I just got bored and am now writing a blog on ModDB. I'm probably gonna document my thoughts and experience from past months of SourceModding. So probably only a few people might read this. I used to write similar stuff in my HL2Mod's channel on VMC(Valve Modding Community) discord server, but I left it about a month ago, explanations below.
Motivational problems. MOTY. Competition and showcasing as wrong ways of retaining enthusiasm.
At the end of August 2020, I finally released the Demo of Fremen's Foes: Redux. I finished 2 chapters out of 7, so there's still a plenty amount of work to do. Most people, who played the Demo gave me a good feedback, even though it has a few bugs that are still unfixed to this day.
Starting from September, I began going to a University and life didn't get any easier since that point. I quickly gained this lack of both mental and physical energy to do any modding, but the main problem was me refusing to acknowledge it. Along with lack of any ideas I had to take a hiatus for a single month. I used to work pretty hard during the summer and it felt quite bad to lose all productivity because of IRL stuff.
And even though the Demo received a nice feedback, I was always thinking that it just wasn't enough. I expected more comments, more reviews, more overall feedback. I made myself a LambdaGen account to showcase my stuff there, already had a VMC channel, did a trailer on Youtube. I did too much showcasing, because I was craving for any attention, since I was looking for any motivation to continue my work on FF:R.
Then, December started. So did the Mod of The Year Awards. And, oh boy, I took all the effort at making FF:R's Modpage look fancy, wrote a mediocre promotional article, did some images, posted all of that everywhere I could. The first half of Competition ended with me getting in Top 100, which was pretty good, I thought I had about 50/50 odds of getting there and so I succeed. So I stopped all promotional hustle. But then, suddenly, I am now in Top 10 Upcoming mods. And goddamn, my disappointment was so immesurable, the following week was filled with shame for my past actions.
I realised the MOTY was a nearly effortless event. It all turned to be fake. In the article they just copied mod descriptions, and all results only depended on how much votes you got, whether they were from actual players or random people that were told to vote(I had quite alot of the latter, because of my aforementioned mindless showcasing). And I told myself "THIS is what you wanted all along. THIS is what you were doing all the showcasing and promotion for". I felt really shameful and disgusted from everything. I left all discord servers related to Source.
I decided to somewhat "disconnect" from the community for some time, because I want to keep my expectations low and stop being constantly disappointed from the lack of feedback. Although I knew some good people from it, one of them even promoted my modification on theirs without me asking. I still appreciate everyone who enjoyed my modification.
In short, too much showcasing and attention-seeking eventually made everything only worse, because it was only raising my expectations, thus leading to even more disappointment. Also, the whole promotional paradox is that by constantly showing your work, you only do the opposite from what you really want. Updates and Devblogs must be good enough, so they wont bore people. Big, rare updates are better than frequent small ones.
As for today, I can say that I almost passed all exams I had at the University except for one, which I have to pass on a second try, which will be on the second week of February. I'm working on City-47 interiors from the 3rd Chapter and I hope to make a great devblog update in the future and return to VMC at the same time.
Thanks for reading all this crap, see you in idk, next article, probly. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
