It took us 5 years to finish our game (everyone started from 0 knowledge on how to make games, so it was a rocky road), and for the last 1.5-2 years my life was absolute hell.

I'd push hard at work for 9 hours a day, eat, then push hard on the side project for 8-9 hours a day, sleep, wake up, and just keep going. One day a week maybe I'd just sleep. Not having "pure energy" for the side project meant that everything suffered.

We had to learn-by-trial virtually _everything_, I don't recommend ever doing a big project that way.

If you want to finish a game, choose a small game. Start doing game jams. Practice _finishing_. You can do more and more later.

Or, go for it, do it our way, all in to win (win is subjective, the pride is real, the monetary result didn't really do anything meaningful for so much investment). I wouldn't do it this way again, but I understand people who do.

All that said, the joy of doing something for us by us is not something I've encountered in my 15 year career yet. So... if you've never built something (and truly finished!), but you want to try... go for it.

No wonder you feel like hell, where is time for people, leisure, exercising and all the other activities that will help you move faster by feeling better? The true optimization for becoming a more efficient person is to do less of the thing you're doing most of, and do more of the other stuff you do less of.

There’s almost no time to do anything, and some of the hours you have left may be at non-prime times of the day.

> The true optimization for becoming a more efficient person is to do less of the thing you're doing most of, and do more of the other stuff you do less of.

The problem is this means sleep or work. I’ve opted for the former, and suffer for it. Sacrificing working, at least any notable amount, just means trading time-loss for money-loss which may or may not work depending on person.

Evening is pretty much make dinner, eat, relax for a bit and be in bed reading by 8.

But otherwise, it prioritises your side project while you're fresh in the morning and puts relaxing (movie/TV/etc) for when you're fading at the end of the day.

Our first would sleep 12 hours per night. Yay, lots of free time.

Our second sleeps 9 hours per night. Whoops.

even if you assume this is possible, why would your boss pay you for the 8 hours when it clearly is possible to only pay 6? You end up back where you're started.

The issue here is that the income you generate from your job is not enough. I dont know what the solution is - but under a capitalist world-view, the only solution is to own more capital, get that capital to produce your income stream (dividends or capital gains or whatever), and thus, give yourself back time.

AKA, this is called retiring, and if you can do it early, you end up with a better life, able to spend your energies on activities you care about (such as making this game).

Which doesn't necessarily change the point, but I'm not sure what if anything the point is supposed to be, and it seems an important omission.

I might have 2-3 hours each day (of energy and motivation) to work on projects but not 8. Of course I never have 4 hours during the week either, I'm lucky to get 1 in usually.

which is why some people who have the discipline and self-control to do a big personal project often have to neglect friends and family - it's a sacrifice.

Hell, I'm still waiting on my first board game signed by a publisher four years ago to be manufactured and released, and it sounds like it's still on the backburner at their company (they had a rough two years from the pandemic, I get it). And I've had another game be a finalist in two game design competitions since then and still not find a publisher willing to take a chance on it (several other finalists in the same competitions have). And I've pitched at least a dozen of my other designs to quite a few publishers as well.

Still churning and pitching but after seven years of trying and not getting anywhere, it's rough. I know if I went full time I'd have a lot more success (especially seeing how much success a friend of mine is having in only about 3 years of being full-time at it), but I'm not willing to start working for 30% of my current salary or possibly a lot less just to throw a few more board games into the field that's already supersaturated from the past decade of constant new and quality releases, especially when most publishers are facing an existential threat from the current shipping crisis.

I'm also working on a couple of smaller video games, but there are weeks where it just seems like I'm too busy or tired to spend time on it. And it's hard to go "yes, let's make the sacrifice of not seeing friends and ignoring my family" when I'm really not seeing how I'm going to break through the flood of video games out there either. I'm not an artist, I'm not going to make the next Stardew Valley or Undertale by myself. I'm making games with hexes and arrows in them :) Fun games, and one of them was even a popular free flash game back in the day and also won awards, but most people have probably moved on now and the new generation won't have any nostalgia for it.

Still feel like I need to make it anyway though.

Saturdays and Sundays are chore days, or family days, or simply resting, or ...

About 4h remaining for yourself is still fairly realistic.

Work less, but keep clocking the same amount of hours.

A lot easier to do with WFH, but still achievable if you're in an office cubicle.

Impossible to do if you work a trade/labor-intensive job.

Now that I have an office, it's like I'm living a completely different life where there's energy for meaningful activities after work. I get so much more done. The socialization is down from 2019 but there's a feeling to being in a building full of people that's different from being stuck in your house all day.

I can't imagine accepting an open plan office job again, the money would have to be life changing. I suspect cubicles would be fine.

