What do you do when you burn out?

[elias4444]

Kind of a personal/curious question here... What do you do to help yourself get over burnout?

I'm mostly asking because I've been working on the same game for over a year now. I think I allowed the scope to go too large, and now I'm getting frustrated as to how long it's taking (especially when my income goes from project to project, and I could use some influx of money here pretty soon). Do you just start a different project (which I worry would cause me never to finish the one I'm currently working on)? Or do you take vacation? Or what?

[elias]

YMMV, but we started out pretty ambitious (closest match to our idea was Second Life!), and we had quite a few 'burnouts'. We ended up aggressively cutting off features until we got something playable (people on an island, clicking them around RTS style) and then began adding features iteratively until it morphed into Tribal Trouble. Probably the worst way to do a game, but we were (and to some extent still are) quite green at that time.

There's also the problem of motivation - I don't know if I could make an entire game from start to finish alone without others to show off to or discuss ideas and programming with.

- elias

[the2bears]

Take a break from it and work on something else.  I know how you feel, a couple times a year I get in a game funk and what I'm working on seems boring and just doesn't excite me.  So I try out something else, an experiment (technical or game play) or something quick.

Good luck!

Bill

[bobjob]

also maybe make little tasks which are not your main game concept like GUI's and a network chat program, which you will be able to implement in your game later, works as a nice break, but also keeps you in the mind set of programming so that your not intimidated by your own code buy the time you back to the core programming.

[princec]

Go on holiday. Worked for me.

Cas

[elias4444]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I took a solid break over the weekend (headed out to the beach and left the computer behind). I'm feeling quite a bit better. It's amazing how stress can really sneak up on you like that and slow you down.