endlessly and nothing gets done unless I get lucky again. A lot of projects die in this way.
Other times, I commit too hard to doing something in a particular way, and that makes improving upon it difficult. I might spend all this time doing something in a particular way, only to find out that it doesn’t really work, and all of that work needs to be scrapped. At that point, it becomes a sunk cost fallacy, where I need to change things, but I am too attached to the effort that I put in.
These problems are at their absolute worst in game development.
If an idea for a mechanic isn’t as good as I had hoped, I have absolutely no clue how to iterate on it because there’s just so many different directions to go in. Experimenting can also take quite a bit of time and effort.
Also, when I’m writing code, I have the tendency to design things over and over again until I feel like it’s not spaghetti. It really eats my focus when I feel like some system “”feels”” gross in its implementation. So, I spend so much time trying to make some system feel good in my brain only to discover that it’s not really what I need and that I just wasted my time.
I don’t have a nice way to wrap this all up. Making things is hard.