12 Sep, 2011, melopene wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
TL;DR: I've hit the wall, life is driving me crazy, and I've come way too far to stop now but am having difficulty pressing on.

So, I've recently had to take some time off for real life stuff - defending my dissertation proposal, house/dogsitting and family duties, a new boyfriend who's sucking the life out of me, and teaching a difficult (for my students, lots of prep/grading for me) graduate-level course at the local uni. I've basically been MIA from my game for about a month, and am trying to sit down and get back to it. The thing is, even a few days before all of this came around and necessitated my temporary absence, I realized that I was lacking in creativity and struggling to find my way out of The Gap, as Ira Glass put it. In fact, I'll just insert that image here, so y'all know what I'm talking about.



I look at what I've accomplished so far, and the list is pretty damn long - impressively so, considering that until recently, everything that had been accomplished in my code and game world had been done by yours truly. But a lot of it still remains in the land of 'hack job', in my opinion. I'm not a fantastic builder. I can write good descriptions (better than most, but nothing deserving of a literary award), I can do progs well, but so can anyone with a mediocre sense of logic and the willingness to sit down and read a prog guide. I'm also not that great of a coder - I taught myself many years (and a few MUDs) ago, deciding not to rely on anyone but myself, but most of the learning I've done has been through the support of the community. You guys are head and shoulders above me in terms of programming knowledge, and so I still feel like a total hack.

Of course, part of the frustration I'm experiencing also stems from the fact that when you're in this perpetual development cycle and you have to disappear for a while, the attrition rate for staff and players goes through the roof. In fact, in my case I only had a small handful of people that would be around regularly, and by the time I came back, only my head builder remained - still plugging away at some major housekeeping issues, and still there for me (though we have very different schedules and the beginning of my day overlaps with the end of hers). But she and I keep different schedules, and so when I log into the game, I find that I'm once again lonely in my own world. I like having people around, even just to cheer me on, and without that motivator present I find it difficult to get going. I'm less creative, and even though I'm motivated, I'm not actually accomplishing anything lately.

I look at my ever-expanding to-do list, and it really just bums me out. I know that I can get most of it done, but I don't know where to begin, and even trying to sort them into priorities can be a daunting task - and that's just for coding, nevermind the tons of small areas that need to be built and littered throughout the world, quests to be conceptualized and progged in, and so on and so forth. I find myself thinking that I'm going to write a builder ad, and end up staring at the screen wondering if I should even bother - it isn't as if builders are flocking to in-dev games at the rate they did just five or ten years ago. Then there are all the potential players who know me from past games, a number of whom keep IMing me and asking, 'Is enough done yet for me to level all the way up? Did you finish the last set of subclasses?' - and I'm forced to say 'no, not yet, but I'm trying.'

In the dissertation support circles (yes, they exist and are badly needed), they call these sorts of feelings the 'phony police' or 'PPs'. A lot of the advice you receive in that corner of the internet is helpful, but largely restricted to academia, where we have accountability to our advisors and to those who are funding our PhD work. Just sitting down and doing it isn't working - I can't force myself to be creative, after all. And as far as Ira Glass's advice goes, I've been fighting my way through it for years, I'm just feeling so mired down that I'm not sure what to do next. This project has been with me off and on for six years now, and I let it fall by the wayside long enough. I refuse to give up; in fact, if I had to choose between the current boyfriend's time demands and the game's, I'd choose the game, without question.

I know that I'm not the first admin to encounter this problem, and I know that I won't be the last. So, aside from this post partially being just a bit of a rant for me, I do have to ask: How do you push past the wall?
12 Sep, 2011, Scandum wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
Try a nicotine patch if you're a non smoker to increase productivity, though it's likely to lower your creativity. Use sugar and alcohol to increase creativity, though it'll lower your productivity. You kind of want to move from a creative cycle to a productive cycle and back, doing different tasks in each cycle.

Some people have a bit of a hangup when it comes to creative drug use, it's fairly difficult to get addicted to nicotine patches. Sugar and alcohol are addictive, so try to restrict those to one or two days a week.
12 Sep, 2011, Runter wrote in the 3rd comment:
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I too only offer advice attempting to fit into a self-prescribed caricature of being edgy about social issues.
12 Sep, 2011, melopene wrote in the 4th comment:
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Scandum said:
Try a nicotine patch if you're a non smoker to increase productivity, though it's likely to lower your creativity. Use sugar and alcohol to increase creativity, though it'll lower your productivity. You kind of want to move from a creative cycle to a productive cycle and back, doing different tasks in each cycle.

Some people have a bit of a hangup when it comes to creative drug use, it's fairly difficult to get addicted to nicotine patches. Sugar and alcohol are addictive, so try to restrict those to one or two days a week.


Well I chain smoke and drink heavily as it is (grad school does that to ya), but if there's any message I'm getting out of your post, it's that I need to smoke a lot more grass. *snicker*
12 Sep, 2011, David Haley wrote in the 5th comment:
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I'm not sure if I should be surprised or not that the advice being given is to essentially dope yourself up on chemicals.

Well, in any case, figure out why you're doing it. Do you have a good reason? Not just "oh I want to finish it" – do you truly want to finish it? Why? Why do you want to finish it? Do you want to have players? Do you want to look back and say "I did it"? Do you enjoy the creative process, and not care so much about the result?

