I’ve been doing indie game development for a long time now and what has contributed to my lack of finishing has been staying on a milestone for far too long. When you do this you tend to slowly lose steam. You need to keep moving and keep a pace that will allow for excitement in your development cycle.
You should setup goals and milestones because they setup victories. Remember though, there is nothing worse than never getting past one. If you set a milestone, those checkpoints are often the areas of your project where you will tend to bog down in details that might not matter. Dose everything need to be perfect to mark that off, no. Get to a point where the basics of a milestone are done and working and move on.
Iteration is the key to not stalling out at a major milestone in game development. Say you want character movement done. Set your first milestone for simplistic walking, not all of it including jump, crouch, climb, and crawling. See each one of those can be a small victory not just one. A lot of people tend to want to bundle large amounts of features in to one game.
Take time to think about the victory points in your project and make sure they are not too large. Break things down to smaller victories so you can have one every couple of days. Large milestones will slowly kill your momentum and make it mentally harder to continue to push on a project where you might not be getting paid to do it.
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