Towards the end of 2025, I started focusing solely on Hyperslice to prepare for its release. This stopped months, if not years, of struggling. After its release in January, I jumped straight into Lexispell to prepare for the Next Fest demo. During these past months, I was incredibly productive, working 10-hour days (if not more) 7 days a week easily, all because I was focusing on one thing at a time and I was keeping momentum.

This stopped towards the end of Next Fest and since then I’ve been struggling again. I don’t feel burned out or tired, but I’m not focused anymore, and I’ve lost momentum.

This ultra-focused period was definitely not super healthy. I don’t want to romanticize the “crunch” or the “hustle” but it made me reflect, and I think I know myself a bit better now.

From focus to dispersion

Towards the end of 2025, I started focusing solely on Hyperslice to prepare for its release. This stopped months, if not years, of struggling. After its release in January, I jumped straight into Lexispell to prepare for the Next Fest demo. During these past months, I was incredibly productive, working 10-hour days (if not more) 7 days a week easily, all because I was focusing on one thing at a time and I was keeping momentum.

This stopped towards the end of Next Fest and since then I’ve been struggling again. I don’t feel burned out or tired, but I’m not focused anymore, and I’ve lost momentum.

This ultra-focused period was definitely not super healthy. I don’t want to romanticize the “crunch” or the “hustle” but it made me reflect, and I think I know myself a bit better now.

From focus to dispersion

The difference between now and the focus period I experienced is how many things I had to do. When I was working on Hyperslice, I had an obvious goal of releasing the game. It was the only thing that mattered, and everything else was secondary or not even conceivable. This means I would wake up every day, knowing I had to do one thing: work on the game. No videos, no client work, no game jams, side projects, or whatever. Making games already requires doing a bunch of different things: design, art, UI, code, marketing, etc… and that’s why I like making games! Adding more diversification is just adding more ways to lose energy and focus. This also meant I was working all the time. No weekends, very little social stuff, way less gaming, no gym, no walks, pretty much nothing.

So why did I lose the momentum? Towards the end of Next Fest, I had to make a video about my Linux experience for YouTube. I had to do it as I agreed on a specific date with a sponsor. This meant I stopped working on Lexispell to produce a video, in the middle of Next Fest. It was not ideal, and most importantly, it was not what I wanted to do. This made me very unproductive, and I spent a lot more time doing it than I should have. Working on the video, got me motivated again to make more videos and it also reminded me of Linux. The video discussed my Linux experience, and I received many interesting comments. Unfortunately, the pandora box was opened, and my brain started to deviate from the main goal, which was Lexispell.

The problem is that I love doing different things, and for a while I sincerely believed it would make me more productive. You see, whenever you’re stuck on something or tired of programming, you can switch to making a video. But unfortunately, my brain doesn’t really work that way. I can’t compartmentalize my life and my ideas so easily. What ended up happening most of the time, is I would switch to another project, but my mind would still be stuck thinking about the previous thing. Not only that, but project or task switching was becoming an easy way to escape difficulty.

When working on a game or any project, really, you’ll face moments where things are difficult. It can be technical, a hard decision to make, or even something you don’t know how to do yet. When this happens, the immediate response is to flee, at least for me. It’s uncomfortable, and it will feel like no progress is being made. If you have multiple projects you can work on, it’s very tempting to switch. It requires some time as the brain keeps thinking about the previous problem, and you’ll inevitably face other difficult things in your other projects. You can actually reach a point where you’re stuck on every project, switching is not possible anymore, and you feel completely frozen.

Focus and momentum

It’s not the first time I’ve thought about this subject. Since I started working for myself, I’ve been struggling with this. Over the years, I think I found the solution, but unfortunately I’ve never really been able to

implement it. I think the solution is simple: you can’t truly do multiple projects in parallel. Well, it’s not exactly that. The solution is to tune the time frame of the parallelization. Are you going to switch tasks every 20 minutes, hour, days or months? What happened when I was focusing on Hyperslice and Lexispell, is that I had no other things to think about for weeks or months. This made decisions much easier to take. Oh, I have a video idea, should I do it? No, I have a bigger priority, so it goes into the list and I’ll think about it later. Oh, I have a game idea, should I prototype it? No, bigger priority detected, this goes into a list. I really want to explore a new technique, art style or color palette. NO! Focus, list, goodbye.

Understanding what time frame is best suited for each task or project is not easy. Switching from answering emails to doing the dishes is fine. But switching for working on a new design or mechanic in a game to making a script about an entirely different subject for a video is tremendously difficult. It probably makes more sense to dedicate an entire day just to write the script and do the video. Or push the video for later to allow multiple weeks or months of focus on a game.

Moreover, I think I’m reaching a point in Lexispell that is simply a bit boring. What is left to do is mostly content. This is usually where I start thinking about moving on to another project. My brain knows that, and it’s like a little devil on my shoulder trying to convince me to do other things. The problem is that I go nowhere if I listen to this little dude. It’s what happened after Dashpong and why Hyperslice took so long to make. I would get bored or discouraged and I would just switch to something else. I was constantly busy, doing a lot of stuff, and yet I feel like I have nothing to show.

I talked a lot about focus, but it’s deeply linked to momentum in my mind. It’s way easier to maintain momentum when you don’t have to juggle between many things. Even if you have a slow day, you can do one thing, feel ok about it and keep the momentum. It’s much easier to do this if you have one clear goal, instead of many.

Understanding how YOUR brain works

It’s totally possible you don’t understand the struggles I’m describing. I think it’s because we are all different, and the difficult thing is understanding how we work to live a better and less torturous life. I realized my brain likes to hyper focus in a way. If I allow myself to think about other topics: videos, articles, shorts, DIY, etc… My brain explodes with ideas and things to research. I’m not really be able to shut it down and it will affect the main thing I was trying to do. It appears that my balance is not in doing a little of everything. It seems I have to accept I need to focus on something for a while, almost forgetting that other things exist. If I don’t do that, I’m like a butterfly, moving in seamlessly random directions, appearing really busy but making little to no progress.

I feel like I have to fight my brain most of the time. It can be super helpful to get plenty of ideas when brainstorming, but more often than not, it’s a struggle. That’s why I feel like trying to focus on one thing only is helpful for me. At least, all my “idea power” is going to that thing only. With time, my brain forgets the other things, and I enter a “flow state” where I don’t need motivation or energy, it’s just pure momentum.

With that said, I’d like to find a better balance. It’s cool to be able to focus on something, but I don’t want that to happen at the expense of “real life”. I struggle a lot to allow time for physical activities, social gatherings, and even house projects or DIYs when I’m too focused. Ideally, I’d be able to make some room for both, but it seems to be using the same brain energy. When I work hard, I just don’t have the energy to plan a cool hike for the weekend, get off the couch to go see friends or work out. If I reverse priorities, then I often end up with less time and energy for work. Finding balance in that is incredibly difficult for me.

I’m still unsure what’s the real solution. I don’t know how I can force myself to do one thing and not forget everything else at the same time. I’d love to hear your experience and how you’re dealing with your life in general. Maybe what I need is to talk to a psychologist and not strangers on the internet…

Cheers, Eliptik

MrEliptik

Full-time indie game developer using Godot

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