There's still a lot of work.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed after completing a major event. Does anyone also feel this why?
You've gotta be able to pace yourself. Completing even a decent game - let alone a good one - requires a lot of work and a lot of time. Anyone can work full-tilt, around-the-clock on something for a week or two. Maintaining a consistent amount of work over one, two or several months is the hard part.
The most important thing is to not let yourself get burnt out and make sure you take breaks whenever you need to. It helps if you keep track of how you're doing and how much work you're actually putting in - if you work yourself too hard, sometimes you won't notice how tired you are until it's too late. Then you start not getting any work done at all, lose a ton of motivation (and feel bad about it, to top it off). That's how projects get cancelled.
Long breaks can help, but really those should be like your absolute, ****-just-hit-the-fan last-resort option. The ideal is just maintain a steady pace you can keep up with (keeping the rest of your life in mind), putting in enough time to get a decent amount of work done, while not being enough to overwork yourself. In addition to that, take frequent
short breaks, even if you don't think you need it. A lot of the times, it will help you realize just how much work you've actually gotten done (which you'll often lose sight of while you're too close to what you're doing - you keep looking ahead at how much is left to do and forget to look back and see how much you've already accomplished), and it will motivate you to do even more once you get started on the next thing. Additionally, it sometimes pays to take a short break or move to something else if you get stuck on a problem, or a really nasty bug. Sometimes that one thing you just can't figure out now will become obvious when you come back tomorrow or the day after, having not thought about it for a little while.
I usually have one or two days during the week where I'm mostly free, and most of my weekends. I try to spend a good amount of that in RM, but most weeks I'll take one or two days and say "I'm just going to do whatever I want today, and I'm not going to do anything work or RM-related at all. Whatever it is, I can deal with it tomorrow." A little bit every week prevents you having to stop for much longer than that down the line.
Another thing I do is I usually have a huge text file with notes on what's left for me to do in my game (in broad terms, I can figure out the specifics once I actually start doing it), and roughly what order I want to do it in. Usually I try to space things out so I never have a bunch of
huge tasks next to each other. If this week I'm implementing a huge, super complicated system that will take a ton of effort and debugging to get it to work properly, then next week I'll stick to small improvements, tiny bugfixes and nifty, small features that don't take a ton of work to do. When you're doing anything large and complicated (especially if you're a programmer), it often feels like you're not getting anywhere while you're working, because it won't work properly at all until almost all of it is done. Sometimes it's nice to just work on small simple things to get that sense of accomplishment ("I finished something and it works!") back, so you don't get stuck with that "I don't feel like my work is going anywhere" feeling.
