Ask HN: How do you stay motivated to work on side projects?

I don't. When life gets busy with other I am busy and the other people are my priority. If you are with your family and you are not really there, you will feel guilty later on work and not be there either.

Steve Pavlina explains it better than I do: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2014/12/130-days-off-per-ye...

What Steve could do after years of training(and reading thousands of books and learning from others) is probably not what a normal person could do. But they can apply some of the ideas.

In my experience, people from the US tend to work to much, but not really work. e.g When a German person works, he works, do not distract him because he will get upset.

I had never ever got bored in my entire life. I have always done whatever I wanted to do. Life has been tough to me at some times, but always in the sense of the Lion on the wild, that if he does not hunt, he just dies.

It is just so easy today to choose safety, but also living on a cage.

Go to the zoo and look at the animals there. Have you ever seen an animal(lions, leopards, elephants) in the wild? It is completely different. It is the same with people.

First, your project is F%CH#NG amazing!.

IMHO there are two reason you are not millionaire(yet):

-You need an application or game for your engine so people can play with it.

-You need to learn a little marketing. That is, you need to understand the needs of the people, so you can design around humans beings, not just around machines.

Keep the great work.

Both of these are things that I (massively) failed to address early on and am actually now striving towards.

I'm actually pretty happy at this point. If my wage were raised just slightly, and the threat of running out of (non-investor) money was not looming, I would be 100 percent happy. Wouldn't take millions, but nonetheless its good to aim high. :)

Currently working on putting out at least a minimally viable game to accompany the engine, which will be released with source this coming March (fingers crossed). I'm taking community input for the most part as to what they want to see in the game, filtered by my judgment.

Minecraft has actually been a great case study for me in terms of marketing. There are many Minecraftian games, but none have really reached the success of Minecraft (even though many clones generated millions), and you have to ask why that is. There are many theories, but mine is that:

A) Minecraft's success was a self-fulfilling prophecy (the more successful it was, the more news it generated, and thus the more sales it drove). This is not to say, at all, that any of its success was not well-deserved.

B) It appealed to the younger generation in a (say, ages 4 to 14) in a way that many people are still failing to grasp. A huge amount of marketing revolved around user-made Youtube videos. I don't think I can do this, but still it is interesting to analyze. It was immediately accessible but showed its potential for further development which is why it was so successful in pioneering the early access model.

C) Markus Persson is a likeable guy, and an entertaining read on Twitter. He created a culture around Minecraft. He is also genuine - he really takes part in the indie community, cares about what people say, and actively develops even though he no longer needs to. Another part of this is because he has befriended and surrounded himself with other interesting people, and curates interesting content. He has almost 2 million followers at this point, including the vast majority of the gaming press, so single tweets can have powerful effects.

I think Pavlina is an odd guy, but I've found some of his advice to be quite helpful over the years.

I don't agree with everything he says, but I don't think he's a "crank" either.