My Graveyard of Unfinished Projects... Is not a bad thing.

I've decided not to worry about "sticking to one project."  At all.  When a new idea hits me, I'm just going to run with it.

I used to, like TheMeatly here, think this was a problem; but it's really not.  Writers keep journals and switch projects mid-story all the time.  They don't always just work on one project until it's finished. The creative mind just doesn't work that way.

In Indie Game the Movie one developer (I don't remember if it's the guy who made Ted or Super Meat Boy, said something like "My hard drive is a graveyard..." of ideas that were never finished...

Well mine too.  Check this out...

Those screenshots represent about 1/10th the amount of gamedev projects I have started or mostly completed. These are just the ones I could easily find a screenshot for right now.

I could tell he felt the same way I did: like those unfinished projects were failures... a huge waste of time. But what great writer publishes everything he or she writes? What painter has every sketch in a show or museum (before he or she is dead I mean). They are journal entries.. sketches.. .and from every single one of them I learned something, I figured out something...I got something I could take and use elsewhere. Or I might just come back to it someday. Hell, I could have just as easily been watching a reality show on Netflix.

I was just reading On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, and the stuff he says about writing seems eerily similar to what I've discovered about indie solo game development.

Check out these quotes, and replace "writing" with "game dev."

http://positivewriter.com/quotes-on-writing-stephen-king/

"Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position."

"Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work."

"When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest. "

"Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s."

"Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference."