what do you do for creator's block?

jbskaggs

Creator's block when it hits me it's like having my imagination covered in liquid amber. I get tired and I cannot force it to come back at will.

What I end up doing is walking away from the project for a while, rest, maybe play or watch other things in same genre. Taking tutorials. Etc.

When I have creator's block though it affects my whole project, it is very difficult to work on any part of my project if I know my mind is frozen on one area.

This is one area where I wish I was part of a team, rather than a one man office. There isn't really anybody I can eat lunch with and scribble on napkins as we discuss the projects.

So what do you do when creator's block hits you?

DaveTheCoder

This concerns writing, not game developing, but some of the ideas might be applicable: https://blog.reedsy.com/writers-block/

Megalomaniak

Find something more technical to do until I'm past the creative blockage.

Erich_L

IMO one the best things to do is watch someone play your game. It's unlikely while you're watching that you're not going to try to think of another idea that'll be sure to impress them. Also take all the things you had to explain to them and see if you can make that part of the game a little clearer.

If you don't have anyone around I'd suggest closing your eyes (maybe at night) and just go back to imagining the awesome game idea you had in the beginning. Forget about the cloud soup your brain has been in trying to use code to implement this and that. Think about how you originally wanted the game to feel and what really cool thing you wanted the player to be able to do. See that awesome spaceship that just flew by? Yeah I bet you forgot about that space ship, didn't you?

If that doesn't work then yeah, as @Megalomaniak mentioned, might as well go back to the dry stuff that you haven't finished coding out or perhaps back to photoshop if you haven't finished some sprites ect.

The feeling I get is that for solo indie game developers unless you're a Zuckerberg droid you need to finish small fun interesting features that you can bring into your social sphere for the social nutrients to sustain development. So let players stimulate your creative juices where possible.

DaveTheCoder

"Zuckerberg droid" :lol:

jbskaggs

The feeling I get is that for solo indie game developers unless you're a Zuckerberg droid you need to finish small fun interesting features that you can bring into your social sphere for the social nutrients to sustain development. So let players stimulate your creative juices where possible.

Yeah. Also watching what other people do to solve similar problems helps alot.

xyz

I generally cannot do anything creative while in front of a computer. Most of my productive thinking happens on walks/hikes or while driving. These two activities also relax me the most.

The only effective tool I have to combat laziness and inertia are to do lists. I use plain text files for this. Fancy organizing apps are themselves too much work. And I don't want any surplus work. Here's the file format specification for my to do list. It has only two sections: TO DO and DONE.

TO DO:
	- boring task
	- boring task
	- annoying task
	- task I hate doing
	... etc

DONE:
	- boring task
	- annoying task (optional self deprecating comment)
	- boring task (optional comment about meaning of life)
	- hard and boring task (optional "who's laughing now" comment)
	... etc

Once the list is conjured I proceed to cold bloodedly execute it. My main objective is to transfer all items from TO DO section down to DONE section.

I sometimes break the DONE section into dated sub sections. As the DONE section grows it starts to exude strong motivational properties that take effect immediately upon one skims through it.

jbskaggs

@xyz said: I generally cannot do anything creative while in front of a computer. Most of my productive thinking happens on walks/hikes or while driving. These two activities also relax me the most.

The only effective tool I have to combat laziness and inertia are to do lists. I use plain text files for this. Fancy organizing apps are themselves too much work. And I don't want any surplus work. Here's the file format specification for my to do list. It has only two sections: TO DO and DONE.
TO DO:
	- boring task
	- boring task
	- annoying task
	- task I hate doing
	... etc

DONE:
	- boring task
	- annoying task (optional self deprecating comment)
	- boring task (optional comment about meaning of life)
	- hard and boring task (optional "who's laughing now" comment)
	... etc
Once the list is conjured I proceed to cold bloodedly execute it. My main objective is to transfer all items from TO DO section down to DONE section.

I sometimes break the DONE section into dated sub sections. As the DONE section grows it starts to exude strong motivational properties that take effect immediately upon one skims through it.

Actually I put my todo list in my game design doc. And It does really help.

xyz

@jbskaggs said: Actually I put my todo list in my game design doc. And It does really help.

Great! Glad to hear that. They work wonders for me, either on professional or self initiated projects, big or small.

One thing I forgot to mention. TO DO section is meant to be aggressively subdivided. I often start by just putting a generalized big task there. If it makes me go "Wth?! It'd take me years to do this!1!", I subdivide it into smaller subtasks. And then again and again like in Asteroids game. Until majority of tasks look like "Heh, a trained monkey could do this" (no offense to monkeys, trained or otherwise :) ) I'll even go a level below this if I feel particularly jaded about a task and shamelessly divide it into insanely trivial babysteps that take only a minute or two to execute. Divide and conquer.

Such subdivided list is always kept flat, no hierarchy, just a bunch of "simple" tasks. Now I have a large candy jar of differently flavored easy-peasy tasks to pick and choose from at each session. Sounds almost like fun :)