WHAT CAUSES US TO STOP MAKING OUR PROJECTS?

I dunno! I've never quit a project that I was more than 2% done with.

Making a game is a serious commitment. You should expect to spend a few thousand hours of work to make a bad game, and many times that much to make a good one. Maybe your problem is just that you lack inspiration or planning, like you said. Maybe you keep changing your mind about what you want to do. But if it's happened so many times, another possibility is that you start projects you don't plan on finishing. Maybe you simply don't actually want to make a game. You just think you do, because you like games, and you like being in control, and maybe you even want to have made a game, but the actual process of building the game might not appeal to you as much as you once thought.

My situation's pretty different from yours. I've put a total of three of my games on long-term hiatus after simply losing motivation - but in two of those three cases, I actually came back and finished the project years later. I have confidence I'll finish the last one as well, some day.

The reason I lost motivation varied. In one case, I got to the point where I was satisfied with the gameplay, it was fun, but visually it was horrible. That wasn't something I personally cared about, but it kept the game from being releasable, so I called it quits (until an RMN event a decade later called Revive the Dead). In the other two cases, the projects became so big and important in my mind that I became sort of paralyzed. I avoided working on them because I felt like the amount of effort it would take to make the games meet my own standards was more than I was willing to put forth. "I'll feel up to it another day, I'd rather do something easier today," I told myself. And again the next day. And I started and finished multiple easier projects, and years went by.

• Hitting a roadblock you can't figure out, so you end up just not working on the project in place of doing something more interesting.
• Not liking the way the project is turning out and deciding to just quit.
• Forgetting it exists.

All of those have happened to me at least once.

I love programming. I like brainstorming and coming up with worlds, characters, etc.
What I don't like quite as much is creating assets, such as graphics. I am somewhat able to, but it feels more like a choir.

I can get by if it's placeholder-heavy, but it gets harder the further I development and nothing looks real.

The fan games I've worked on so far have been easier to get somewhere with since I mostly use and tweak existing resources. Some of these games I actually finish.
Demakes are fun to start working on, but as time goes you realize you're not building anything new and then the interest plummets.

Chronic indecisiveness. I've started and stopped probably over two dozen different projects over the last few years. Hell, maybe even three dozen or more at this point...

That, and the fact that I'm shit at designing anything other than a human being's general appearance. With costumes, armors, monsters, mechanical things, etc etc I often just have no idea what I'm even trying to do.

I share a lot of the above reasons though one unique reason was me thinking the engine I was using was outdated that by the time I've finished it'd be too late for anyone to really care about a sprite game on rm2k3. Keep in mind I was thinking this as far back as 2010 and yet rm2k3 recently got localized and Ara Fell is actually being released on steam.

But above all else I think ideas themselves never get outdated no matter what they're rendered in. My current project is using RMVXA with MV already out but I'm not bothered by the above thinking anymore.

I'm also a person who doesn't like to release demos, it's either a full game you can beat from start to finish or none at all. The only thing that gets me to complete shit are game jams, and even then I flake out on a lot of online ones.

I have on a couple of occasions wanted to make a game that had parallax mapping. The block for me is my mapping skills with Gimp aren't good enough to warrant doing this (ie. over tile mapping.) I mean I can make some pretty decent maps with tile mapping. To warrant the time for parallax mapping I need to do much much better.

Usually the reason comes down to my skill level. I want to do something but it's not in my skill set.

rmn

I feel like I suffer from imposter syndrome. I find myself hating my earlier works despite it being well-received, and always wonder why people kick up a fuss about my maps when its one of the easiest things/skills to master in RPGMaker. But I'm my own worse critic as well, so take that with a grain of salt. Of course, this creates a vicious cycle where I find myself redoing works over and over again, or I find myself resenting the more popular works on this site.

So I'm just keeping my head down and quietly work on my games. I feel it is better that way for me to just concentrate on the task at hand, rather than checking RMN every few hours to see if you got a notice or two for your game...