I once heard someone say something along the lines of “Finishing the last 10% of a project is harder than the first 90%” and, oh boy, am I feeling that. But why would that be? For me and my project there are several reasons, most of which feel fairly universal to creative endeavors. Even if the specifics get twisted a bit dependent on the medium.

The first bit is setting the details in stone. Throughout the project I have been putting in elements of the game and saying, “that is a temporary label/position/color, I can change it as needed.” But now that I am reaching the end those elements can no longer be labeled as “temporary” and need to have a final decision made about them. Now you might say “That is just putting off the work until latter. Why didn’t you do this stuff sooner?” And the reason is simple: a bunch of my “temporary” elements have changed significantly over time, some of them have even been removed all together. So, if I had “done it sooner” it would have been wasted effort. But now those decisions need to be made… And it is just as much fun as it sounds.

But now for the bigger problem: actually getting my product on the market. And this comes with a bunch of questions. What platforms do I want to target? Do I want to charge for the game? Do I want to put adds in the game? Do I want to make a demo version? All these questions and I haven’t even gotten to the real problem (for me anyway): I don’t know what steps I have to take to get onto a given platform. I know I can just look it up, and in fact have looked up the steps before, but I respond to the process in one of two ways. Either I look at the steps and get overwhelmed, either by the number of steps or by things in the steps that I just don’t understand. Or I look that the process and go “Is that it? You must be hiding something. I must be looking in the wrong spot. Where is the real process!” And I know… I just “need to get over it” … Believe me I am working on just that, these are me problems and I am working on handling them. But in the meantime, I just keep pushing it off. What I really need to do is subdivide the problem and tackle the smaller parts, so I don’t get overwhelmed.