As much as I can, I've been trying to decrease my natural inclinations towards perfectionism lately. I am not someone who likes to show anything less than my best work. I don't really think it's entirely ego-driven, though I'm sure part of it is related to fear of being vulnerable. I mostly just want to show my best work out of respect to those who see it: I want my work to show that I tried and I'm working hard on this. This worked really well for me in grad school, but also caused me to have a huge panic attack every month or so when I just couldn't write anything that made sense.
Now that I'm working in the field of learning design, I have a totally new appreciation for small wins. Or small attempts. Breaking down your work into very achievable bites and expecting that you will not produce anything beautiful, coherent, or perfect in your first or second attempt. That's what learning is all about. I've been taking what feel like huge risks lately in showing people my first drafts of work or making very simple, small projects public.
I made a New Year's Resolution for 2020 (lol) to publish a game on itch.io - but it got around to November 2020 and I still hadn't done it...even though I had made a handful of games. They just weren't impressive or that good. They were my first attempts and I built them in order to learn skills. I started seeing other creators' games on itch, though, and was inspired to share more works-in-progress. I uploaded all of my games to my itch.io page. My most recent quick build is called "Freedom," an 8-bit narrative-based game built using Bitsy, a small game editor I recently discovered. Check it out if you want to play an adventure game where you do nothing but try to relax and read some of my favorite quotes.
Cross that one off the to-do list:
create some games and share them, without fear- keep making more games
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