Hopefully others have been in this spot and have, through experience, found a method of digging through it. If so, I'd be appreciative of any advice. I've been working on a design for about 8 months now. It's well fleshed out, nearly to an early alpha state, and the results so far have exceeded my initial expectations.

However, being so far completed, about the only work that is left a ton of dull work - minor adjustments, finishing touches, extra assets, bug hunting, basically the grind. The majority of this project, I was happy to spend 10-14 hrs a day working on it. But now I'm lucky if I manage 3-4 hours daily of actual work.

This isn't my first game, and not the first time I've been through "the grind" phase, but it's not much easier the 3rd time around. Since I'm working alone, I don't have team-mates to help motivate me. At least this time I don't have a girlfriend whining that I waste all of my time on a stupid game.

To make this phase worse, the next steps are more dreadful than dull. It will be finished enough to start showing of off and let other's see the results of my blood, sweat, and tendonitis.

Does anyone have any advice for surviving this phase with my sanity intact? The combination of pressure/tedium is a strange mix.

I don't speak from experience, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

To make this phase worse, the next steps are more dreadful than dull. It will be finished enough to start showing of off and let other's see the results of my blood, sweat, and tendonitis.

I'm inclined to suggest that you embrace this. As you said, you don't have team-mates or loved ones motivating you, so perhaps instead start releasing builds and getting feedback from your community. How this feedback affects you is, naturally, related to your own personality (and the nature of the feedback, of course), and thus I don't claim to know how it will affect you, specifically, but I've gathered that for some at least it can be rather motivating.

If you're sufficiently nervous that releasing to the public is problematic, perhaps start out on a single small community--a game development community such as this one might be a good starting place--or even just to family members. If the feedback from these initial stages is positive, perhaps this will help you to build up the confidence to release your builds more broadly.

8 months is starting to be quite some time. Consider taking a break. If you got a first working prototype I'd say it's the right time to step back a while and look at it from a 10,000 ft overview.

Lucky you! It's also the right time of the year to do that.

As a side note: if you have problems with your hands, get a better mouse (I have the handshoe). Keyboards might be a bit more problematic to get; at worse you might have to switch to a DVORAK layout.

I second getting a break.... some weeks not working on the project, maybe a refreshing holiday or another small, fresh project to give you a boost is sometimes just what you need to get back to your old project and push through.

Has helped me numerous times when I started to feel the grind... either I was refreshed enough to push through, or the 10'000 ft view, as Krohm said above, helped me to part with something in the project that needed to go.

Anyway, good luck on your project, and congrats on getting this far.

I don't think i can bring myself to completely stop work - as i've worked on it nearly every day in the last few months, but maybe I'll take it easy for a bit. Maybe that will give me enough energy to make a final push to get it into an alpha state once I slowly grind through the minutia.

Personally I've found that if I "take a short break", I quickly drop it entirely and move onto something else.

conquestor3: I've had that problem with projects I "took a break" on because i was frustrated or not excited about anymore. For me it is kind of like a romantic relationship in ways. Once you get past the initial "idea" of it, and start to see how it is really developing and the realities surrounding it, you either embrace it or realize that it's a big waste of time. It's also easy to give up on a project when it starts to get out of hand - too complicated or the scope is too wide to handle, or nothing unique about it, etc.

With this particular project, I know i'll finish it - i haven't lost interest in it, it's actually better than i expected thus far (which is a first). I'm just in a grind phase. Manually populating data arrays, making icons, grinding through bugs, cleaning up the interface, revising it in some spots. All very dull mind-numbing monkey-could-do-it work. If a monkey knew c# anyway..

How the heck can you find 14 hours aday to work on your game? (envy)

Anyway, what I find sometimes helps is creating a to do list containing really small tasks that in the end will get you to a milestone. Also, if you watch a video of a digital painting process, you will notice the artist jumping from one part of the painting to another before it's finished in order to get a feel of how the painting as a whole will come together. I've found this strategy also helpful in developing software as a lone developer. Good luck.

P.S. can we get a link to your game or is there nothing online yet?

Amr0:

I lived & worked overseas for a few years, living very cheaply and saved up money. I had a first-world-job but lived 3rd-world-style. I'm using what i saved for my living expenses to do this design full time. Maybe fortunately for my game design, not much money for entertainment. So it's either work on the game, stare at the wall, or waste time on the internet.

Right now, the game isn't on the net. I'll probably have screenshots in a few weeks though.

Both your checklist and "painter" style suggestions are good. I jumped around a lot until the game was in it's current state, but i tended to quit when a feature was functional, and move to something else when the work got boring. So now I'm left cleaning up my own mess. Checklists have been invaluable for digging through the piles of work I previously neglected.