So hard. As a programmer it’s so much easier to get deep in the tech and push off the ambiguous, frustrating, yet rewarding craft of designing content.

I built half the content of a VR game I released a long while back with a friend, and the only thing that got me through it was listening to talks by John Cleese on the topic of creativity. My process could be summed up as: beat my head against a wall, make something okay-ish, get frustrated, try again and again, sleep on it, and eventually repeating that enough times results in awesome stuff.

But I have a hard time calling it “fun” even with the luxury of 7 years of hindsight.

This is super true. It's why programmers like writing game engines. It's relatively well defined all the parts needed so it feels like you're making lots of progress when in reality you're just re-inventing the wheel and not doing the truly hard part, the actual design and content creation. I'm super guilty of it myself.

I'm polar opposite - ideas coming out the wazoo, like on average 1 idea per day, after decades of research into game design, but I dread moving into production and programming. Not for lack of experience, as chief of infotech I brought business-grade software projects from whiteboard to screen, but talking to a computer is just tedious. So much plumbing.

Yeah a lot of people think of game design as just being about brainstorming cool ideas

But in reality it’s actually a pretty technical job from what I’ve seen

Can involve a lot of staring at spreadsheets and dealing with stats