Yes, how indeed. I lived in that mode for past 2 years. AAA gamedev at day, indie at night. That is around 16 hours a day staring at Unreal Engine. Over the weekends even more. Social life took a toll. Relationship issues arose a few times. Every free minute went into the game. I gave up my other projects, like fitness, BJJ.. health in general. No dates. No family visits. No cooking, only bought food = more efficient. My headspace was full of the indie project.
And it was only made worse when I saw it will be successful (paradoxically), because now there was a way more responsibility and heavier load to carry, and a lot of money involved and lot of money lost with any bug that I left in the game (The game turned out great, but it took a lot).
Making something great takes sacrifice. You will have to sacrifice something. There is no other way. And be very careful what game you will choose to make, because from my experience, you will become the project. My last game was about the Backrooms. I thought I am expressing a feeling of being in the Backrooms. But instead, my life became like the Backrooms. Next time I will make a really deeply meaningful game, nothing else.
I agree it takes a lot of long nights and weekends to deliver a great thing, but there's a caveat that this could backfire and you end up investing a lot of time in a not-so-great project.
It's important to organize and break down the tasks into regular deliveries which you can test and get feedback from others (don't spend the whole week trying to code that perfect mechanic, make it work first and improve as needed).
If you've got kids, you will have to make sacrifices.
FOR THE KIDS! DON'T SACRIFICE YOUR KIDS!
But yeah, short of a lucky break where you suddenly don't need to work, or a lucky break where the silly game you made over the weekend becomes an indie hit, I think coming to terms with the reality that trying to be a game dev in your spare time, dreaming of a time when it'll pay off, might just lead to a lot of exhaustion and frustration.
But hey, when I was a kid my dad used to make little games for us to play. Treasure maps with riddles and clues. Even a short silly computer game once, in Basic. He was never interested in making it big as a game developer or anything, he just wanted to bring us some joy. And he did, and it was beautiful.
If you're gonna make games, just do it as much as it brings you and your loved ones joy. Do it as much as, if you never made a dime, you wouldn't regret the time you put into it.
I worked with a guy that would have game design sessions with his 6 year old on Saturday’s every week. He let his kid be the lead and would just do the hard stuff and teach him what he wanted to learn. I thought that was cute. I hope to do the same when mine is older.
I‘m grinding as a lead engineer and making a game whenever i can. I‘m remaking an educational game my dad made in the 80‘s… in basic… he passed away when I was a kid and so i‘m really building out this world as a commemoration 30 years later.
Still try to build robots whenever i can with my kids.
You took a big risk and it paid off, congrats. But beware of survivorship bias, there are many others who have done this and failed. Me being one of them.
I sacrificed a lot of my 30's in this way toiling after hours from a AAA gamedev job and at weekends for years. All for the princely return of $10. This was in the Indie Game The Movie era so it was significantly easier than now to potentially make a return. In hindsight, the reasons for the failure were obvious, but there's no guarantee of success even if I'd done things differently.
Do I regret it? Absolutely. I had no social life or memories from that time other than sitting at a desk and had a relationship break up. Would I regret it if it made a million? Of course not. You have to decide if it's worth that risk.
I still do gamedev in my free time, I absolutely love it. But I restrict my time to 2-3h on evenings and protect weekends and holidays with my new partner religiously. You have to decide if such a risk is worth it and just because you sacrifice doesn't guarantee success.
You are either depressed because you are not trying hard enough or you do what is mentioned above and pay those costs.
It's a no win scenario, but I know no other way.
Sacrifices can vary. Working 16 hours a day for years is way too much. I believe in balance putting 20 hours a week in your personal project is more sustainable and manageable. It will take more years to complete but you will not reach 50 plus and regret you wasted your life. Also easier to lose motivation and get depressed. At the of the day physical and mental health is the most precious
Full time backend engineer here, married with two kids... I feel you. I just pushed till 2am last night. It's hard to hop out of bed and do it all again but I love my brain baby too much to leave it alone. Cheers mate , best of luck.
Full time backend engineer here, married with two kids... I feel you. I just pushed till 2am last night. It's hard to hop out of bed and do it all again but I love my brain baby too much to leave it alone. Cheers mate , best of luck.
I admire you. I can't stop myself from losing interest when working on a project and it's going nowhere. Also, I'm not paid well enough to buy food but I don't think I can make this kind of sacrifice anyway.
Either do gamedev early in the mornings, or find a way to trick your brain into resetting itself. A nap might work or just take a shower followed with a cup of coffee, just something that puts you into a place of felling like your day has restarted.
Another idea is to have a concrete plan and to stop in the middle of something (counter-intuitive I know, but if you set things up so you have an obvious "I will finish this thing" it may help with being able to actually get work done).
