I have been working on a game as a side project for 10 years now. Why such a long time? It started when I was freelancing and carried on through full-time jobs, a marriage and now a small child. I am lucky if I can get one hour a day to work on it - but as others mentioned here, the best time to work on it is before your main job, otherwise I am too tired to code after a full day of software development, childcare, and home chores.
I really wish I can finish it some day and show it here.
Finishing my first game while working full-time
171–180 of 198 posts
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#172Not discussed in the article: You have to have the support of the people in your life this will impact. For example, the 7-9am timeslot for working, as listed in the article, will impact my family, as that is when I'm getting the kids up and off to school. OK, so I could move it to 5am to 7am, but that would mean I'd need to go to bed earlier, which eliminates important evening time with my wife. Similarly, I could d…
The meta is that if you add something to your life, and you don't currently have a lot of time when you are just bored, something will have to suffer. 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…
When you start valuing new things, then you automatically stop having time to value the things you valued before. So you stop valuing them. Because your values changed.
So let your values change. You'll be the richer in the end.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The meta is that if you add something to your life, and you don't currently have a lot of time when you are just bored, something will have to suffer. 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…
Health is also a factor. Health issues can take up 1 of those 'thing' slots, another thing to spend time researching and working around. I've seen it happen unexpectedly to a friend, and it was a normal part of my life for a long time. Health can also include preventative things like exercise and diet, which require mental effort (research, willpower).
It can take all of them up for some people.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#174Here are my side project tips: 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 anot…
"Create little task lists, with short little tasks"
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#175The most important message here is "take care of yourself" near the bottom. I want to share a story about how I did a moonlight effort the wrong way. 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…
There must have been a clause in the contract that they can pull out for that reason. That sucks bad.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#176Not discussed in the article: You have to have the support of the people in your life this will impact. For example, the 7-9am timeslot for working, as listed in the article, will impact my family, as that is when I'm getting the kids up and off to school. OK, so I could move it to 5am to 7am, but that would mean I'd need to go to bed earlier, which eliminates important evening time with my wife. Similarly, I could d…
Totally agree with this. I am woken by my kid at 6am, then it is 100% go-go-go with work or family until about 7pm when the kid goes to bed, then it is starting to cook and prepare dinner and do housework etc. There might be 2 hours or so between dinner and bed to spend time with my wife before we collapse into bed at 10pm or so - talk, watch a movie, play scrabble or whatever. I don't want to ignore her and just do…
That’s like a c/p of my life. Amazing.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#177I have done something similar - building a game while working full-time. But my approach was the complete opposite of this article. 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 yo…
OP is basically saying: "Here's what I did in order to do what I did".
This reminds me of: Correlation does not mean causation.
And: Survivorship bias.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#178Anyone juggling a ft job and finishing a side project on evenings/weekends deserves celebration. Congrats for finishing it. 1000x claps :)
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#179The most important message here is "take care of yourself" near the bottom. I want to share a story about how I did a moonlight effort the wrong way. 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…
> Then our lead dev died. That's terrible. Was the death a direct or indirect result of working on the project?
It was a question we all asked ourselves many times, but it's hard to say. He was diagnosed with an extremely aggresive stage 4 cancer and was given a couple weeks to live. Whether or not he would have seen a doctor earlier had we not been in crunch mode is uncertain.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the best things I did for myself was moving all of that free time to the morning. Now I wake up at 5, have coffee, exercise, play or work on whatever hobby has my attention at the moment, then work all day. I have loads of focus and attention and energy for my fun things. Evening is pretty much make dinner, eat, relax for a bit and be in bed reading by 8.
This can be a good strategy until you have young kids. After then, they often hear you get up and then seek you out to get help making breakfast or want to sit on your lap. 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.
A lot depends upon how much sleep your kids need too.
Our first would sleep 12 hours per night. Yay, lots of free time.
Our second sleeps 9 hours per night. Whoops.