2024 Year in Review

First of all, I want to just get the message out to join the Discord, I'll be moving a lot of the discussion and updates over there (more on why below). If you haven't already, here's how you can link your accounts and get access to the Discord:
Getting Discord access – Patreon Help Center

Also secondly, a quick update on what I'm working on right this minute, because I'm sure a large amount of you are waiting to know. Fixing the problem with the doors has escalated into changing the way the player controls the office entirely. This is because fixing the doors properly would only be a temporary fix that would need to be replaced quite soon when the android and VR ports are eventually made. The player game object has been replaced by a "Mouse and Keyboard player" object and the controls governing it have been shuffled around so that the player is self contained and interchangeable. So when android is ready I can simply plop a "touch screen player" in or in the case of VR, an "HMD Player".

I'm also remaking the models on the doors and I will need to tweak the "approach" animations for bots who enter the office (pretty much everyone). This might lead to Fredrika, Springtrap, and Chica being able to use either door. Foxy, Mangle, and the Puppet don't really gain anything gameplay wise by being able to use either door so they're not the priority.

Long winded and rambling text warning:
Below I'll be going over a deep dive into why I've sucked at my job lately (my words, no one else's). But you can skip to the very bottom to read a TL;DR summary of what was said, not every word of it is important to you, it's just important for me to write out.

So back to 2024, and why I want to increase the activity on the Discord dramatically. I want to start off by saying that I don't want you to think I'm beating myself up or that I'm going through a mental health crisis from what I'm saying here. My life is great, I am just a bit frustrated with my performance this year and particularly these past two months. I don't think of it as a mental health problem, it's more like a mental engineering problem so please keep that in mind, there's no pity party to be had here. I'm just looking to explain my assessment of the issue and how I'm trying to improve.

The key issue I struggle with is that I am driven primarily by avoiding discomfort and secondarily by making cool shit and learning new things, and tertiarily by making myself laugh. The reason I struggle immensely with making public releases is because it's stressful to put myself out there to thousands of people, on a smaller scale it's stressful to make Patreon posts because I'm putting myself out to hundreds of people. This stress increases with the time made between posts since I feel like I need to make up for the time between them somehow, like if I miss a weekly update I feel like I need to make the next one twice as good.

When I don't feel like what I have is good enough to release I just fall back on my base motivator which is to avoid the discomfort. I just don't log in to Patreon, don't log into Twitter, it's super easy to avoid. It hurts my analytics for sure, but I'm not motivated by money or fame, in fact being famous is antithetical to what my brain wants since it brings more people to see what I'm doing. But then I miss a second week, a third week, then I need to make a monthly update and it's never where I want it to be. For Twitter and the public it's even worse since the time between updates is much longer, there's more people, and it's Twitter so it's full of Twitter users.

The anxiety of the release process has grinded my productivity down substantially. I can't think about working on the game without thinking about what the weekly update and the release is going to look like. So I end up avoiding that too, and it becomes a vicious cycle of avoidance, which leads to more stress, which leads to more avoidance.

I think moving updates primarily to the Discord will greatly alleviate the stress. First it cuts down the number of people to a maximum of the number of patrons. Second it reduces the time between updates so there's less build up and reduces the trap of needing to produce an update "worthy" of being released. Third it's more conducive to immediate feedback, I always appreciate hearing what Patrons think and having the updates in chat form I feel makes me seem more approachable. Fourth it makes back and forth updates easier, if I post a build and there's a bug reported that I can fix immediately I can just reply there with a fixed build, I often find myself getting trapped trying to fix every bug report before I post anything.

I'll still for sure make updates on the Patreon for people who can't or don't want to use Discord. They'll be more like summaries of what was already posted in the Discord which I think will make it easier to post since I've already "released" what I'll be posting.

TL;DR
My motivation style is working against me with the current way I do updates. The time between updates increases the difficulty of making the next update, as that difficulty increases it effects my ability to make any update. I'm going to make freeform unstructured updates frequently on Discord since although it's "more work" it will be less stressful work in the long run (I believe). Sign up for the discord if you can:
Getting Discord access – Patreon Help Center

If not, I'll still be here doing mostly the same thing, hopefully more regularly.