Your Alibis on why you won't finish your RPG

[DustyCat Media]

we're all good at excuses. we're all good at making reasons.

Hence, I thought it would be cool to learn what other people say to themselves to delay a task they're supposed to do for their games. 

Here's mine (since I'm the artist):

"I'm afraid my work/drawings won't be perfect."

      My perfection rears its ugly head with this alibi. I want to immediately draw the final design for a character. Too bad i keep forgetting that part of the creative process is creating sh*tty work.

"I'm too tired."

       Am I tired? Or am I simply using this to procrastinate? Most of the time, when i sit on the chair and draw for at least 5 minutes, I discover that my head just made this up.

"I don't have time!"

       This was my favorite alibi for years! Then I discovered "26 time management hacks I wish I knew at 20", and i learned that there is ALWAYS time. We all have the same 24 hours to use. It's either I waste my 24 hours, or I invest it wisely. 

So there you have it! My alibis on why i won't do my tasks.

I'm curious to read yours. have fun posting!

 

[Milkdud]

Too lazy.

 

[kerbonklin]

Too busy playing Dota2.

Too busy trying to get back into MapleStory. (lol)

Too busy wasting my time on an MMO forum laughing at bad trolls there.

Woe is me. =/

 

[Indinera]

My alibi on why I *do* finish them is because I love music and I can listen to music while making my games.

 

[Bonkers]

Too busy working on RPG to finish RPG.  Self fulfilling prophecy.  Something breaks, I fix it.  12 more errors appear graphically or event wise.  I've redone the main character's sprite about 8 times now and still need to backtrack on their other sprites to do quality control.

 

[Makio-Kuta]

@palladinthug: That's an easy spiral to get trapped in. Because during the course of making a game you always learn new things, grow and get better. But it's important to always keep pressing forward. If you sit down and continually revamp that first sprite over and over, you'll find yourself doing it again in another months time because a few sprites later you'll learn new things again. Remember, a game can function with partial or temporary graphics. Make your game, at the end of the day, while you have people test playing and the like, you can sit down and remake your core sprites with all of the skills you learned. But to continually readjust your graphics along the way is time consuming.


This is a really good read for anyone who has troubles finishing games or other projects. It really tackles a lot of the most common issues people fall into that makes things never get done. It's long, but it's worth the time.


As for what can make me not finish something - it's usually bouts of inadequacy rearing their ugly head and making me question what I am doing, why I'm doing it, and if it's really something I'm any good at doing. Self esteem issues twist their way back at me constantly and leave me a lethargic mess of "I don't want to do anything." Luckily, my ego usually kicks back in and smacks me in the face and says, 'get a grip; you rock what you do,' but there's still plenty of time lost to simply staring at the wall thinking I'm lame. :/


I guess the other thing that makes me quit a project is nagging. I hate to be nagged. It makes me not do things just to spite.

 

[OmNomZombie]

My alibi is that I deal with severe depression and anxiety, which can often be disabling and out of my control, unfortunately. As well as serious bouts of "never good enough". I decided recently, that yes, my art will never be good enough; that there is always something that bothers me, always something I could do better, but I will never finish my projects if I keep letting that hold me back and "wait" to be good enough. I'll regret not making the games I want to make more than I'd regret sucking.

 

[Sharm]

1. I'm too sick to work on anything today.

Yeah, that one happens a lot. I try to not beat myself up about it.

2. I'm in the wrong phase of my manic/depressive cycle and I can't focus.

Sometimes valid, often it's just another "I don't wanna" excuse that goes away if I can get started. Dealing with that one right now, I'm in a mixed episode.

3. I don't know what to do next.

Veeeeery common. Usually I know all sorts of things I could do next but the simple act of choosing one is somehow impossible. Usually this occurs when most of the stuff on the to do list 1. is boring 2. has a problem that needs solving first 3. may not even be necessary for completion.

4. Burnout.

Been happening a lot more since I went pro, which is not okay since just stopping for a while isn't an option. I haven't found a really good solution for this one, so far I've been pushing through anyway, allowing myself creative breaks where I do both my job and something completely different and trying to keep the main project interesting by shifting focus onto some other aspect of the project.

 

[Dalph]

Laziness is the worst enemy of RM (and mine too).

 

[Alexander Amnell]

   I work on it whenever I can, I guess my best alibi is I have a family and they come first... and animals to take care of...and when the baby's old enough to go to school I'll go back and get a part-time job again probably during school hours. (though I'm the stay at home dad whenever my kids are not at school, and if women can claim that's harder than a full-time job I guess I can as well, right? ) Another problem I have is doing to much of the things I enjoy and burning out when the stuff I don't want to do becomes screwed up because it has been neglected to long (my first two projects failed mainly due to this.) I've gotten better about that now though and tend to do things in the order they need to be done in, whether that's what I want or not. 

 

[aozgolo]

Spend too much time playing games to make them I guess, I certainly do have the free time but in most cases if a creative streak grabs at me I usually just hop on Minecraft or Terraria and build something, A lot of times I just get too overwhelmed with thinking about everything else I have left to do that I never really start.

 

[arekpowalan]

Too lazy, I tend to get stuck in YouTube rather than making the game. And when I actually want to make a game, college's assigments flood my desk.

And I'm stressful. My face's really hot right now, literary.

 

[Pern]

I think I try too hard. I have to make sure everything looks just right in mapping, at least to me, before it goes anywhere. I've redone rooms two or more times now because I know I could have done something better, made more room ect. So these hundreds of hours have done pretty much nothing besides maps :/ But I'm still learning and I'm actually glad that when I got back and look at my old maps, I can recognize my faults and improve upon them this time around. I story is down pat, I just have to get to those points and make em!

 

[Zoltor]

Spend too much time playing games to make them I guess, I certainly do have the free time but in most cases if a creative streak grabs at me I usually just hop on Minecraft or Terraria and build something, A lot of times I just get too overwhelmed with thinking about everything else I have left to do that I never really start.

Delete minecraft/the fav link from your PC(frankly I don't understand why you even have that on your PC, when you have a tool as powerful as RPG Maker on your PC), there problem solved

Work on one aspect at a time lol(start by making a town or whatnot, and don't think of anything else until that town, along will all its maps are done. Once that's done, fill it with the NPCs it needs, this is the only phase you should be thinking about what other events would be nice to have. Likewike only think of spells/abilities when you're working on char creation, and the battle system, ect

 

[zacheatscrackers]

I'm capable of completing projects, but it tends to take me a long time, since I try to make sure it's working correctly the whole way through before I release, I tend to be busy irl, and I'm quite lazy.

Thankfully, I'm pretty far in my current project, so I should be done it fairly soon.

 

[Matseb2611]

I've got no alibis. I love my games too much and working on them is my number 1 priority in my spare time.

I think it's best not to have any alibis, because then you're justifying lack of progress, which can't be a good thing, but that's just the way I see it.