Project that will never be complete

With this update i have reached a certain milestone - i have finished the prologue
And on that occasion i present you with a ramble from my gamedev experience, read it, you won't

Would you be surprised if i told you this project was going on for a year at this point? Or even two, depends on what is counted as the starting point
Probably not, but this whole game was my little hobby project for last two years, learning gamedev at a leisurely pace
Progress on the game has been incredibly slow, it still is, and likely will remain slow for the foreseeable future - last thing i want for myself is to burnout on a hobby

"Chapter 0", or "Prologue" is that stretch of the game you can currently play, which i decided to create before i began work on the game proper, a sort ot sandbox to experiment with things and create a foundation in the process
I wasn't planning on publishing it here before i finished the prologue, but i guess i decided it was close enough, and i thought it already was taking too long 

When i just began development i didn't know what i was doing - creating yume nikki fangame based on my and my friends' collective dream journal? or maybe i wanted to do some original story?
i had ideas, of course i did, but you should never trust an idea residing purely in your head - the moment you write it down you realize how rubbish it is, and that will be your actual starting point
First i created technical foundation, next i outlined story ideas - maybe you'll have it in reverse order for your projects, who knowns
When i build enough of a world i then began to connect the mess i already had to that body of lore, shaping it to be "Prologue" - at that point i still had no idea what will be happening in next chapter
Thankfully, by now i do, story crystallizes naturally as you go, but you shouldn't rely on that

I'm glad i didn't jump right to chapter 1, and that is the lesson i learned about gamedev, i suppose
The lesson being that i wouldn't recommend anyone to just jump right into development in any project more serious that a jam entry without at least general directions, especially if you're prone to abandoning projects
But, of course, you need to start somewhere eventually and learn as you go, so yeah, start with a "prologue" of your project, or develop a few burner games if you're alright with creating few projects you'll probably never touch again
But despite that, your project will always be suboptimal, there will never be a time when your game won't need a refactoring, you will be instant legacy code at all times, but at least you'll figure some stuff out before it becomes set in stone and save yourself lots of trouble