Sorry, man. Design work is tough. <3

[... and I'm going to say some stuff about my own history with design work, but mostly because you got me thinking about it. Please feel free to ignore, dismiss, yell at me for taking up space here. :)]

My work always lives in a fury of half-formed, half-abandoned ideas, sometimes forced into the light by the Magpie machine. It turns out that thinking about a game is... well, probably better than actually making a game. At least, it's much less pressure.

I can 100% say that my first two attempts at publishing games were driven by a theoretical view of what I wanted more than an actual understanding of what games I liked to play. Both of them have fans (and good parts), but it wasn't until I wrote Urban Shadows with Andrew Medeiros that I was like "Holy shit, I would play this game a lot." And now I tend to only write games that I would want to play and abandon them early when they don't meet that expectation.

So... I think this is a good thing! You did some stuff and you learned from it, and now you get to jump in to doing a new thing and the only thing that died was your idealized image of a game that never existed! And your next game can/will/must move you closer to a place where you'll emerge with something you're genuinely proud of producing (and might be marketable!)