Start the Journey. Finish the Process
I have a tendency to make my creative endeavors more complicated than it has to be, especially because I have very poor follow-through. As I recently learned, this is a product of my inattentive ADHD. Once I embraced this diagnosis, many key factors of my behavior fell into place: the hyper-focus followed by complete disinterest, the beginning but never ending, the overwhelming urge to quit something because it is not perfect. The executive dysfunction. All barriers to achieving my goals.
Vicious Rhetoric, my ESL TCG (see previous post), is an intricate game full of complex rules and game elements. It is the nature of a trading-card game to be complex. Much like English itself, the game requires conviction to learn, play, and to make. It is beyond my means, mentally, financially, organizationally, etc. So, I discarded it. I haven’t looked at it or its rules since 2017. I have moved on to more grounded endeavors, like instructor training and curriculum development. The same could be said for my Sight Word game I developed for my kindergartener (who is now in middle school). More on that later.
But that itch...that creative itch is still there. It writhes in my brain. It lures me, bright and shiny. “Yes, you are good at coaching. You are good at administration. But are you having fun?”
Gramatic! could be a solution. When I started making this game, I purposefully did not give myself goals. But, I did give myself one rule: make it simple enough to follow through.
Gramatic! was born out of the desire to make a game that helped practice grammar tenses. It needed to be simple enough to make that I could work on it in my down time. It had to be simple enough that I could develop it in a short amount of time, with the creative resources I already had. I am racing against my own weaknesses after all, and now that I know the dopamine from a new project only lasts so long in my brain, I had to push to finish the prototype before I inevitably lost interest in the process.
Gramatic! also needed to be affordable to manufacture. Considering I was working on a budget of basically zero, once Gramatic! was ready to go on sale, I needed a way to sell it without investing too much money I didn’t have. This is where I am very grateful to the Game Crafter for print-on-demand. The mere ability for someone to buy professional cards and have them shipped without me being anywhere in that process is the only reason I have gotten this far.
Fighting my ADHD has been the biggest hurdle of making Gramatic! a reality. Now that it is officially on sale, I am ready to tackle the next hurdle: getting people to actually buy it!