This and lists. I am currently struggeling in adding more content to the game.
I counter this by having lists with a lot of small Task broken down from bigger Task. If I have some time, pick one. Find a bug on the way -> into the list it goes for the next time. Have an idea during lunchbreak, quickly create a new list item. Got 5min during commute, break down bigger tasks.
Has a few benefits:
- you always have a choice what to work on next
- you have an overview of planned tasks
- you see progress as your done list gets longer and longer
Trello (kanban) is nice to organizr those lists.
This is the main thing I bring from my professional job (product manager) into my indie project; time and task management.
I have a clear goal (playable demo before my summer holidays), a Trello board full of sorted tasks and a sharp razor on any scope creep. If I'm in the mood and have time I'll do a big job, otherwise it's some bug hunting or idea testing. If I'm off line I tweak my Trello or do some research. If I don't feel like it then I park it, the deadline is still in scope.
For me planning is also just a tremendous source of stress relief. Because then I know everything is accounted for and only the tasks for today weigh on me. And it creates order and space in my mind. I'm not sure if it's like that for everyone, but it really helps me. Conversely, I sometimes gain stress from a lack of structure in my job working for someone else.
Clear responsibilities, goals and timelines have so many benefits.
Oh its easy, just dont have kids! My capacity for extra work has plummeted since kids arrived - but not when they were babies - it gets harder as they get older, which is the opposite of what I expected. It could also just be me getting older, but... well I just refuse to entertain that possibility.
So now, I'm limited to booking a few days off work each year to enter a select few gamejams. Sometimes when the mood takes me I can spend some evenings on my games outside of these gamejams, but its usually maintenance / new features on existing projects, not new projects.
Playing in a shared minecraft world with my sons has been amazing, but one of them at least is starting to want to hang out online with his mates instead. Dad isnt cool anymore :(
Programming games - both of my kids say they want to, but dont seem interested in taking those first steps / start from the beginning. Scratch and Fuze4 on the switch seem to be ways in. I kind of want to print out one of their manuals, and just give my kids time to flick through them, and try things out for themselves - like how I started learning programming.
And then they become teens and don't need you any more except to borrow your maxed out work station to game on. Ok, sure, they want money too.
I'd suggest teaming with people to distribute load and give yourself a set time to work on your ideas without sacrificing your family.
As they get older, they demand more of your time, stay up later etc etc. I'm assuming it'll drop off when they become teenagers & want to spend more time on their own, but I'm not quite there yet. Time with them becomes more precious to me.
my full time job doesn’t have anything to do with software or programming, but i have plenty of time to think. usually i’m excited to work on gamedev at the end of the day :)
I come home and try to do something. Doesn't have to be huge. Small progress is still progress. I chip away at it every day and when I'm stressed and need a mental break I take the break.
I do what I can in the morning because my brain isn't as cooked compared to end of the day and it's quieter since everybody's asleep and nobody wants anything from me yet
My sad realisation is that I can't do gamedev alongside my fulltime job, so for years I tried to "buy" time by decreasing work time. Now I have a setup where I work 60% as a freelancer and get two days a week to do "my own sh\*t" and it's the best time of my life. It's also allowed me to really pour my heart into research, planning, prepping, technology development, and so on.
If anything, I think I'm more focused these two days now that I know their value (and cost).
Yes. I've had the fortune of working in gamedev since 2006 and have freelanced part-time as game designer, programmer, and teacher of both off and on since 2012. This year I dialed that up and stopped having an employment, while also reserving two days a week for my own project.
It's been 18 years in the making. :)
I am glad to hear that you have found a good balance and are working in the industry. I have been doing full stack web development for startups the past 15 years - that had nothing to do with gamedev.. Meaning there was no time to improve my skills while working in order to also benefit the assigned game dev days. I had to stop freelancing about 7 months ago to focus entirely on learning unity and programming for games.
I am now considering doing some freelance work on the side but only if it is game development related.
Do you have any tips on what kind of specific skills / tech stack should a game programmer know to be able to freelance in the games industry?
And maybe also give us a tip or two on how you got into finding the clients to freelance for. (I don't think the usual Upwork/Fiverr routes are what pay the bills in the end, in my personal experience it was getting to know people in the web dev industry who could put in a good word for you in their networks to bring you jobs)
Skills-wise, I think there's always need for programmers. But some areas that are usually in high demand because few people specialise in them is animation programming, audio programming, network programming, AI programming (game AI; not LLM nonsense), and physics programming. But all of those are fairly in-depth areas and you need to find the right place to stay in-demand.
