It sounds a lot like you're dealing with burnout. One of the quickest recipes for burnout is putting all of the value on the results of the work rather than finding the work itself inherently rewarding - valuing the explicit reward instead of an implicit one. These two aren't always causal, which can result in this disjointed feeling and lack of motivation. Since you're not seeing any results from your work, it feels like a lot of wasted time and energy.

The quickest way to provide that explicit reward is to see players enjoying the results of your work. This doesn't have to be through a shipped game, it can be through your own personal projects as well. One of our Discord members enjoys posting his own personal playable game projects to our indie channel, where people can try them. These are not massively scoped games, but they are fun and the play testers do appreciate them. The feeling that your work is not wasted is important to getting validation that your efforts are worthwhile.

A longer-term solution to switch to implicit enjoyment of your work is to embrace a sense of detachment from the results of your work and focus on doing tasks that you enjoy doing for their own sake. I don't focus on what the results of my work will get me when I go into my job at all. I focus on the part of the work I find inherently rewarding and interesting - I treat my tasks like puzzles and I solve them. The feeling of solving a puzzle is rewarding and interesting to me on its own, I would feel good solving problems and puzzles all day long. The other stuff - the rewards for doing well at work and the promotions and whatever - are obviously important and there is some long-term meta-game strategy, but the day-to-day job satisfaction is entirely based on doing the things I find inherently engaging to begin with.

You might not find that to be the case (or even possible) in your current place of employment, or even in general. What is job satisfaction worth to you? Perhaps you could find a new employer that matches your needs better? It's difficult to say for sure. I also suggest talking to a therapist about this. Therapists are there to advocate for and provide context to you in the field of mental health. Pursuing a career that is more engaging is certainly a reasonable goal that a mental health professional should be able to assist with. A good mental health professional should certainly help you identify and work through the feelings of burnout you've expressed.

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If keeping the beat is the most important thing in the game, then you build the game around keeping the beat. There are many different ways to approach the problem, but if I were building such a system myself, I would start with a system to handle a data-driven beat (e.g. this level/song sets the beat to X, that level/song sets the beat to Y) and then build all of my visuals and gameplay on top of that. The key component to making this work would likely be an animation system that could scale animations faster or slower in order to match the timing of the music.

On the data side, this would mean all animations would be built so they could be sped up by dropping frames, or slowed down by holding certain frames for additional length. All animations would also need to be the same length (or a multiple of a standard length), so that I can ensure the animations will fit into a standard musical measure. If I wanted to have a variety of attack animations and hit reactions, I would probably also establish a set of rules that each attacking and hit reaction animation must always be the same number of frames. I could further standardize each attack and hit reaction active frame happening on the same frame each time.

The code side would then play my animations to those musical measures along the beat. It would do so by scaling the animations longer or shorter based on the beat. The system could add or cut animation frames so that each animation can play in sync with the music. Once I've got the animation system integrated with the beat-keeping system, I can then ensure each animation should start playing on the appropriate frame to keep the beat. As long as the animations are scaled to the musical measure and the music keeps the same beat for its entire duration, the animations should always sync to the beat of the music.

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How do they find that many bugs? Consider - in AAA games, we bring on entire teams of QA to test every day during production. Imagine 50 testers each find only five bugs a day from a full eight hours of testing. That's logging a combined 250 bugs daily. In a week, you've got 1,250 bugs. After a month, that's 5,000 bugs. A year would be 60,000 bugs. Most testers can find more than five in a day, especially early in development.

To give you an idea of what things are like in the trenches, take my example. Two days ago, I personally fixed bug number 522,096 on my current project. I'm currently working on bug number 474,991. These are not randomly generated numbers. When I joined the team (roughly two years ago) I started working on bugs and tasks numbered in the mid 30,000s. QA finds and logs a lot of bugs.

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After being collectively yelled at on the forums for so long, I've developed a thick enough skin that none of the feedback really bothers me anymore. I don't get the emotional engagement with it much anymore. To me, there's really only two kinds of feedback - actionable and not.

If the feedback is actionable - if it's actually within the realm of possibility to do - then we'll consider it, figure out how much work it will take, prioritize it, and put it in the backlog to get worked on if/when we have time. Actionable feedback would be things like "Pastrylord doesn't feel very engaging to play", "The Buttery Doom ability feels overpowered", or "The Cappucino Plateau is a boring area". These are issues we can legitimately investigate and try to address.

If the feedback is not actionable, then we'll probably file it away somewhere. Some of this feedback is pretty obvious, but there's also some feedback that will never go anywhere. Trying to assign blame among the developers or our business partners for some shortcoming in the game, for example, is never actionable. Asking for a complete redesign of the game (or major game systems) is almost never actionable. Giving us unsolicited content ideas (e.g. posting a design a dungeon for the game you like) is not actionable for legal reasons. Realistically, little will actually come from this kind of feedback - we can't do it in the current game we're working on and we have plenty of our own ideas for things we want to do in other/future games. Never say never, but often say "probably not".

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You're talking about downtime. Whenever I have downtime I try to be productive if I can, but the type of downtime determines what I can do. There's two main types of downtime - when my workstation is still usable and when it isn't.

If my workstation is still usable (e.g. the build is broken but I can still look at code/script/assets/etc.) then I notify my team that I've got some bandwidth and downtime to help out as a second set of eyes on any tasks my team might need help with. I can do code, design, or asset reviews for teammates and I can look over the various Slack discussions on other in-progress bug fixes and features to comment if I feel like I can contribute something helpful. I might not be able to run the game to test or validate anything, but I can still contribute my skill and knowledge to others who aren't having downtime.

If my workstation is unusable (e.g. all system resources are dedicated to building the game, building assets, compiling a level/lighting/etc., network or VPN down, etc.) then I really can't do much. I can't do reviews or join those conversations. In those situations I've traditionally done things to pass the time like listen to music or a podcast, scroll through social media, or think about what to write next on the blog. More recently, I've been focusing on leaning away from the social media scrolling and being more mindful so I have been taking the opportunity for mental and emotional "digestion" by not focusing on anything external and allowing my mind to process the normal emotional experiences in my life. It was difficult to start, but has definitely helped with my focus and my attention since I've started doing it.

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