How to overcome Indie-Game-Devs writers block

Martin Wisniowski - Nodepond
2 min readFeb 14, 2024

Here I share an idea, that helped me to get my (single) indie-game-dev process more streamlined.

The Problem of Switching Tasks…

One problem I always had in game-development was a very typical issue: I just finished a work of art (like gfx or sound assets). To experience them in the game, you would need to switch to coding to test them out — but you are in the “artwork mood” right now, and switching the brain from art to code is kind of hard.

And also exactly the other way round: you just finished coding a part of the game-engine or a new feature to test out. Now you would need sounds or graphics, to actually really test the experience of the newly written code. But switching from the coders-brain to the artwork-brain to make some assets to test out is super hard most of the time. Like: I will need a decent explosion, but I don’t have one here.

This kind of task switching brought me lots of frustration while developing a game on my own.

A very simple trick resolved this problem

When I realised, that this kind of “task switching” was a very reliable source of frustration to game-development for me, I came up with the following idea, and it still works for me:

I seek to always have a backlog of tasks to do, that will fit in the following categories: a) technical, b) artwork, c) game-design and d) organisational tasks. With that backlog…

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Martin Wisniowski - Nodepond

Media-Artist, Game-Designer, Software-Dev with background in Urban Planning. Follow my atomic-newsletter about nerdstuff: https://nodepond.beehiiv.com