As to your other questions, I have no good answers, since I've done this for a majority of my professional career (I was a journalist briefly before games). Most of what I get today is through contacts.
Just work with a different period - 4 working days of 12 hours, then 4 days off. The computer is turned on only for programming, creating resources and game levels. Designing in a notebook.
I just game dev on days when I feel like I have the capacity. It's also a late night thing for me. After work, I chill for a bit, then do game dev for an hour or 2 before bed. Progress isn't that fast, but I'm only doing it for fun anyway.
It also helps that my job is in non-game programming.
Many people gamble. Quit your job and live with savings for a while. Accumulate enough to live off until the project is done and try to gain fanbase while monetizing the process.
Seen one dev that I actually pitty a bit. Total Indie that released very mediocre game while keeping his job. Development time was like 10 years. He managed to endure this much pain for project that didn't show promise of any returns or profits.
Seems like that would be pretty stressful just burning through savings? I have enough in the bank to keep me afloat for several years but I don’t trust my ability to be successful right now.
YMMV but here's what works for me- when I sit down to work on a game project, I virtually always know the "big picture" of what I need to do and/or the specific pieces I'm trying to accomplish. Throughout the day/week/whatever, I think about what needs to be done/fixed *and* how I might want to go about that. How am I going to represent that inventory? How many animations am I going to need for this NPC? You get the idea.
So once it's go-time, I have a plan of attack and probably a stopping point as well. If I get everything done I wanted too, session complete. If I run into a snag or really am just out of it, I can stop, too- and I even still have my list of tasks for next time.
A lunch analogy... You can mosey over to the fridge, open it, and spend a surprisingly amount of time glancing at what's in there before you end up with a meal. The indecision might even leave you walking away hungry. But if you step into the kitchen and the bread, cold cuts, lettuce and tomatoes are all already sitting in a line on the counter, the process becomes a lot more streamlined.
I usually try to do it on weekend, where I somewhat have a bit of free time. But then again, while I"m an adult, I'm not a parent. So I have less responsibilities. And I'm also a bit new on game dev (and programming) and my job is unrelated to tech, so everything is still so fascinating to me.
Maybe try doing it with a partner, and start with a for fun project, instead of full-fledged project?
So I am just like full time dev, kids, wife. All of which take up a majority of my time. With what little is left it's very hard to want to do a hobby let alone something as taxing as game dev.
So how do I manage? Well I am honest with myself. I'm not building a game for production or sacrificing the family time or health for a passion project. I typically take time when I have it to implement something fun as a little activity say learning tilemaps, or sprite animations. Maybe it's building a dialogue system. The sum of these right now isn't a game but it satiates my desire to build something in the space. Long term I'd love to complete a real project but for now it's not really in the cards and being honest with myself helps that.
Some folks out there will tell you to grind away, to make time. The reality is you will pay for it elsewhere, it may be your kids missing a few nights of story time. Your wife losing a date night, or even your own sanity and personally i wouldn't do that for my job, so I'm not going to do it for a hobby. 🤷♂️
I’m kind of on the same page as you here. I guess the choice boils down to what’s more important to you. I think I need to remind myself of the choice I made and not get frustrated on those nights where no progress is made.
Bit late to the thread, I have 4 rules for myself with my hobbyist game dev.
1- Make sure what you're working on is fun. It's ok to drop a project in extra for something you're going to like working on more; carry the experience you got from that project over and try something you'll enjoy making.
2- If you can't work, don't force it. Spending 30 minutes looking at the game engine doing nothing isn't productive. Try to get into it, but if you can't; try spending your time doing something else and come back to it later. This could mean taking a break of a couple hours, days, weeks ect. Try not to let breaks be too long, but you shouldn't make game dev into a chore. You should also build spending some time working on games into your routine
3- Keep scale small. Don't try and make your magnum opus, you shouldn't gamble a crap ton of time working on a huge game that you hate working on just for it to be a dud. In my opinion the best part of game dev is releasing and sharing your work, so do that frequently. You'll learn more this way then toiling away on the same project.
4- Keep a notebook or something similar of different game ideas. Forget scale, or achievability. Just keep some place to get out your ideas. I find this helpful to keep track of the ideas I have.
I know my advice is different to some people here, and you absolutely can go all in, sacrifice most other areas of your life, and spend every spare moment grinding. But in my opinion, you'll just burn out and your mental health will suffer. It's a hobby for most of us here, and a hobby should bring you joy. If it brings you joy, then you're going to be motivated and more likely to produce better stuff in my opinion.
**1. Work smarter**
>Most nights I sit there looking at my game engine for 30 minutes and just end up turning off the PC and going to bed.
