Changing gears and mopping up

Having too many plates in the air can be a great problem in any creative project, especially with a giant mod like Legacy and being as OCD creative as I am, I tend to work on an idea obsessively for a period of time and then drop it. In the case of this mod I have worked tirelessly and refuse to just drop it unfinished. I have something to prove to myself in completing something 100%. It rarely happens for me, so this time around, I set out to do just that.

In order to facilitate this goal and to keep things feeling fresh I often have to drop certain things part way and shift to making something new in the mod to later return to the other item in progress. This comes back to that “being a big project” problem because I end up with several things left unfinished at a time and can quickly lose track of what I have left to do.

Luckily I’ve come to a point in development where I have deliberately welded the idea vault doors shut and have a clear solid end point in view. Despite this new ideas can tend to seep out from under the door and being insane that I am, I grab them and run with it. The result is often times something really awesome and badass but it does mean more diversion from the goals at hand.

In the past I’ve shut down the request and suggestion page to stem the flow of other people’s ideas which tend to stoke even more ideas from me in turn and it has helped give some reprieve and focus me on the task at hand. At this point I’ve just learned to largely ignore it or at least tune it out. That tuning out of new idea fodder has help a great deal because when I near the end of something but haven’t quite gotten there (the point where it’s mostly the hard work of cleaning up and refining, i.e. the not-so-fun-part) my brain usually starts to seed itself with new ideas for entirely different projects; like my action adventure table top role playing game entitled “Gun Mage” started to pop into my thought processes recently and while I entertained them and thought about some new concepts for it. I have learned that as long as I do not write any ideas down, I am safe from the idea machine shifting my interest away from projects in progress.

The creative process can be an interesting and fickle beast for sure. I’m just happy I’ve been able to focus it toward one goal for as long as I have, and learning how to do more things and executing new ideas faster and more efficiently has done a lot to aid that