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Any advice for sustaining motivation for a long-term project (1.5 years, 5+ years to complete)?

I get very excited (probably overexcited) when I finish a milestone and it works better than I could have hoped. But if I share the tiny victories with a select few friends or family, I mostly hear, "I don't understand the project," or, "this project is impossible/can't be done."

"Nobody cares until everybody cares," is a painful truth to live by. The lack of meaningful feedback makes me wonder if I will ever create something worthy of the time and attention it asks of the audience.

That is 100% on my timeline and may end up being the most productive way to find "my people."

I still have more work to do, but I have some organizations in mind locally (job/home training programs for BVI or soon-to-be individuals) and beyond (library programs and orgs in my state). My self criticism is holding me back a bit until I have something more recognizable as a traditional "game."

Thanks again for the insight. If you want to take a listen/watch, I have a 5 minute video demonstrating how I use wind to provide the background scenery in the world. Sometimes I listen to it on repeat as a sort of guided meditation (headphones are best).

Just imagine the footsteps as a corgi running joyously through a forest, I have the steps set to a high rate so I can feel each surface transition immediately: Link to YouTube, includes chapter marks for skipping

Music is also a huge part of the game, since the genre is adventure/puzzle/soothecore and pitch happens to be a very convenient way to organize audio into solve-able parts! I'm a lifelong amateur musician, combining programming and music to create virtual instruments has at least been personally entertaining and satisfying.

Thanks for the encouragement and I hope so too!

Thanks for the response, unfortunately that does tend to be my experience. Can't change the world with something that has been done before, right?

So what to do? I believe it's essential to find a creative community that does understand and appreciates what you're doing.

In a way, I have increased the challenge level for myself. I'm a full-time software engineer and the project is an audiogame, specifically created with the Blind and Visually Impaired community in mind. Audiogames as a medium is already niche; I hope I can attract wider interest, but the format and concept rely heavily on accessibility as the highest priority design goal.

Where can you find community in your creative field?

So far, this is a particular challenge for me. I've slowly participated where possible in an online forum for audiogames, and while sometimes positive there is more often than not negative criticism and even toxic behavior. I am fully sighted so there is definitely an aspect of feeling like an outsider to that community. There are also not many games I can look at as an example, since many audiogames are created by independent BVI developers and limited by the accessibility of their tools.

I have had some limited success contacting independent audiogame developers and studios, mainly hoping for correspondence and discussion. I've had good discussions with a few individuals but nothing consistent.

An option I have would be to create a dev blog and post updates, but that requires an entire other workload that I haven't been able to engage with. Especially since it doesn't feel ready to be published to a wider audience, and translating the experience to video loses a lot of the tactile and spatial "sense" I'm trying to provide.

Edit: added some clarification because I tend to overthink everything I write

You have no idea how true that is! I can trace the lineage of this game back through childhood: at 12 I wanted a tape recorder for Christmas, at 9 I wanted a parabolic "spy dish" from a catalog.

I started designing it after I found very few good audiogames to play. It was almost disorienting when I realized how much of my personal history unknowingly led me to this.