The Importance of Finishing

Sometimes, just before I fully awaken in the morning, my mind goes into a place of pure creativity.  It is a wonderful place, full of shiny new ideas and golden possibility.  For those brief moments just before I wake up, I feel the new idea lucidly, as though I can reach out and touch it or play with it.  Then my eyes pop open and I rush to recall all of the details, to recreate the form in my mind again and get it down on paper.  With age, I have begun to question if these little visions are creative gifts or merely self-indulgent distractions preventing me from actually finishing a great many side projects.   It truly feels like both.

One thing is for certain: the promise of these new ideas is enough to make me push aside current projects and focus on the siren's song of the new one.  I have personally fallen victim to this sort of fickleness countless times in the past.  It is something I wish to get better about, however, and I do attempt to mitigate these distractions and get on to the business of finishing my side projects.

For example, the most fun I have making video games is working on little game jam projects.  Generally these game jams last for 2 - 7 days and require me to get to the core of an idea quickly.  2 days to make a game seems like an insanely short amount of time.  Despite that fact, I almost always walk away feeling good about myself after I've taken part in one.   I sat down and asked myself about this last night:

Assuming that I wasn't lying to myself, this means that I like finishing projects and I really dislike failing.  Sounds about right to me, but that hasn't stopped me from failing to finish my projects countless times in the past.  But if I look at game jams and see what I've done, I've nearly always finished and always had something to show, even when the time frames were ridiculously short.  This made me sit down and put together a list of things that game jams force me to be better about, and I think these can be applied to bigger programming projects.

I am coming to realize that we are all capable of doing great things if we can simply get out of our own way and get to work.  If you want to see for yourself, go finish an old project that's collecting dust.  I guarantee it'll feel better to finish what you've started than to dream about doing something new.

Originally posted at http://andrewcarrollgames.com.