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Finishing my first game while working full-time
181–190 of 198 posts
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn’t mind if it was my 4 best hours a day, but it’s the 4 hours after work and dinner when my energy levels allow for a half effort workout and a bit of reading or TV.
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.
I recently found myself in the same position by being in Asia while working for a European company. All my free time is in the morning without having to wake up early (in the dark). I go surfing or swimming/gym and then work 12pm-11pm with some breaks for lunch and dinner. I go to bed straight after working, which means I've stopped drinking. It's made a huge difference to my quality of life and I hope I can keep this up forever. Having to wake up and go straight to work seems like a depressing thought now.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
One simple trick to exit the labor class; investment banking MDs hate him; "how can one man achieve so much?": 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.
Or open office where everyone can see your triple monitor screen and it’s a company work station so you literally can’t do anything else, can’t even open a personal laptop. Any cellular data reception is very bad.
I worked in an open office for years and never understood how people did things besides work. I tried 100% remote but that got lonely.
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard this called before the "4 hour life", you have 4 hours every day for yourself: https://medium.com/@pskallas/4-hour-life-glossary-4740bca641...
Generally true. The next step of optimization would be automating parts of your job so you can reduce 8 hours of work to like 6 hours of work. Now you have more time for yourself.
> you can reduce 8 hours of work to like 6 hours of work.
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).
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
This doesn't acknowledge weekends, which if you have the same 8 hours sleep and 4 hours "not for yourself", add more than 50% to the time you supposedly have "for yourself". (4×5 + 12×2 vs 4×7.) 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.
Don't usually have much extra time on the weekends. Weekends are for making up for a week of the house getting dirty, relatives and friends wanting to meet, extra long walks for the dogs that only got short walks during the week, errands that got put off, some catchup sleep, actually relaxing a bit since there wasn't much during the week, etc. I might have 2-3 hours each day (of energy and motivation) to work on proj…
> relatives and friends wanting to meet
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our youngest was the same way! Things will get better! At least, in terms of sleep. She actually sleeps in now. Even better, on the weekends, when both kids wake up before us, they just play together for an hour, instead of waking us up. It was truly a strange feeling, when that started happening.
Good to hear! That is reassuring. 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 challeng…
> Most parents don't really understand what we are dealing with since their kids sleep much longer (2,3 hours more).
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Someone wrote that gamedev isn't really software engineering 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 underengi…
> Could you elaborate on that? 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 m…
I think I know what you mean, but I'll counter and say that instead of just focusing on completing the game one should pay some attention to longevity and re-usability of your codebase.
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't usually have much extra time on the weekends. Weekends are for making up for a week of the house getting dirty, relatives and friends wanting to meet, extra long walks for the dogs that only got short walks during the week, errands that got put off, some catchup sleep, actually relaxing a bit since there wasn't much during the week, etc. I might have 2-3 hours each day (of energy and motivation) to work on proj…
> relatives and friends wanting to meet 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.
Sure. I'm not saying I haven't made sacrifices for personal projects before, especially when I was younger, but I'm also not willing to become a total hermit and slave for these projects that are not really going anywhere.
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#189Good tips... but in reality if you're working full-time (especially in a software related role), you may find yourself depleted before you get to the keyboard. 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…
I followed that exact same lifestyle for 2 years (and also 2 years prior of us not knowing what we were doing), I would consider it impossible to have any relationships, romantic or casual. Now that I am older and have more responsibilities, I don't think it's something I could pull off.
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#190Good tips... but in reality if you're working full-time (especially in a software related role), you may find yourself depleted before you get to the keyboard. 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…
Yeah, this is my issue. After a long day of (sometimes pointless) software dev, strapping in for more is draining. So as a contrast, I design board games (not digital) as my hobby. It is very analog and tactile and so energizing partially from just being a nice change of pace. 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 hav…
Can you elaborate on how you design your board games? How do you approach it?