The need for... something.

I was only able to spend about two hours last night working on Rustbot, and then life responsibilities took priority. We realized we were out of food, so we had to go grocery shopping. Aaaaaand then we finished season 1 of Galactica (thank [insert deity of choice here] we don't have to wait a full season like everyone else did after that cliffhanger).

So last night I began work by re-tooling the object class into multiple classes and, when that (including all the program-wide changes required to accommodate the new objects) proved to be quite a monumental task to undertake, I decided to start Rustbot all over again.

I spent about thirty minutes copying code snippets before I realized that it would result in 99% copied code snippets from the current iteration and 1% improvements.

So I rolled back to the previous (now current) version and continued my re-tooling. What then became apparent to me is that I need to fix lots of sloppy code. Many times during this iteration I have fallen into the "I'll just make it work for now and worry about good coding principles later" schism, only to completely forget to fix the sloppiness later. As a result, it's hard to look at, and even harder to understand.

What this insinuates is that I'm going to need a lot of time to sit down and organize things, to plan and modularize things better. Currently everything is far too specialized and I want it to be more adaptable / applicable to generic instances. This, coupled with global cleanup, is going to be time-consuming. I feel like it will be worth it, though.

Good coding now, ease of use later.

The big problem I face is motivation. When I think about the things I want to implement and how to do so, I'm very much enthused about the project. But when I sit down in front of the dev environment, all I want to do is shut it down and throw it away. It's a very difficult hurdle to overcome for me. I don't know if it's because the task appears too big and ultimately I'm really lazy, if it's because of the fear that my efforts will ultimately prove fruitless thus rendering them irrelevant and pointless, or if it's because I can't avoid the distraction of playing a game (or wasting time on twitter).

I feel that if I had, say, a week off to work on it that I would do amazing things with all the time. But then I also feel that I would spend every day just dicking around until mid-afternoon and wonder where the time went.

So it appears that my two biggest problems are lack of motivation, and lack of discipline. I would like to know how to overcome these so that I can actually make the game. Do I need ritalin or something?