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[Hide] (156.2KB, 666x562) >>1475
A 3 word post? Better respond with a wall of text.
I used to do this thing I called "go to bed strategy". The TL;DR is to just go lay in bed, maybe with legs hanging out (it makes me feel like falling sleep isn't my goal), and think about what to do next in your game. You'll probably find out one of the following:
1. You're too physically tired, you'll either fall asleep or just want to go to sleep. Just do it, wake up at night and go to work/school at the end of your awake period if you have to, use your peak energy time on your projects instead of on school/wageslaving. Browsing the internet all day isn't going to give you energy, so why spend the rest of your day on that instead of just regaining that energy by sleeping?
2. Your mind is too preoccupied with something else like a videogame you want to play or boobs you want to touch. If that's the case then play the game or fap or whatever, this should only happen if you genuinely want to do it so you should just do it.
3. You have burnout. Burnout manifests as a total lack of interest, you may even question if you're interested in making games at all and would rather take up hiking as a hobby or do something that you usually don't do. In that case the worst thing you can do is try to force yourself. Give yourself a permission to take a break and forget about gamedev for some days/weeks until your interest starts to resurface, play games or watch movies or go outside or try whatever you feel like trying to do.
4. The idea of working on your game feels uncomfortable. This is a very silly but extremely common problem, sometimes you have a feeling that you want to work on your game but it just feels strangely uncomfortable and you try to distract yourself by browsing the internet or whatever. This has 2 likely causes. The first is that you're trying to do more than you're capable. You need to simplify things, throw away the hard work that you've done on it so far (because it has become a burden that's blocking you) and redo it, take up a smaller side project. The second cause is that you don't know the exact thing you need to do. "Work on my game" isn't a concrete step you can take, neither is "work on X feature". You need to figure out what part of your game you want to work on, and what are the actual steps you need to take to get started, something more like "loop through entities and put the ones that have X into an array", or "make sprites for the thing", or "figure out what buttons are on the UI and where they are".
You may not feel directly interested in working on your game which is easy to mistake as #3, but you can tell the difference by thinking about your game. If you feel like it might be fun to work on it, then it's not #3. In this case fate is in your hands, if there's something you want to do then do that, if not then consider finding some simple thing to do in your game and keep in mind if it's turning into #4.
Sometimes it's hard to tell if I'm in 2 or 3 or 4 because all I want to do is daydream about something like an indestructible robot emerging from an underground lab and starting to kill politicians as they helplessly try to mobilize the army or go to a bomb shelter only to have it all vaporized by overwhelming power.
There's also a type of exhaustion that sleep won't fix. It's not necessarily a problem by itself, I can work on some easy stuff like ideas or mockups in that state, but it's often combined with #3 or #4 which makes it much more complicated. It hasn't happened to me for a while so I don't remember the exact feeling though, I think I started wanting to do light exercise and go outside more because I felt like it would somehow alleviate this problem. Maybe the reason I haven't felt it for a while is because I started doing pull ups every other day.
One thing that I've learned to try to avoid is what I consider "unhealthy procrastination". Playing a videogame that you want to play could be thought of as "healthy procrastination"; although you're not working on your stuff, you are doing something that you enjoy. Unhealthy procrastination on the other hand is you doing something that you're not even enjoying, like browsing random websites or playing games you don't want to play or reading shitty manga/webtoons. If you find yourself doing it, this is when the go to bed strategy can be very helpful to figure out the problem or to find something better to do. I also sometimes turn off my internet connection because I just feel bad when I notice myself doing it.