I'm a deadbeat

I was looking at the list of big-ticket/high priority items on my whiteboard, and it occurred to me that a lot of them are half done.

Not the good kind of half done, where it's a huge project and a lot of pieces are in and functional.

The bad kind of done where infrastructure is in place and working, but it's not doing anything valid in the game context.

A good example of this is the recent boat code. This largely works, and probably only needs a couple of hours to get it in god-level beta test. Instead, it's sitting there in the code base, largely complete but unconnected.

How about clan wars? I spent time adding a lot of infrastructure for this, then never hooked it up. It also probably doesn't need more than a few hours to get it in beta test.

Classes are a bigger picture. I have more structure reworks to do, but I have been avoiding them. This one is a bit more understandable, because the project is so large - but this isn't exactly a huge piece of the puzzle.

Part of the reason for this is because I'm constantly 'firefighting' instead of doing new development. I'm always fixing minor bugs, heading off social/political issues, trying to manage things and people. I'm starting to think it would perhaps be better for all involved if I simply stayed invisible most of the time. I used to do that a lot, for exactly this reason, but for some reason fell out of the habit.

Another part of the reason is that the detail work isn't any fun. It's painstaking and precise, and there's always negative feedback from players to look forward to. Nevertheless, leaving a heap of half-finished projects on the queue isn't helping anything either.

No pain no gain, perhaps.