Progress Update?

Oh man, Guild Wars 2 is so much fun. I'm spending pretty much all my free time playing it.

What's that? Adventures of Balzac? Programming?

They're crying over how little work has been done.

So I said I would be fixing bugs and then releasing the first level as a demo yesterday come hell or high water. It didn't happen. Between doing a ton of programming for my actual day job (web development) and Guild Wars 2's recent release, nothing has gotten done on my game. This is very frustrating for me since I'd love to get a job in the games industry, but feel like I need a portfolio to show first. Now it's September, 4 months since I started programming my game, and 1 month since I got anything meaningful done on it.

I'm feeling kind of lost on this project because...well, I'm not sure why. Maybe it was the fact that the game is pretty bland and generic in terms of gameplay and I'm not entirely sure what to change about it. Maybe it's that after spending every available free minute during July working on the game, I just burned out on it a bit. I'm not sure what's causing me to feel this way about the project, but I've got to take steps to deal with it and get back on track to shaping the game up to a point where I can feel good about posting it somewhere.

What I've decided to do about this is two fold:

1. I will no longer hold myself to the previous "I need to have visual progress every Saturday" standard that I was keeping up during May, June and July. Progress will come on it's own time and I'll just have to deal with it. I suspect that there will be more progress when things are slower at work though, and less when, like now, we're scrambling to make sure all our ducks are in a row so that we can release our product.
2. I'm going to sit down and be mapping out possible ideas to integrate into the engine. As it stands I have the jumping and shooting aspect more or less down pat. But there are other things to think about including level gimmicks and code structure (which still needs to be fixed up after the rush at the end of July). So I'll be carefully planning out where those go from here.

Hopefully these two strategies will lead to me getting more work done and feeling better about it in the future. If anyone has any ideas on how to deal with this kind of lethargic, wandering feeling regarding a game project or if you have a neat idea for a platforming mechanic that you'd like to see in a game, feel free to drop a comment below and tell me about it.