You can't do all of that and have a job and also make significant progress on a side project. There isn't enough time in the day.

https://blog.asmartbear.com/two-big-things.html

https://www.amazon.com/Finish-Give-Yourself-Gift-Done/dp/052...

Thanks for sharing it :)

It turns out it’s hard to completely drop projects in the spring/summer and pick them up in the winter. I’d love to keep pecking at them over the photography season but I have a hell of a hard time getting anything done when I can only dedicate an hour or so an evening to it.

Actually, many software jobs are like that. All it requires is for you to not be ambitious to create. You can have very good salary in many companies while slacking a lot. Sometimes you might have to be in office for a lot of hours, meaning doing leisure, socialization and side project in the office.

The specifics will vary greatly depending on your employment agreements and legal jurisdiction, so make your own decisions regarding your own situation (doing it on company time might be the lesser risk compared to not doing it at all), but do be wary.

If you’re salaried, you’re always on company time, so whether the company owns it or not is up to the laws of the state and the agreements you signed when hired.

Your advice to start small is spot on though. I would even say one of the best first things to do is start by making a game mod. You don't have to invent so much, you just get to enhance. You get to something playable much quicker and learn about all your false assumptions.

Another risk with mods is the game owner can shut you down at any moment, if public. I'll probably never do another mod or reuse someone else's IP for anything beyond very small prototypes. There are just so many tools now that you shouldn't have to.

(Star Wars Quake 1997-2002)

I have played lots of board games so I have a good mental model of different types and the components needed. When I get an idea for a theme or mechanism, I build it up mentally first. When it feels like it might be fun or interesting, Then I'll start making some crappy cards or tokens. Some people will just write on note cards but I like something that feels more real. So I'll make some mostly text based images from a template. If they are cards, I'll print on paper and cut them out, then use CCG (MtG) sleeves and cheap playing cards to sleeve my paper. This lets them be shuffle-able. For other components or boards, I'll print on card stock. If I need something heavier, I'll print on adhesive label paper and then stick that to foam board or cardboard. The next and most important step is play test it with anyone and everyone you can.

Glad to provide more information if you're interested.

And now with remote work being a norm, sometimes it feels like you barely work at all, and yet still accomplish the same amount of work as before.

Get paid for the value you bring, not the time you spend.

- Frameworks are great when you need to keep a team to a standard, and keep standardized answers available. There's no way I'm going to debug someone else's dependency errors on my own time though.

- Dev tools and automation are nice to have, but if I spend a whole night fixing tooling that's time I could have spent on the project. Some loose unit testing and tools that work without configuration is all that's I'm willing to use.

- A while ago I would have said that paid tooling is worth it if it saves you time. Open source and freemium products have gotten good enough now that that's no longer the case for a small enough dev team.

This struck me. Thank you for the reminder.

Learned a lot though, got pretty good at programming because of it (I am early in my career).

My thinking now is that if I want to make a somewhat complex/ambitious game, I will need to take the route of other successful artists, become independently wealthy first.

If so, why would you choose to do the same thing 18 hours a day for 5 years?

Yes, however the day job and night project were _completely_ different disciplines. Someone wrote that gamedev isn't really software engineering... I'd agree with that (not putting it down, but its not like anything I've done).

> If so, why would you choose to do the same thing 18 hours a day for 5 years?

Those long days came in the last 1.5-2 years. Why? I don't think we would have finished otherwise, or at least not anytime soon.

We found that momentum for us was critical. If we took it easy, then it slow days would turn into slow weeks and it would turn into slow months. We wanted to finish at some point. Even when we had a slow week or day, or when we'd go do something that wasn't the game, there would be a shadow of guilt that we are not finishing. I think that is personal, everyone does this differently.

And the second why? The reward loop of doing something with a realtime 3D game is simply joyous. I would sometimes have _so much fun_ making the game that on the good days I dreamt of quitting the day job and starting up a studio full time.

When the dust settled though, it took me almost a year to think about using the computer at home for anything other than playing a game or reading news / experimenting with homelab stuff. The burnout was harsh.

I don't regret it... but I'll never do it like that again.

Could you elaborate on that? I find this perspective very interesting.

I had a brief experience with gamedev, and I've actually found that even the smallest bit of game engineering is significantly more challenging than (I suppose) "x%" of web development.

However, on the other hand, the engine is only a part of game development (and can also be underengineered, and I think it generally is), so maybe this is actually the reason why you/other people don't consider game dev software engineering?

I can try, but I may not do the idea justice.

When I was working on the game, the only thing that mattered was the _game_. Was it fun? Intriguing (we are a story based walking simulator)? Original? In line with our story structure (we wrote the story side by side of making the game because sometimes the best words on paper just couldn't be translated by us to a player experience)?