Use Notion, Trello or something to organize your work into tasks. The smaller the tasks are, the better. I usually have cards with a todo list inside it like :
Hunger system
- \[ \] Thirst bar
- \[ \] Hunger bar
- \[ \] Item: Bottle of water
--- \[ \] Sprite
--- \[ \] Item stats
- \[ \] Can drink the bottle
- \[ \] Item: Burger
- \[ \] Max health reduction when hungry
- \[ \] Max Stamina reduction when thirsty
Don't look at your project aimlessly. Open up your kanban and pick a task and/or subtask (or sub-sub-task, basically any checkbox in your kanban that you can check once done\^\^) that you have time to do entirely.
Like "okay, it's really late, I'm exhausted, let's just create that bottle sprite". It should then be easier to jump to the next task once you've started.
**2. Reduce your dayjob time**
Ok, this one isn't for everyone, but if you can afford it / it's actually a possibility, you should probably go for it. I think a lot of people CAN do just that but refuse for bullshit reasons and for being indoctrinated by the idea that we should work all day long until we die.
I did change my dayjob schedule from 5 days a week to 4 a few years ago. The day gained I use to sleep a ton and work on my game. This improved my life A LOT. It's not that I work that much on the day I've taken back, but I'm less tired all the time so I actually work more on my games the other days (evenings and weekends).
People around me lost their damn mind when I announced them I was going to drop one day of salary. To them it's like I would ending up sleeping under a bridge or something or that I was just lazy. But, when one year later I've got a raise and basically got back to my 5 days salary but in 4 days, I didn't sense the same level of reaction from them.
The human brain is averse to loss so I guess that's because of that. What I'm trying to get at is that you (and you and you and you) should probably consider reducing your dayjob work time.
Maybe working 5 days but finishing the day earlier would work too, I think.
Especially if you plan to make money from gamedev but I think we should also have the right to just take time for us and not having to justify our life decisions (that's what I did the first years when I should just have said "fuck off, I need to sleep" :D
And that's it. I think if you do both those things, you should see an incredible boost in your project's progress :)
Also: That "cooked brain" thing can be a sign of a possible incoming burnout, so take care OP
It's part time here in Belgium.
Basically everything I get is divided by 5 and I lose 1/5 (less legal leaves, less salary, less retirement benefits....)
I tried learning how to be a game designer and developer for some time next to a full time job. it was absolutely futile. My brain was cooked after a whole day of working a high position management job. Next month I'll be unemployed - I arranged getting fired so that I can spend the next year on German social payments, which are 60% of my average monthly salary, for a whole 12 months. This is enough to cover my bills. And with the money I have saved up, I can even think about collaborating with people who can cover my weaknesses, such as illustration and asset-creation.
I'll be using 100% of that free time to study and work on the game I want to make... I want to deliver something... at the end of those 12 months. Whatever it is, success or failure, I will at least have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge.
I wish more people would have the opportunity to just do something creative and new for some time, while not having to bother with existential dread / not knowing how to pay rent.
and I am now doing exactly what you described. breaking everything down to sub-tasks using trello. and not just for the game, but also all administrative things... because if you ever want to release a game you need a whole company that needs to be set up.
Nice trick :D
I too wish people could get some time for them.
I feel like most of us are miserable but don't even realise it because our metrics for hapiness; a nice car, a big house and a marriage with a few kids; are all wrong. once we get all that but are still feeling miserable, we don't understand why, and think this must be our fault somehow. Which is why, I think, burnout is such an insidious thing.
It seems like things are changing though, 4 days week are becoming more common and some countries are trying UBI (universal basic income) with great success (not in my country, Belgium, though, we just elected a bunch of morons stuck in the past) so I guess there is hope for a society that values people hapiness a little more.
For kanban, I know some people use it in their daily lifes too. Checking those boxes is a hell of a drug :P
Best of luck with your project. Be careful with your deadlines though, if you're starting from nothing, one year is pretty short to release some commercial project, especially while learning.
I just need it to be marketable by that time. My business plan requires some kind of Kickstarter campaign anyway. If I end up needing a job afterwards to continue playing bills, I'm positive I can find something within the gaming industry as a remote position. Maybe as an associate producer. I'm a bit older and have 10+ years of IT management experience. It's a now or never situation for me.
I wish all of us best of luck 🤞
Can’t offer much insight, but you made me think….
I honestly couldn’t imagine working a full 8 hour job and then coming home to dev. Unless maybe you’re someone who finds game dev relaxing.
Weekends might be your best bet!