If you can't figure out why you are doing this, you should learn to move on and do something else, rather than stay stuck in this horrible rut that will cause you nothing but stress for no good reason. If you have a good reason for doing this, that will at least take some of the pain away from being in a rut that causes you stress. :smile:

In all seriousness, unless you have some obligation to finish this, it's ok to walk away if it's causing you grief. Dissertation time for PhD students isn't a terribly fun time, and if "taking a break" from the MUD means "work on dissertation", well, you're kind of going from the frying pan to the fire. Maybe you do just need to sit back for a while, focus on the immediate, real need of the PhD, and worry about the MUD later. Or if you find that creative process truly fulfilling, put your main project on hold for a little bit and let your mind wander and enjoy itself on a side project. If your fun becomes stressful, something has gone wrong…
12 Sep, 2011, KaVir wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
melopene said:
TL;DR: I've hit the wall, life is driving me crazy, and I've come way too far to stop now but am having difficulty pressing on.

Yup, I think it happens to most people. I try to avoid it by working on whatever interests me at the time, but sometimes I'm forced to work on something particularly important and boring, and afterwards I'm usually burnt out for a while.

I've always found the hardest phase (from a motivational perspective) is when I'm not yet ready for players. That's where my previous mud (Last City) died, after years of development, and God Wars II floundered there for a while as well. I've seen several other promising muds die before managing to open their doors, too.

What really helped me was when people started playing, as their feedback made me feel as though the project was finally moving forward. I was too busy dealing with bugs and minor requests to waste time thinking about the huge todo list, and at the end of each week I had a nice report of all the progress I'd made. But I needed something playable before I could do that (not quite sure how far along you are).

When I finally decided to move out of beta, I wrote up a list of "must haves" and a list of "nice to haves", publically announced a date, and forced myself to stick to it. I didn't actually manage to get everything done, but I did manage most of the important things, and the clear short-term goals certainly helped my productivity.
12 Sep, 2011, Tonitrus wrote in the 7th comment:
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In addition to what others have said, I will mention that large projects drive me crazy. Small projects, on the other hand, are easy, and large projects can be pretty easily broken into small projects. So I try to break everything down into the smallest project I can, then do it. Then, when it's done, I do another project. I end up covering a lot more ground this way than I ever did while trying to think about the whole thing as one large ordeal, and without all of the stress that comes with it.

Also avoid the temptation to find more work to do while doing work. Another thing that has helped me tremendously is thinking of things in terms of "releases". I come up with a list of things to do, and I do only those things, and I ignore anything that doesn't directly interfere. This keeps me from going into a cycle where, while working on a task, I continually expand it and thereby make it impossible to complete. At one point, while working on a release, I started tracking my completeness by tasks done, and was horrified to watch the percentage complete continually drop with each hour of work I put into it, because I kept adding new bugs to fix or new features to add.

Your mileage may vary.
12 Sep, 2011, Markov_AU wrote in the 8th comment:
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David Haley said:
Well, in any case, figure out why you're doing it. Do you have a good reason? Not just "oh I want to finish it" – do you truly want to finish it? Why? Why do you want to finish it? Do you want to have players? Do you want to look back and say "I did it"? Do you enjoy the creative process, and not care so much about the result?


Is any MU* truly finished, until the doors are closed?
12 Sep, 2011, Ssolvarain wrote in the 9th comment:
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It is if you quit.
12 Sep, 2011, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 10th comment:
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At a point just make a todolist.
And well, just stick to it, and only ever go to item3 if you can do item3 in a few lines of code until item1 & 2 are finished.
Yes it can grow and expand a lot, if it goes pas 20 things to do, try to reorder it by putting some easy thing as item3 :)
But never forget, this is all a matter of money. Money buy time :)
But really keep focused.
12 Sep, 2011, David Haley wrote in the 11th comment:
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Quote
Is any MU* truly finished, until the doors are closed?

I think that you can consider yourself to have "finished" a project if you opened it to players and got reasonable activity. Of course, work is ongoing, but there's a difference between a MUD in development and a MUD that's being worked on that also has activity.
12 Sep, 2011, melopene wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Quote
Is any MU* truly finished, until the doors are closed?

I think that you can consider yourself to have "finished" a project if you opened it to players and got reasonable activity. Of course, work is ongoing, but there's a difference between a MUD in development and a MUD that's being worked on that also has activity.


Personally, I have a list of things that I want to see completed before I can consider myself 'finished' - and by no means does that mean that I'd be completely done with the game, but that I would've accomplished the key goals that I'd had from the outset.

Much of what remains is either highly complex or building-related. There are, of course, some small bits that can be addressed here and there as I work toward a final goal, but a number of the tasks seem pretty daunting at the moment, even when broken down into sub-tasks.
13 Sep, 2011, Lyanic wrote in the 13th comment:
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There's a lot of good advice in this thread. Like Tonitrus, I think of things in terms of releases to help stay on track. I keep lists of every change that needs to be made, and routinely reorder them. If a list of changes I have planned for a release starts growing faster than I can work, I have to re-prioritize and move some of them over to the list for the next release, or to the "future planned" list. And when I get burnt out from working on a difficult/long/boring change, I'll rearrange my list to include about half a dozen easy changes in a row. That way I feel like I've been productive, and it motivates me to continue on.
13 Sep, 2011, Scandum wrote in the 14th comment:
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melopene said:
Well I chain smoke and drink heavily as it is (grad school does that to ya), but if there's any message I'm getting out of your post, it's that I need to smoke a lot more grass. *snicker*

Smoking is so addictive that you can't regulate it well, which messes up the ability to create a creative cycle. You could try marijuana to increase productivity, my best guess is that claims of increased creativity are primarily claims of increased productivity by non-smokers.

You really ought to quit smoking and switch to patches, the more continual release of nicotine is a plus as well.
13 Sep, 2011, David Haley wrote in the 15th comment:
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I'm stunned that this is actually where the conversation has gone.
14 Sep, 2011, Cratylus wrote in the 16th comment:
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David Haley said:
I'm stunned that this is actually where the conversation has gone.


Interestingly it seems to lend some support to Quix's theories of where Scandum's decision making comes from.
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