You make changes non-stop to iterate and tweak and perfect. You learn quickly that someone's gut feeling can kill an entire chapter of the game, or change the ending completely.

At some point, my code was just a tool in making the game. I didn't see myself carrying this codebase further to other projects (we built the game on Unity so already writing an engine was "solved"), so it just turned into working prototype after working prototype.

Your code doesn't have to solve for all the corner cases you may miss in QA, because in our game the state was almost guaranteed at different parts of the play through. You need to remain extremely flexible with your design and code because its possible the game shifts drastically under your hands, more so than I've ever experienced at an already-chaotic "big" company.

So it just stops mattering that much. At least for us. We didn't have a team for code (just me), or a separate art team, or a separate story team, or even a single game designer throughout the project. Everyone wore almost every hat, and you lose the grace of planning and process.

It's more a feeling than something I could quantify exactly. An interesting reflection is that I became more rigorous and detail oriented at the day job after the wild west of my game code.

For example I have things like a KD-Tree implementation/wrapper that will always be useful, a maths library, a HexGrid component I use a lot, wrappers for rendering a lot of things fast, an entity system for units/objects, a generic framework/layout for code/objects in Unity etc.

But having said that, it really depends on the type of game that you're making.

Compare a basic CRUD webapp to a game. Most webapps won't need stellar art, it just needs to look okay and have some logos or default assets. Games often need to run their own assets for uniqueness, have way more freeform art, you name it. That includes pixel art, the often lowest barrier to entry. Animation? Webapps generally don't need animation beyond some default practice tweening, most games require animation to make things feel smooth and actually give the feeling things are happening, on a vastly higher level than simple tweening of color and position of some flat objects. Audio? Where the average person hates the embedded autoplay video/audio, games generally require at least sound effects, preferably a sound track too. Storytelling? Unless you count the average buzzword-filled marketing video as storytelling, webapps don't need that. Marketing, collaboration, etc. are all factors that come to play as well depending on corporate size, so depending on your goals, you will run against those too.

There is much more too. Psychology can play a huge part if you don't just blatantly copy existing things, and it is far more difficult to map a vague "I like this / I don't like that" than a business requirement. If you don't require animation, in all likelihood you're either creating a game in a genre where other demands are higher (visual novels with higher storytelling and individual art asset demands), or you'll be outcompeted if you don't have something to stand out, in which case one could argue the load is shifted to other disciplines anyway.

Maybe most of all, you generally don't need to develop content in most webapps: you are enabling users to create content themselves, whereas in gamedev, you are more often providing them with content. Of course this comes with exceptions (What about Sims? What about Rollercoaster Tycoon? What about mods?), but most games deliver at least some content developed by the makers of the game themselves. Or you spend days agonizing over algorithms to generate content in a way that makes it fun, making tons of art assets players can fiddle with, etc.

In addition to what others have said, game development places a massive priority on optimization and performance.

You have to write code that updates game state and renders a scene in under 16 ms. CONSISTENTLY under 16 ms. Otherwise, you get stutters and choppiness as it fails to maintain 60 fps. If you want to please your top-end PC gamers with their 144 hz monitors, you need to render each frame in under 6.9 ms.

With a web app, you can make up for underperforming code by scaling horizontally. That's simply not an option for game development.

Gamedev is mostly about iteratively changing some equations to make the thing behave like you want it to behave.

Disclaimer: I never worked commercially in gamedev, but I wrote a lot of games as a hobby. Most of them unfinished of course.

I know a few people who tried to make a big game first. None of them finished.

Even a small game will take much more time than you imagined, because there are so many details to consider. (Then it gets faster, because you can reuse the ideas, maybe even parts of code.) It is easier to try new concepts in a small project.

Do you feel comfortable sharing game name?

Going from start to finish on something, and then getting the opportunity to hear from fans (and critics alike), it is still making me smile a year and a half after launch.

When they say "money isn't everything" in this case its true, but I had I (and still have) a day job. If I had bet the monetary-farm on the project, I'd be singing a different tune.

The game name is "The Shattering", there's a link below somewhere to it on Steam :)

This isn't to say that people with a family can't do these things, but that you need to acknowledge the impact it will have on other people, and plan with them to make it work. For example, I often make the time for my wife to work on her novels between 7pm and 9pm. I get the kids to bed and do some cleaning, while she writes, and we still get to connect before sleep.

If I do get some spare time that is entirely mine, the absolute last thing I want to do is more work - one needs to relax! Go for a run, watch a movie, do some coding for fun, play a game, or just waste time on youtube or whatever - I don't want to be "hustling" a side project.

