Hey everyone! It's Noah, and I'm gonna talk your ear off about perfectionism and how it is pure poison to game development.

It's so so so easy to spend countless hours, even days or weeks, on a single aspect. This could be a single scene you're trying to tweak to perfection, or a single mechanic that just isn't quite smooth enough, or a sprite animation that isn't quite how you want it. It can be absolutely demoralizing to realize that a month has gone by and you've made barely any progress, but hey, at least that one thing is quite nice (or worse, it isn't even to the level you wanted. Happens to me a lot). 

I'm sure you all know everything there is to know about perfectionism if you can relate, probably through the exact same google searches I made. "How to overcome perfectionism", or "How to stay motivated". They all hold answers that yeah, might make sense, but never really help with it. That's because, for me at least, after reading just shy of a billion articles and blog posts about perfectionism, I already knew the answer.

Just do it!

Yeah it sucks! Make something intentionally shitty. Write the next chapter in your book without backspacing once. Make an asset with little to no care into design, throw together a shitty image or sprite and make it happen. Add a feature with some truly atrocious implementation, but at least ADD it. You can always make it better later, but you can’t improve what isn’t there.

Spinning your wheels, like I have been, on things that technically are important for the final product but in reality are just one of many many aspects it will contain is a GREAT way to make yourself miserable and make no progress.

That's why I'm finally writing this blogpost. That's why I feel like I'm finally making progress after nearly 3 weeks of no progress. I said "fuck it" to some feature I was working on, or this endless goal of "improving the codebase" which had no clear goal posts, and just starting throwing together scenes like crazy. I've added two new scenes already, and working on a third.

I can't wait to show you all what we've got!

-Noah

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And now, something from Brandon! I asked him to write a little something about perfectionism, and here it is.

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I would say the main thing that's been holding me back is that this project started as a way to be creative without judgement and it was a really fun way to express myself, but as it became more and more serious, it's been harder to meet a "standard" that I hold myself to.

-Brandon