Perfectionism Demon and Analysis Paralysis (Patreon)

I don’t normally write blogs, but it’s been a quiet month or two. I’ve put stuff out there, but not on the level I want to be. At this point I’ve identified the issue, I just don’t know what to do about it. Perfectionism. It’s coming in the form of redraws, analysis paralysis, and endless sketches of ideas that will ultimately never see the light of day because I always feel like there’s something wrong with them.

I’m working on something now, but slaying the perfectionism demon is a double-edged sword. Perfectionism is in the soul of all artists. It’s what makes us want to improve. I am learning, but I have to balance that with delivering the content I promise. Here. Maybe this can at least be educational.

A is (in my opinion) a better piece of art. But I’ve redrawn the frame twice now, finally settling on B, because at the intended distance and against a background the ‘good’ art just causes eye strain and the details are lost anyway.

And backgrounds are a thing with me right now. Without assistants if I want good looking backgrounds I need to use the industry secret - shortcuts. So I spend time leveling up in that arena and feel like the backgrounds are almost too good.

So then I feel like I have two choices. Rapidly attempt to level up my character and technical drawing to match which causes delays, or purposefully draw worse backgrounds, which the perfectionism demon has a really tough time accepting.

I have trouble getting much actual work on Turn done because… well. Look.

I am very confident saying that if I was happy with the demo I would have finished Turn by now and it would be at least as good as any other random adult platformer on Steam. The problem is that adult platformers on Steam are bad, which is what made me start Turn in the first place. Now Turn looks like a proper game, but it’s hard to stop fiddling with it and actually work on content.

I know this probably isn’t super interesting, but there’s so much fucking work that I haven’t been comfortable showing because of my own hangups. It might take another couple weeks before I get something out the door, but I promise it’ll come, and hopefully it’ll be worth it. I’ll leave you guys with a bunch of my doodles from the last week. Check the next post.