I could stay up later after the wife has gone to bed, but that is going to harm me long-term by trading sleep for side-projects that in reality are not going to change my life as much as long-term sleep deprivation is going to change my life. That said I do occasionally from time-to-time stay up late to have a beer and mess around on the computer - I think that is healthy in the long run :)

It took me some time to work out that with 2 kids now I just don't have the time for side projects anymore. It is impossible. My oldest is also a person that needs very little sleep. He stopped regular daily naps when he was about 6 months old. In the beginning of daycare (2 yo) he was the only kid in daycare that didn't sleep during the day. He also never goes to sleep before 9pm. In summer it often is 10pm or even later.

When he finally sleeps both my wife and me are just wasted. Not ever could I find energy or motivation to "work" after that.

However I still have hope for the future. When the kids grow older and do more for themselves there will be opportunities to write some fun code on the side :)

Most parents don't really understand what we are dealing with since their kids sleep much longer (2,3 hours more). This was even more extreme when he was little. When we told people that he wasn't sleeping at daytime they had this strange look as in "that is not possible".

However he learned walking and talking pretty early so he used his extra time it seems ;)

While it is a challenge I always remind myself how lucky I am to have two healthy kids. Sounds like a trope but it really is true.

That is true. Our 2.5 y.o. had a period of a couple months in which she refused to sleep more than 8 hours a day. That took a huge toll on all of us. Even now, she sleeps less than she's "supposed to". And of course, when we tried to consult with other parents, nobody could offer any useful advice (and we even asked widely, i.e. in local Internet groups for parents), as apparently everyone's problem is worrying that their kids sleep too much.

I was wondering why I was often stressed out even though my life was good and I mostly did the things I want to do. Years ago, I had 3 things in my life - work, rock climbing, and coding/reading/videogames ("geeking out"), and I was never stressed for time. Then I got married, so now spending time with my wife became another thing. For a few years, it just so happened by itself that I've been coding, reading or playing videogames very little - turns out I could only fit 3.2 things in my life, not 4, something had to give. That actually made me stressed out and I didn't understand why... When I did, becoming more organized and wasting less time upped it to maybe 3.5, so now I can read a book/code/geek out now and then. But, alas, not as much as I would want.

That's one of the main reasons I'll never have kids - there's just no way I can handle 5 things, and I don't think I'd want any of the remaining ones to suffer for the payoffs (well, maybe work, but not just yet). That is also why you cannot add game making to your life without sacrifice...

EDIT: fixed some grammar

Similarly, it's fun to read a book around the same time as my wife, and then we can have a sort of "book club" discussion.

If I want to play something too scary for kids, I sacrifice sleep, so you win some you lose some lol.

As far as kids go however, I feel like it's almost always a trap (it can sometimes happen with adults too, but with kids it's almost a given)... I know many people with hobbies from some tech stuff to extreme sports (like skiing), who "still play with Arduino" or "still ski" after having kids. Except before they used to do some hardcode backcountry stuff, and how with kids they go to a resort, fool around on an easy run, and then go have a beer while kids are taking a lesson. Technically, they are still skiing, but realistically they are not - they are just spending time with their kids. There are exceptions, but they are few and far between imho.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, but my point still stands - when you add something, you have to lose something; I feel like for kids, it's especially true.

So let your values change. You'll be the richer in the end.

1) As the article states, work on your side project first in the morning before your work. You will be too tired after work. Yes, this means your not really giving 100% at work. Hopefully your good enough at your job that this is OK.

2) Create little task lists, with short little tasks... Then knock those tasks out one by one. If you find yourself procrastinating about some task do another little task first, then later make a quick spur of the moment decision to go do the procrastination task.

3) It's OK to dream about the best case scenario, but also have realistic side goals: "worst case scenario, I've built a cool engine for my next project."

4) DO create the right amount of tests (too little and your going to be creating buggy crap code, too many and you're bogged down updating your tests constantly)... get a feel for what your right amount is.

5) Don't type so much, think more... think through designs... use paper, be messy and redraw... all of this is faster than building the wrong thing.

6) I think its OK to be quirky. Make the thing YOU want to make. This is another way to monetize: your mental health is worth a lot and personally I find bringing shit that I want to exist into the world just the way I want them to be is a good trick for staying happy.

Yeah I tried that. The side coding projects I have are things I'm not good at yet and want to get better at, so they are this big pile of "I have no idea yet until I try", and that does not break down into neat short little tasks to knock off in an hour before work. They need deep concentration and focus in order for me to learn and figure out what the hell I should do.

Does anyone know what app the author is using to create nested tasks for 'lightweight sprint'?

https://notion.so/

I'd get up early and get a few hours in before my more ordinary programming work as a Python backend developer at a fintech startup. And then on Saturdays I'd get something more like a normal days work done on the project.