In my capacity as an Arcade manager, the majority of my time is dedicated to addressing technical concerns and ensuring team satisfaction. Once my emails, meetings, and daily tasks are completed, I dedicate my attention to my personal video game project on my PC. However, I can empathize with your current situation, where you may feel depleted of energy after work, hindering your creativity and motivation.
A strategy that proved effective for me during my tenure as an attendant was to carry a compact notepad. During periods of downtime or breaks, I would jot down ideas, tasks, goals, or even snippets of code to test at home. This practice allowed me to maintain focus and prioritize my efforts upon returning home, thereby expediting progress.
Yes, always write down your ideas when they come to you. (For me, I add them to a tasks/todo app) they usually come to me when I'm just laying in bed trying to fall asleep. Also, I lack creativity, so I also kind of use my dreams/semi conscious state to have more "out there" ideas come to me.
Note: I am not yet developing games. I'm currently learning C++ on Udemy in my spare time.
I don’t manage haha - I do get occasional success from getting up earlier, working out, and using that energy bump to dev before work.
If I anticapate a rough work day (in a similar role to yourself) I will plan to skip dev entirey as to not burn myself out.
I'm in the same boat, and I feel like I have absolutely no time to do game dev alongside working full time and household responsibilities (which was made even worse with the Elden Ring DLC coming out).
My only actionable piece of advice is to plan ahead. In my experience, a lot of the mental struggle of adding a feature or fixing an issue comes from solving how it is integrated into the project as a whole. If you spend some time considering the issue and solving it hypothetically before actually working on it, it can become easier to solve once you sit down and get to it. It's a "measure twice, cut once" sort of deal.
I like to have a notebook and pen with me while I'm at work so that I can just throw out all of my random game dev thoughts onto paper and then try to spend some time honing everything down into something I think I can manage.
Yes. It's what i do. Overseas like romania, indonesia, africa are great for leverage - just be aware the overall quality is much harder to achieve. You need to be diligent in your hiring process and in general just be ready to help them learn if needed. Some are scammers but majority are not.
Find a reason. Find people enjoying your work. It's a very nice motivator - at least for me, without motivation it's hard to justify investing your time for others.
There simply are a limited number of hours in a day, if you are "grinding" a full time job, AND being a parent, you should really evaluate your priorities on if you want to be doing a 3rd very time consuming thing at the same time.
Now, if you decide this is important to you, then the real answer is - slowly. You take the time you have, and ensure you pick a project that is feasible for you to make with the time you have. Don't plan on building MMORPGs or other massively ambitious projects, start small and build something you can ship.
Do not listen to the adderall "accomplishment" addicted people who think there is any real need for you to burn yourself out and burn everything around you while you're at it just to work on a project that sounded like fun.
It's incredibly rare any of these people are successful in the slightest, it's even more rare that they don't end up seriously regretting the sacrifices they made, and do you really want to gamble away the rest of your life?
Step 1: Take care of yourself.
Step 2: Take care of your important responsibilities - like working and being a parent.
Step 3: Do what you feasibly can without sacrificing on 1 & 2.
On a side-note, if it's feasible for you, you can consider asking for a reduction in working hours.
Balancing game dev with a full-time job is tough. Try setting small, achievable goals and enjoy the process. It's okay to take breaks and not force productivity. Keeping it fun is key!
I do it on weekends where I can, and I don’t beat myself up if I miss a few days. I track hours using an app called Clockify, but any time tracking app will work. That allows you to see exactly how many hours you are putting in. The tracking also helps you keep it in perspective how fast you are progressing. That’s it. There’s no secret.
Project planning, plan out your work for the week or month and then break it down day by day and then break it down even further in task by task. If your brain is cooked after work then following a checklist of tasks will be much easier than trying to do it on a whim
Building momentum. Force yourself to start, even just 30 minutes a day, and then it will become part of your routine.
It's like finding the time to do some sports or anything else. You have to fight inertia.
What I do is work in the early morning and I just use a no-code/low-code engine. It also is easier to go back to after being interrupted. I probably will eventually go on to use a different engine, but for now what I'm using works for me (Gdevelop). It also helps me focus more on learning the design part and abstract the programming part sufficiently so as to not burn out, since I'm somewhat new to game dev.
Perhaps it’s a boring answer but scope down the project and use a tracking tool like Trello of Jira. Try to scope the tasks such that they are achievable within a or a few hours. That way, you can still see progress and structurally work towards a goal.
I try to go for small, easy objectives every time I work on it. I accept I won't be able to make progress everyday and that it can easily take me 10 years to finish it.
In my case, I see solo-developing as a form of self-expression, so if you are not ok, your game won't be ok either. Make enough exercise, spend time with your family and friends and eat healthy. Your game will collaterally benefit from it.
