My trick is to spend 15 minutes per day minimum working on the side project.
this is the way I think - a writer writes, always. its many authors recipe for success.
Finishing my first game while working full-time
21–30 of 198 posts
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#22Kudos to launching. This is hard. To me the hardest part is context switching. Meetings, scheduling, resource planning in day job, child care after work, household core, reading, occasion workout, etc. The amount of energy, both intellectually and emotionally, left after all these is... miniscule
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
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#23Good 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…
What I learned from other people who have success in their side projects is to choose a workplace that allows you to do a sub 40 hour work week. Of course you would have to live a tad more simply than your standard upper-middle class software guy.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#24Game jams are a great motivator. I need hard deadlines. 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/
I also found that hard deadlines work. The closer they are, the better they are.
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#25I don't work on personal projects on my own time, but I do work a part time hourly job alongside my software engineering job. I've found for me this is an essential part of my mental health. My arrangement offers up a little more variety than I'd otherwise have and allows me to work with another group of people in a totally different domain.
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.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#26I dont care about finishing side projects.
They exist to keep my mind occupied or give it a break from other stuff. Thats it.
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#27I don't work on personal projects on my own time, but I do work a part time hourly job alongside my software engineering job. I've found for me this is an essential part of my mental health. My arrangement offers up a little more variety than I'd otherwise have and allows me to work with another group of people in a totally different domain. Also, I've found the best opportunities come through word-of-mouth connectio…
Interesting. What is the field of the part time job?
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#28Good 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…
Just out of curiosity, when you spent 9 hours at work, was that in a software field?
If so, why would you choose to do the same thing 18 hours a day for 5 years?
Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#29Good 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…
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Re: Finishing my first game while working full-time
#30I tried to complete a simple 2D RPG that is a Ultima spinoff a few years ago. Nothing is technically impossible as it's just a simple 2D game but eventually I lost interest and broke away. 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…
> - 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).
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...