It worked, and I'm glad I did it, but it definitely was a temporary situation, I don't think it's something you can do long-term without facing burnout or neglecting other important areas of life like family, friends, exercise, reading books, etc. So that last paragraph of the original post - making it sustainable - I'm glad to see it in there.

[1] The Cat Machine - https://store.steampowered.com/app/386900/The_Cat_Machine/

Did you use Python for your game as well? This looks really cool - congratulations on making the leap to full time.

I've advised several folks who said they want to quit their jobs to make games to do a compo, a game jam, something small and constrained. Ludum Dare has historically been good. Try but expect not to finish. You'll learn about your own weaknesses and limitations.

Even if you don't finish the first few times, you'll hopefully understand what it takes, or at least think you do.

A good next step is to timebox one or two months, in your free time, to make a game, publish it, _and earn $1_. That's it. Make a buck.

If you can pull that off, and make a buck, you've made it. You're a professional game developer.

I treated it like a second job. When my day job was finished, I started my second job working on a game with a team of coworkers and friends. We were working crazy hours, but we were crushing it. Before long we got the attention of Amazon who wanted to acquire our game as part of their Fire phone launch. Our game focused heavily on motion controls which was perfect for the direction they were taking the phone (they were really pushing the envelope with motion + cameras + other sensor fusion things). We worked even harder. Before long we had a meeting with Jeff Blackburn. He showed it off to Bezos and got signoff to acquire us. We worked even harder. Contracts were signed and due diligence started.

Then our lead dev died.

Amazon backed out as we had no way of completing the game on time. We had poured everything into this game with the intention that the payoff would be worth it. We never prioritized enjoyment of what we were doing or our own health. Our mistake was we hadn't left room for failure.

Whatever you do, ensure you have gas left in the tank for when things go wrong. Things will always go wrong in ways you'll never be able to plan for. If you stretch yourself to the limit, when a bump in the road hits you you'll break and everything/everyone around you will suffer.

I now have a far, far healthier approach to moonlighting. I try and work a little bit every day on something. It doesn't need to be 5 hours of work - 20 minutes is enough. I've been working on something for the last 3 years or so and while it doesn't have the velocity that that game did, it makes me happy while I work on it. If it fails, it's OK because I find joy in doing it. Success isn't a requirement.

That's terrible. Was the death a direct or indirect result of working on the project?

No real process, no plan, no scrum method, not even a trello board to track progress and todos. Personally, I enjoyed the "fun" of it being very spontaneous, yet still passionate. I didn't write to-dos and tasks to be done, because there is always something to be done. And intuitively you feel what's important and what's not. I also didn't want it to "feel" like work.

For context - the game took me about 6 months to create: https://yare.io

But on the high-level — my full-time job is interaction design. Throughout my career I used JavaScript a lot for building interactive design prototypes and it’s the only language I know, so when I had the idea for Yare.io (heavily inspired by MIT’s Battle Code), vanilla JavaScript (and Node for server) was the only thing I could use (didn’t know any libraries or frameworks)

The project was really just a “problem” to be solved. Use JavaScript to move basic geometric shapes on a canvas in a 1 versus 1 battle. It needed to have a UI, rendering of a game state, authentication, event queue, basic ruleset, … None of this really required any tracker or rigorous process. I know what needs to be done, because I’m literally sitting in front it, seeing what needs to be done. It didn’t need a “plan”, because it didn’t matter when each piece of the puzzle was made. Just, whatever I was in the mood for that day.

I think the principle of simplicity (as cliche as it sounds) – trying to keep everything (especially the foundations) as basic as possible – was really the main thing that allowed me to finish the game.

I don't think I could enjoy it as much as I did with some scrum method, brainstorming bullshit, or anything reminding me of work.

But I think there's something key here that's left implicit - do your own project first in the day. Obviously everyone's different, but I reckon for the most part that means 'don't necessarily start everything at 7am' (or do so even earlier), rather than 'work first and moonlight on the side project'.

I have way too many days where I'm less productive on the paid work than I could be because I've got something else on my mind; then come the end of the day when I could finally put some thoughts into action, I'm just too drained and fed up of sitting at a computer to do anything about it.

Also, this works only if you are a remote worker. Most commuting will nuke those two hours away (yeah you can work on the bus/train, but probably not well - spotty connections, uncomfortable, no extra monitor, no mouse, etc; and if you have motion sickness like me, it's a non-starter), and in the evening you'll be even more shattered.

It's the same when you get back home after work though.

> Also, this works only if you are a remote worker. Most commuting will nuke those two hours away (yeah you can work on the bus/train, but probably not well - spotty connections, uncomfortable, no extra monitor, no mouse, etc; and if you have motion sickness like me, it's a non-starter), and in the evening you'll be even more shattered.

