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://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 :)
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.