Wanted to post a little about my thoughts on my experience with the game dev process, mentally. Not just the technical hurdles, but the constant loop of thinking you understand something, realizing it was quite a bit more complex than you thought, then slowly crawling your way back to something that kind of works, iterating on that repeatedly until you have it the way you want it (or at least close). I feel like I am getting better at properly envisioning a design element up front 

A lot of my time isn’t spent “coding” so much as staring at a problem from different angles, trying to figure out what the real problem actually is. I’ll go in convinced the issue is technical, only to realize it’s a logic flaw, or a design decision I made three steps earlier that painted me into a corner, or I simply didn't assign the fields correctly in the inspector (unity). Fixing the bug is easy once you actually understand it — getting to that understanding is the hard part.

What’s been interesting to me is how much progress feels invisible while it’s happening. Days can go by where nothing seems to move forward, but then suddenly something clicks and a whole chunk of the system makes sense. Looking back, those “unproductive” days were actually me building a mental model, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Ive been actively trying to design a game for probably around~300 hours. I feel like I am getting better at properly envisioning a design element up front but iteration seems to be king. I draw parallels to molding something out of clay, you keep pushing, pulling, tear a piece off here, add a piece on there, sprinkle a little water on it, stare at it, lick it, hope that it doesnt fall apart when you bake it.

I guess I’m curious how others deal with that side of development — the uncertainty, the second-guessing, the constant balancing act between pushing forward and stopping to rethink things. How do you know when to power through a messy solution versus when to tear it down and rethink it entirely. Any specifically infuriating bugs or reoccurring issues you have encountered?