It's not always clear when you're spinning your wheels. Polish, your quality bar, and iteration are very connected. Here's a couple of things I've seen (and fallen victim to) in my #gamedev#indiedev#gamedevelopment

BTW - Still trying to figure out the best way to do longer posts like this on bsky -- as I'm genetically incapable of writing anything less than, like, 5000 characters 🙃 Would love to hear what works for others.

There's more of course, and even the ones here have different "flavors" - but simply getting the habit of "wheel spin checking" can help you get a lot more done in a lot less time.

3: You're doing a lot of tangential work. It's "busy vs productive" focused on a specific element: Noodling with its file structure or naming conventions. Adding unrelated details. Or doing fringe polish - like perfecting the scale of a background prop of a gray box map.

2: You're WAY past your estimate. To be clear, there are many valid reasons this could happen. It's by no means a perfect measure for this, but if you've realized you've spent 2 weeks on something you thought would take 2 days, it's worth examining.

1: You're making lots of small changes to "the thing" and while those changes are making it _different_, they are not making it demonstrably _better_.