I personally have 5 "free" hours after work, which includes time to do shopping, eat, exercise, cleaning, all that sort of stuff. It's not a lot but it's not 0. That's with 1h30 of commute each day.

I would argue it's even easier in the evening, for sure. The point of doing it in the morning is that your brain is fresher; I'm just saying that might still not be enough to start.

> I personally have 5 "free" hours after work

Yeah, but it's after work, when you're inevitably more tired. One could push it by going to bed earlier and waking up at 5am, but it risks becoming unsociable.

Also, I expect you (and OP, and a lot of folks in this thread) are 20-somethings with no attachments and no family. Those things tend to suck every bit of spare time you have, for years on end.

That's a fair point. I find it easier in the mornings but that may be because the rare times I do wake up early, I have an unusually high energy/willpower.

> I would argue it's even easier in the evening, for sure. The point of doing it in the morning is that your brain is fresher; I'm just saying that might still not be enough to start.

I'm not sure about the unsociable thing, I personally go out once a week usually.

> Also, I expect you (and OP, and a lot of folks in this thread) are 20-somethings with no attachments and no family. Those things tend to suck every bit of spare time you have, for years on end.

I don't really like the way you put it. I have my parents, brothers, grandparents, friends, coworkers, all of those things take time. Sure, probably less than having children, but they still take time. I know people my age that have almost no spare time for themselves, and some older people that seem to have all the time in the world.

I think that depends on the type of person you are. I do my best to get a good 8 hours, but it usually takes me a good hour or 2 (and a coffee) before I'm really into the swing of things in the morning.

It's even tougher in the winter months when sun isn't really out until around 9am and the sun is already setting at 5pm. It feels like you work through the entire day, and mornings are like getting up at 2am.

For me, it really is as simple as....I just go to work hours early to work on those things, because I enjoy them. When I get home, I'm just a dad and a husband.

This revealed itself as I was working on a game engine reimplementation. For two years I was personally satisfied with myself by being able to return to a hobby and actively enjoy my time programming, and I thought I had managed to find something I was comfortable with doing just for myself.

It turned out that I was deceiving myself by saying that I was in it for the personal enjoyment. This was false. I was ultimately working towards a goal that I didn't properly define, which was releasing the engine. This is the goal that everyone talks about when discussing game development, and it is a goal that carries value only because it involves other people - people that learn about and play your game.

So in the future I will have to be more perceptive of the goals I'm hesitant to admit exist. From the beginning, I was only ever going to work on such a project with the eventual goal of making a release, as in making my project have an effect on people other than myself. That meant I was only working on my project for other people, and not for myself. The enjoyment I found in working on it was nothing more than a prerequisite to getting to work. It makes you feel virtuous to think otherwise, but it's nothing more than an elaborate lie.

I don't understand how one could possibly develop games just for their own sake if shipping the finished game to other people is the point of game development.

I guess I would say that if you aren't willing to permanently delete everything that you've worked on the moment you've finished a project, then you're not actually "doing it for yourself". That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but you have to be honest or perceptive enough to be able to admit the truth.

Unless you create a game that has infinite replayability and you find playing it fun you're right that game development is ultimately FOR someone else. But there is nothing wrong with that.

Ultimately you have to find a project whose goal is worth the effort. Honestly part of why I got out of game development was because I wanted some more reasonable projects.

Now that I look back, there are two obstacles:

- I'm not really interested in such a game. I probably fancied about the genre as it's classic but I never finished any of the Ultima games.

- In the middle I tried to implement a full scale map editor. I managed to build a simple yet working one, but dropped the project once I realized that it needs a lot of work to write my own GUI (back then I'm using C++ and SDL2).

I also find out that once I know how to implement something on paper (e.g. if I can draw the process of an algorithm on paper), I usually lost the interest to implement it in code. It takes a huge amount of effort for me to complete assignments for the Data Structure class I'm taking, to the point that I'm thinking about dropping the class.

Sharing my slightly unrelated experience, but Tiled2D is a nice piece of software to achieve this.

I've used it for one of my personal project, where I wanted to make a digital adaptation of a board game, and I needed to "digitalize" the game board[1]. I don't use the tiles or the tile grid at all, but just the "polygon" feature that allows me to draw the borders of the different regions. It's not at all why the software has been written, as the polygon is supposed to be a small feature to define areas in a tiled game, but it gets the job done.

[1] https://github.com/Longwelwind/swords-and-ravens/blob/master...

Very nasty mindset I have to admit...

