I’ve been stuck in this mindset where I can’t think of any good website ideas, or game ideas, or anything really. I want to get out of this mindset by thinking, “What should I make?”, or “What do I need to make?”.
I still follow peoples advice on “go take a walk and think about it for a bit” and “you’ll get one soon” and things like that. Those don’t seem to work.
All I need is advice on how I can make myself come up with ideas for projects that would let me do something with my free time. Any help would be appreciated!
These are very open ended questions which make it hard to narrow things down to one project and generally I don’t find them a good question to ask. Instead of looking for something to make for the sake of needing to make something try to find a problem you have that you can solve by making something. All the best projects are solving some problem some one has had and it is a much narrower question to ask. You can narrow it down further by looking at each of your hobbies/interests/things you need to do one by one.
If you want to be more systematic about it go through each area of interest and write down every issue or problem you can think of. Big or small, easy to hard to solve (with or without a programmable solution) - anything and everything. Just get them down on bit of paper or document. You can expand on it over time as well when you think of something or encounter an issue for the first time. Then once you have a few things you can consider them in more detail. Think about how you might solve things, and slowly filter things out to one that most interest/bug you and that you could solve with a program in some way.
That should give you specific things to think about and ponder over which can be very helpful for leading to an actual project idea.
And honestly these days I have far more project idea that I could start then I have time to start. But they all start with a problem I encounter. I tend to need to think through an idea I have for a bit then write it down and shelve it for the future so it does not distract me from the current things I have on the go. Or if something is more important/interesting than a current project it can replace something else I have on the go (which you need to be careful of that you don’t keep jumping to new things and never finishing things you have already started).