I have no deadlines, no pressure. If the game doesn't sell or it's a flop, it will be fine because I will be happy with it. If I'm not, then it's not finished.
This works for me because I don't intend, in the short/middle term, to develop games for a living.
Gamedev is my job but basically what I do to prevent burnout is:
Set a goal that you can complete in a single session. That way you got something done and you feel accomplished but because it was an attainable goal in a short time frame you dont feel like you have to make as much of a mental commitment either. I hope this helps if you end up doing something similar 😊
What I do is try to make a little something every day, no matter how small.
Been working on a roguelike engine since 2018, started working on a data editor this year. Maybe someday I'll finish it lol.
I need to change my whole lifestyle if I want to have the energy and motivation to work on my game. Maybe being a nomad living in a van, barely working as a waiter just to survive.
I find working with a small team really helps. Thanks to a fantastic scripter, my wife's 3D and myself we've put out some simple, but popular games in Horizon Worlds (VR and now mobile) that made me realize: I'm balancing my full-time job with gamedev. :-)
Personally I don't spend that much time, but I generally set aside a few tasks, then churn them out. I don't get lost in it, and I don't have schedules.
Like today I haven't done anything, but I plan on adding the camera switch button.
Yesterday I wired up a few input actions.
The day before I fixed up some procedural mesh generation.
Think of it as "mini-sprints" I don't think far ahead at all, I just write down my goals, try and achieve them, then come back tomorrow.
Oh you're right! I totally skimmed over the '/parent' bit. Probably because I'm a parent and it's brutally hard. You're basically a zombie at the end of the day.
I love working on games. The process (minus the marketing) is very enjoyable to me and doesn't really take much effort to just do at this point.
I struggled with balancing my life and stuff, but an hour for fitness + walking 10k steps helps. I don't have kids or a spouse; live alone so that makes some things easy. There are late nights, but I just enjoy designing, programming and creating tasks for the team.
It's hard. Many nights I don't want to do it but I want to make progress. I try to do at least something every day even if it's just playing the current build or writing up tasks for the future.
its really hard to do so. but i would think about my game at work, i would visualise the game and test it in my head while working a mindless job. i would write notes down and read forums when i could. on my weekends i would work on the game, it was a slog. i didnt work very efficiently when i was that stressed and busy all the time. but the job ended up allowing me to have a better career which in turned gave me more time to work on game. so it was necessary
You need rest, and it seems you need to plan a tiny task for each session so you know before what is the goal for this session, if you just do 30 min/day, break things down into tiny chunks that you can finish in that time.
I started to get up early before my kid is awake. These 1-2 hours are more efficient than 4 hours in the evening.
Additionally I finally made a todo list and visualised it in Trello (free). When I get on the computer I instantly know what I want to work on without wasting any time.
However the most important thing I had to realize is that, in my case, gamedev is a hobby and the worst thing I can do is to put pressure on myself. That's the freedom I get for working full time. I want to have fun and be creative. When there is no room for this because the job is stressful or my kid has one of its episodes I accept it.
I think it really depends on the financial situation and the will to sort of "put it all on one card".
You can do an 8h job AND try to make a game. However it's questionable how far you can get with that little time to put into it.
If you do it as a hobby, all good. If you want to make it with your game, it could be an option to get a half-time-job, turn down your living-costs if possible and use the time you have then.
At least that's what I do, but I'm still young and fresh out of college, I don't need much to live.
I mainly do it on the weekend.
I've accepted that after work I'm not always going to be in the mood to grind 8 hours of game dev, so I'm just not putting any pressure on myself to do it.
My routine now is to get up early on a Saturday morning, go out for breakfast, and then sit in my favourite coffee shop and get a few hours work in.
I usually find that once I get started it's pretty addictive and I'll work all weekend. That enthusiasm sometimes spills into the week and I might manage to get a few things done Monday-Friday if they're related to what I was doing at the weekend. At some point I'll run out of steam, have the rest of the week off, and start again on Saturday.
Works well for me. I probably do 20-30 hours a week on my game dev project on average and I really enjoy it. I think if I forced myself to do more or work every night I'd burn out and start to hate it.
Start small and keep in mind that you're doing it for fun, since you have a day job and no need to worry about paying your rent or similar expenses.
If it's not fun at the moment, just don't do it for a while. Avoid burnout is the top priority from my point of view. Take care of yourself and your family.
You can have a job in a small company with a low workload. For example you can be a DevOps, who can have some free time when all the servers are working fine, you have nothing to deploy and you just monitoring everything.
If you have higher workload then you can work faster. If you are developer, then you can automate everything as much as possible. Automate all the building and deployment pipelines, use fastest editors like neovim, spacemacs, doomemacs.