This is a perpetual problem for me. I start out interested in a lot of things, but once it's clear how to proceed, I get no pleasure out of the rote work required to implement the solution. Whether it's writing code, building something physical, playing a game, putting together a puzzle, or any other activity that involves some degree of thought or problem solving, as soon as there's nothing left to think about, I lose all interest. If there's a chance of an alternate outcome, I remain engaged to the last second (so I can finish PVP games, win or lose, but almost never finish a game of Civilization). It plagues me at work, too, but at least with work, I've got external motivating factors (insofar as I won't get paid if I never finish things).

- Stop working on projects that I know for sure I can't finish, basically that means I'll work on zero CS projects.

- Start hobbies that are either 1) Not of same type of CS projects, or 2) Something that takes a long time to understand.

I have been collecting fossils and learning Geology for a few months and so far it goes well: - Collecting fossils is easy to start

- It's very difficult to find good places to collect and even more difficult to collect very well preserved fossils

- I don't get to collect fossils every day, not even every week if the whether is bad, so zero chance of burning out

- Geology is not something that one can "figure out". In general science is not something I can "figure out" and then apply. It's not engineering.

However I still want to work on CS projects because I need an in-door hobby for the winter, maybe some day I can figure out a way :)

Good luck on your side too!

So yeah I agree it's a good hobby.

I recently did this [1] for a game jam, over one sleepless week. It's pretty unfinished but submitting something felt good. (Source: [2])

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX6AZNWuI5Q

[2] https://github.com/mpersano/generic-rhythm-game/

One thing I need to learn is to create pixel Sprites quickly. Maybe there is even a way to programmatically generate some template Sprites.

Yesterday I spent just one hour to review my computer architecture mid-term. I totally forgot about the date and thought I'm going to bomb it. Eventually I did a very quick efficient review and felt very good about it.

The thing is, as you said, and as my Physics teacher said 20 years ago, that I really need to be pushed HARD to be efficient. That's why I hate assignments with long deadlines.

The antidote is to have no deadlines, and take the time to enjoy doing things right.

For me I had to constantly reign in the scope to be a minimum viable game. I would let my imagination run wild and come up with all these grand ideas for an overarching plot, etc. But the project gets really hard to finish after you've done the fun bits like getting the main gameplay mechanics implemented and there's a big stretch of grunt work ahead ("the last 20% takes 80% of the work"). It's easy to let it languish and never ship/release. That's when you need to re-evaluate what it takes to achieve a minimum viable game and ruthlessly reign in the scope.

Tell yourself "I can implement all my other grand ideas if this minimum viable game proves successful" - and you can. And if it isn't very successful, then you can move onto the next project/idea.

[0] https://www.bryanpg.com/games/embergram

“I want to learn how to do X, but I have no idea what that’s going to take.”

And I end up just coding a logical step and if I don’t know what to do go research it, realize I did something wrong 3 steps ago and then either revert or abandon depending on my current motivation.

I’ve tried before to create a “game plan” before but most of the time there’s so much that I don’t know that I don’t know that it’s either impossible to make that plan or once I do, that plan ends up being wrong anyways.

As such it always feels like I’m doing side projects wrong. But since they’re more learning endeavors more than actually trying to launch a product maybe that’s fine?

I think if you actually _want_ to finish something you finish it.

You have to have passion for it though. It's the common trap I find a lot of people in that fall out of side projects quickly. They're doing it for the wrong reasons and inevitably get tired of it/uninvested and burn out. It's more about the journey than it is reaching the end.

Before I wrote the first line of code, I had an honest conversation with myself about why I am starting a project and put it on paper as my true motivation and goal. Over the course, I had to remind myself multiple times to be sincere and forgiving. Working on a side means that even the simplest task could stretch over several days, and it is okay.

I particularly enjoyed sharing my work in progress on social media and with my friends. During the darkest moments, I found that a great “hack” is to record a milestone that I am proud of to boost my motivation and push a game a little further. If I may quote Rocky, it goes like:” One step at a time. One punch at a time. One round at a time.”

Another “hack” is to cut it out if something takes longer and drains your energy without any significant progress. Make something even just one person to enjoy. It is already a good milestone.

Ultimately, I took this journey as a self-exploration to get to know my true self better, slay a few dragons on the way in a reasonably safe environment.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9wztsnmEIw

[1]: https://oneearedrabbit.itch.io/the-pixel-maze

Do it in one weekend!

How to do it in one weekend?

Use simple game mechanics: a spaceshooter!

Aren't you a good artist?

No problem! Use processing and art from https://opengameart.org/ .

I've done it once just to have fun with my girlfriend. We built a very simple and fun space shooter in one weekend. I didn't keep the license or links of the resources, so I didn't publish it.

I can't finish a side project because for me it is never 'finished'. I lack the ability to say that this is fine enough for my own projects. I always keep wanting to make things better and never can say it's finished.

