Doing something over nothing

24-01-2025

When I got to bed last night I promised myself I would get up early and start on the second game in the 20 games challenge, Flappy Bird. I wanted to get some development time in before work, and planned on getting at least 2 hours of dev time in before I started my day job, essentially prioritizing my energy for personal project over work projects.

But of course, when my alarm rang at 6:00 I was a wreck. Alarms were pushed to 7:30 and when I got up then I didn't feel much better. So I sat down in front of my computer and got stuck doomscrolling reddit while watching YouTube. Great success..

8 o'clock came and went and at 8:15 I hadn't even shifted my body from the shrimp position I had put it in when I chained my brain to social media when I sat down. At about 8:30 I though to myself; "Wasn't I suppose to do some game dev this morning? Good work dumbass". But I also asked myself; "Do I have time to do that now?". And I decided that no, I don't have time to start building a game in Godot now with work starting in just 30 minutes. But there were some stuff I could do. So I decided that I would force myself to do one, simple thing; creating a new github repository.

This took maybe 10 seconds, about as long as choosing the name '20gameschallenge_2_flappy-bird'. That was all I needed for the snowball of motivation to start rolling. In the span of the next 28 minutes I had a flow of "Well now that I did this little thing, I might as well do this little thing too" experiences;

• Create a github repository
• Clone repository
• Create new empty Godot project
• Add empty Godot project to repo and push to GitHub
• Connect GitHub repo to my '20 games challenge' GitHub project
• Retroactively create tasks for some of the stuff from the list above
• Start creating simple tasks for the game features themselves, in total 11 tasks

Let me tell you, each of these little steps felt like almost no work at all by themselves, but these 30 minutes of churning through tiny tasks have probably set me up incredible well for my next game development session. I now know exactly where to start, and have at least the first 5 tasks defined well enough that I can just bang them out one after the other and get a very barebones prototype of Flappy Bird up and running.

Did my morning go as I expected yesterday? Not at all, but I'm very happy with what I did get done, and how effective I was when I first started. The exercise of "Well this little thing, then that little thing" made everything so easy for my tired brain, and it was a great reminder that doing SOMETHING is always better than doing NOTHING.