#2 - Motivation and issue-issue work

Hi :)

I realised I should probably explain why I'm putting off doing the combat. 

So I have problems with motivation. To give you an impression, I started this game a year ago, then I didn't work on it for almost a year. Then maybe a month ago, I decided to take it up again to have something good for my CV. And since I've been working on it every day I'm not in work. It's pretty unusual for me to actually have this much motivation for something. I'll do things if and when I have to, and I'll find things that are more boring or arbitrary less motivating, and I'll give up if I don't have to do them. But the thing is, I wouldn't actually call what I'm feeling now a strong motivation; I'm just kind of doing it. I think there's two main things here; it's (mostly) not painful, and I can get results relatively quickly. The former doesn't push me away, and the latter keeps me going. 

So why is it not painful? That might be a weird question but I'll give some context. I had an internship in Amazon for a year, after which I fell into a depressive spiral. There were plenty of reasons for this, but one of them was that the work I was doing was actively painful. The sequence was this: I would start implementing some aspect of my design, and then at some point I would hit a problem. This problem was never one that could be solved through logic, it was an arbitrary logistical problem - something like this field isn't formatted correctly to integrate with this system something something. And on top of that, all I'd get as a response was 'ERROR'. So I'd have to spend forever trawling through docs trying to find what was wrong, until I found some discrepancy between the expected format of the system and what I had written. But changing the format I was writing in would have complicated ramifications. So I'd have to go off and think about that, consult with my team, and check back. And a lot of the time the conclusion was that I couldn't change by format to fit the expected one. So I'd have to scrap that idea, meaning I had wasted all of my time designing, writing, and bug fixing for a system that wouldn't work. Then I'd have to go back and determine the next best possible option. Write a doc. Consult my team. Start writing. And hit another problem. You can see why this didn't end well.

So because of this, it's a surprise to me that I'm actually enjoying my time writing code for this game. Because the problems are actually ones of logic. And I can think up what the problem might be, test it, and eventually resolve the issue. Mind-blowing stuff.

Now back to why I'm putting off doing the combat. There's been significantly more jumping from issue to issue here than with other aspects of the game, and so I'm starting to get sick of that. And the nice thing is, I can defer these problems and work on the level design or the art assets instead. But I'm aware that issue-issue work is going to come up again, and if I keep putting those types of problems off, I'll end up at the end with an almost finished game, with an ungodly number of painful problems to solve.

So is there a way to make this more bearable, or will I just have to push through it? Idk :)