Alrighty, guys and girls, it's that time of the week again...after two weeks, but still. A new entry in the devlog is happening now. And I'm here to talk a little about creative burnout and why this thing is kinda sorta normal and OK to happen.

So, have you guys happened to just have a pretty hot streak in your projects, only for that streak to get colder and colder and colder until it hits ice levels of cold? Well, that is exactly what has happened to me. And honestly this was bound to happen, because things like burnouts are what happen when you try to dedicate yourself to a project such as a full blown game.

So, why is this normal? Well, first and foremost, there's a lot of moving parts and stuff going on that you, the solo dev, must handle personally. It's a daunting task, even for someone who is experienced in solo game devs. I actually came to the conclusion that every dev suffers burnout on their projects at some point, but the more experienced devs are coping much better with it. Either that, or they can manage it a lot better than inexperienced solo devs.

So is there something to do when burning out? Well, for starters, take a giant step back from the project. Like seriously, stop working on it and thinking about it for a couple of days or for however long it is necessary. Then get back right into it if you are feeling revitalized. If you are the kind of dev who goes gung-ho about the project, with the "zero-days-off" policy and whatnot, then at most work on some small part of the project or something that gets fast results....or just do some project management in Excel...or testing...

In my case, burnout occurred thusly: after a user stated that the jumping is floaty, I immediately recognized this as an issue after I posted about it. So I decided to do some tweaking in the character blueprint. At first, I didn't really commit to it, just did some tweaks here and there without saving the changes that were made. After a few days of fooling around with the tweaks, I kind of had a relatively clear idea for what I wanted from the jump mechanic. I knew that the jump (from input to landing) should be under a second, ~800ms to be precise. This theoretically felt the snappiest and the most enjoyable jump and I knew about this for a while. I knew the height should be around 2 times the height of the player character. This further added to the snappy aspect of things. What I didn't knew was what other ingredients to use to make the vision come to life. This mystery didn't last long and I've started messing around with the gravity. And yeah, mesing around with the gravity was for the better.

But as I started to test out the changes in the levels, I've had a rather unsurprising revelation: all levels needed to accommodate changes to the jump. To be expected, sure. But I did have one surprising revelation: things got way more difficult in the rocky formations level. Which, if you recall, was something that I've complained on more than one occasion. So in that level, *very* few changes were made. Fixed the section where some sequence skipping occurred and made adjustments to the overall layout.

Discovering all these issues, fixing some issues while other issues popped up (of course the height of the character jump affected the jump pad and the monkey bar distances), then fixing those issues as well and the OTHER issues popped up (of course the gravity changes affected the wall run) was just simultaneously draining the joy out of the project and adding to the joy of knowing that the level is closer to being great.

But in spite all of this, I think I may have regained some of the joy back. Because I've started working on the forest level. I'll only link one screenshot of it, because it's terribly late and I'll be missing my beauty sleep. But here is how it looks as of now:

I am making a promise to show more tomorrow. Pinky swear.

Well, that is all for today, guys and girls. See you in the next post, buh bye.