To my detriment even, I've been working on a game for the past 3 years which I'm fairly sure just "doesn't work" in a way I find difficult to explain. But as much as I try, I can't stop working on it.

The other thing that plagues me is decision fatigue. I'm working through a decision right now which is tangentially related to my personal projects but is absolutely weighing me down mentally.

Edit: Reading another reply, maybe I haven't conquered my problem, and that now my projects just never finish, rather than me abandonding them. Maybe thats the case, but right now its absolutely not finished by any means, so thats a problem for later

Now I spend time with friends and family, treat weekends as sacred, and though I still don’t get as much sleep as I should, I get way more done than blindly putting in the hours.

People warned me of it and I didn’t listen, as I’m sure whoever needs to hear this won’t listen either, but 100%, treat it like a marathon and take care of your life holistically.

One of the keys to your success seemed to be that consistent, early morning routine. I've often find myself trying to hack on side projects in the evening, after much of my energy is already zapped. Even if I do have a highly productive session coding into the wee hours of the night, the next day will be ruined by lack of sleep, and as someone with a family it's too detrimental.

But when I am working in the mornings, once I'm awake and at my keyboard, I'm much more productive. Sometimes, it's hard to stop! But, leaving yourself a cliffhanger is also a great way to build excitement to jump back in the next day.

I find that I need to find something that I think would take a week to build. Then accept the fact it's going to take 8 weeks to finish given i'm doing about one hour a day rather than 8.

The important element is making the choice with clear eyes.

They exist to keep my mind occupied or give it a break from other stuff. Thats it.

I'm trying with social contract - commit to somebody that you are showing some progress to them, and have them to help picking what's their desirable next step/topic. Hopefully I can get something started

I have been working on something new though and what has been really working well for me is that I will try to spend at least 15-20 minutes a day working on my new game, this usually always results in more time being spent on it. When I finish working on it for the day at a reasonable time I will create a list of very minor and easy tasks and list them, then the next day when I work on the project I will pick that minor thing implement it and see something I'm happy with and then maybe complete another one. Usually If I feel like I will tackle something bigger, if not then I will enjoy the rest of my day.

The game has been coming together nicely so far me and it feels far more sustainable. I'm also doing this more now as a hobby rather than trying to make it a financial success (as there are much easier ways to make money).

I don't know how many people will relate to this, but while I've known that scheduling time will help me get things done, I keep avoiding actually getting around to it. It's as though I am afraid to face my own impending success.

You've motivated me to try and get things done though - thank you and congrats once again!.

What worked the best for me to deal with a full-time job and a side project of gamedev (or programming in general) was to move the side project development time in the morning before my full time job, and just put a bit less effort into work overall (remote work helped here as well). Moreover, while I tried to have a consistent routine for my personal dev time, I tried not to force it when I was really not feeling like it, to avoid burnout.

I sometimes did additional gamedev in some evening (or moved the morning one), but otherwise, tried to do non-computer stuff in the afternoons/evenings.

Another key insight, is that this also helped me getting an earlier sleeping schedule. Previously I would procrastinate until late, even if tired, because whenever I went to sleep, I would then wake up and have go to work immediately. Instead, now I rather go to sleep early, because I know I'll have more energy to do the things I like in the morning, rather than full-time work.

It's decidedly not a side hustle.

And it's not just "ok, then find free art online" because you also have to be able to do art in code to, e.g. let players customize their character, etc.

I'm sure there are ways to reduce this, but making a game is a lot of work.

It's on GitHub here http://github.com/ensisoft/gamestudio

I like the "us" in your comment. I worked on many personal projects, the best was when someone else is working with me. By the time you finish your feature, the other person would have finished his, and you see everything being built fast and with less pain.

Actually as you know, startups are recommended to have at least 2 founders. So I would suggest that if you are working on a project alone, find help

Also, I've found the best opportunities come through word-of-mouth connections, and having 2 sets of colleagues essentially doubles the chances of that happening.

They tried to get me to join their technology group, which i rejected :-)

The "Making a Mod" Valve wiki page is actually fairly useful for devs totally bereft of mentorship. In general, it seems like there is very little opportunity for devs to find mentorship in making games. Rather, you either figure it out or you wash out.

This is OK, as long as you know you're dreaming too big, but then you need MVGs, minimal pieces of the project that are playable games. If you need a giant world just to get started playing, you'll not get started playing.

This is my only takeaway from the article. I think it's well-written but I also found it vague. Finding implicit joy is such an abstract thing that has no set formulae to it. I am glad that the author was able to complete his game.

To be honest I don't think of it as work, cause I do have fun implementing game mechanics, but I know it's hard work.

Congrats

[0] https://thespacewar.com/

I really would like to do more things at my PC, but whenever I finish with my work I'm drained