When you got some free time you can switch to your own project and then switch back to your job.
I started sleeping about 5 hours a day 8 years ago or so, not because of gamedev, just because I wanted more awake time.
Even though I have a full time job and two quite young kids (2-6 years) I feel like I have plenty of time, basically everyday between 8PM-1AM is dev time. =)
I came down with an incurable disease. More or less most leaving the house is a lot less worth it to me (restaurant dinner or drinking will make me sicker). So it opened up a lot of free time. It's also sort of last hope for me in general (I know a long shot) but it's the motivation that I know I only got so much day job left in me before it's no longer worth it to live with this illness AND have a boring 9-5 life. Pushing through to work on it is more like "I better make something successful before I decide to hit up Dignitas and see if they'll take me" lmao
It means I consistently go to sleep around 1- 2 am waking up in a few hours for work, then time with family ( two kids). I start working on my game once the last kid is asleep which usually ends up being around midnight.
Like another poster said, it's not sustainable. If I didn't have an approximate end date I couldn't do it.
Just follow the No Zero Day rule. You dont have to do much, even a single method, one new item icon - something every day. You will progress slower, but you will progress and wont loose motivation witch happens with working in bursts with long pauses
I don't have kids yet so after work I tend to take an hour or so off, then spend one or two hours at a time working on my game with breaks inbetween, and on weekends it's also on and off working on my game except when I have something going on that weekend. I'm basically going for slow progression and just trying to keep burnout at bay so I can stay consistent
I keep a ton of notes on my phone, any free time I get I do it instead of scrolling (mostly, obviously not now). Then when I do get a chance I already know what to start with and I can plan it down into smaller achievable chunks.
Zero non days is a good intention, not 100% realistic but a good practice. Sometimes I don't even code anything, l just load it up and have a think about what the next steps are.
I'm a bit lucky in this regard, but I don't need a ton of sleep. 5ish hours is fine for me.
So when the wife goes to bed at 9:30-10
I work until about 2 on the project. Everyone else is asleep and this is consistent time I can dedicate.
The important part though is that there can be no missed days. They don't all need to be a full 4 hours of work, but in general my GitHub should have no blanks for commits. Even if it's just 1 little improvement, something goes up.
A sense of duty to my girlfriend and co-creator. I'm lucky enough that we're in it together, both working towards the same goal, so I have someone depending on me to do my share. It means I don't have to be reliant on self-motivation. If it were just me, my project would have died with my brother over Christmas. The only reason that it didn't is because I refuse to see her talent and effort go to waste because of me.
Lived the same, 60-70-80 hours a week, but i came to unterstand that once you have a team that supports you and work can be done, you feel more accomplished.
Get 30min to an hour of dev time in your lunch break and then another hour in the morning or evening. You’ll need to sacrifice something to make up that time. For me it was sleep and fitness, but I’m moving more towards cutting screen time that is otherwise unrelated to game dev.
I'm in a very similar boat, for me what's helping is thinking through a schedule. It will help you see what your priorities are and what's realistic. If I know that Tuesday nights are dev nights, then it's easy to build my schedule around it. If I want to squeeze in more dev time, then I'm forced to look at a calendar and prioritize. Do I need to prioritize room for playing with the kid? For going to the gym? For other social events?
Well I'm dodging punches and being sworn at most 8 hours a day so sat drawing sprites or coding is comparative calm. Also, my genre is simple - mostly storytelling and writing gags (point and click). Wouldn't maybe feel the same if I had a big scope 3D project.
So get a more loud and dangerous job!
work on it in the morning before work, or take a nap after work, then work on it. try moving your sleep schedule. you have to give up any and every activity during the week.
if you like pain, there are 40 hours in the weekend.
Dude. I am literally in this position right now. I work full time and I am working on my first game on the side.
Alongside all the advice given already like maybe separating some time in the early morning, I would also suggest two things:
First, find something specific about the game dev process that will motivate/drive you. This is especially important on days when you don't feel like doing anything. For me it was art. I would draw my characters and put them into the scene(s) and try to make them move/interact. That would really drive me to put in more work.
Second, if you're married, or have a partner to help you around the house, be open and honest with them and explain what you want to do and ask for their support. My wife was apprehensive at first. But now she's incredibly supportive and she really helps me out with chores and stuff while I dedicate maybe an hour or two to my game after work
I am not a software developer by day, so my testimony may be less relevant to you, as I do a net 0 coding, art, or anything at work.
However, i work 9 hours a day and used to be military, so i absolutely understand the struggle of being *drained* after a work day.
My first commercial project had major scope creep, so i brought on some artists for revshare to help out with it. The team dynamic was awful, didnt work out, and killed the project.
Im glad both of those things happened because they were important lessons for a couple years later when i decides to hop back into game dev:
-I need to keep the scope as small as commercially viable.
-i need teams that are energy additive and not energy negative.
Now I work with 6 fantastic people that make every weekly meeting a JOY to be at, composed of people i met doing game jams, friends, and colleagues. I love it more every day, and were going to be launching our steam page soon after about a year of work, and bringing on another artist.
Not everyone enjoys Revshare, or working in a team at all. Only you can find what energizes you, and you knew coming into this itd be (excuse my language) really damn hard. You just need to find what reinvigorates you, and a schedule that works for you. Not works WITH you, but works FOR you, so you can look forward to working on your passion.
Good luck.
I’m a parent and a swe by day. Keep scope and tasks small. Small things over time will become a game. Once my kids become teens, maybe I’ll have more time then lol
It's rough honestly. I don't sleep well so because I need to pull off like 16 hours days, wanting to do game dev and actually make some progress everyday has gotten me to change how I eat, when I eat, how to manage my energy, how to sleep better, how to exercise as well since I work a physically demanding job and how to make the use of my time on the weekends.
Progress is slow but I am actually doing better. You need to figure out how to manage your time and the best time to do game dev. It's all about managing your life to become healthier in order to do the things you want.
Also have realistic expectations on what you are making. Currently working on the narrative design and writing for a game with a team of 8 people that could be done in 18 months and it's a simple turn based rpg.
Stay positive, stay healthy. You'll get there.
I’m currently living by myself and my commute time to work is ~5 minutes or less one way.
It takes discipline & for you to create a routine. I still procrastinate even now, but I’m always working on reducing it lol.
Wow I thought I would learn some tips and tricks here in this thread but turn out every body has the same problem as mine. For the longest time I tried and tried but it wouldn't work, either I lost interest or life get in the way one way or another. Sometimes after work I'm just exhausted and want to play games, instead of sitting in front of the computer and do it all over again. And then having kid make a whole different story, there is just no time anymore.
In the end, once I accumulated enough saving I just discussed with my partner, quit my job, and full-timing on the project instead. I don't know if it was a correct decision or not though, I wouldn't advise anyone to do the same - it definitely has more cons than pros. But at least this way I wouldn't have any regret - at least I tried once in my life.
I just my game stuff after work sometimes, sometimes I do on weekends and sometimes in holidays, I mean, it's not like we don't have time or something, we just decide to spend it in something else (like family, entertainment, home care, etc.)
Doing game design and having a full time job at the same time is possible. But you have to organize it right. Just as we have to make sure we have a Balanced diet. Our minds needs ballance aswell. If you are on the computer programming for your main job and then your programming for your game as well of course your gonna be burned out. A better solution would be to not even have a job that involves computers and then get home and work on your project.
I work a blue collar job working in the Texas heat, digging holes, welding, concrete etc all sorts of things, but even though I'm tired I'm able to work on my project when I get home as my mind is not burned out. So balancing what you do and giving yourself variety will help you able to accomplish and sacrifice without beating yourself up.
I do my side projects in my spare time. It's for fun not money so sometimes I spend a half hour and sometimes I spend all night. It depends on the groove I'm in.
The short answer is "slowly".
I don't try to make big changes. I have a list of things I want to implement, and I just pick any one of the ones that doesn't have pre-requisites and start going.
If I make a mess, I can discard the changes. The joy of Git.
If I make progress, I can commit it.
Either way, I go to bed knowing i tried, and maybe got somewhere.
In the last month and a half, my game has shaped up to a point where I can actually "play" it.
Pavlovian responses to external stimuli.
My home laptop is at a desk on a shared wall with a 70 inch screen where five children play fortnight with three controllers.
I set the oven timer to certain intervals so I have to get up to reset it, so that unique sound triggers desired behavior in me and the kids. We're up to twenty minutes of focused work time for me and a time length they can live with.
I use the time to have a routine, like use bathroom, drink water, relax from intense focus. The kids swap turns on the control and seek arbitration for perceived wrongs done upon them during the previous twenty minutes.
It's amazing how the kids care that I'm sitting with them even if I'm not paying attention to them though. I can buy time getting an older one to play test because he'll spend an hour testing to see if he can " glitch my game" by falling though a collider.
Do a bit every day. Doesnt matter how small, as long as it's something towards your project. Inevitably you always do a more than you planned, and you dont feel overwhelmed with the giant expectation you have put on yourself.
Keep going and then it's just a matter of time :)
... and enjoy your life!
If you already have game dev experience, I would recommend LOTS of paper prototyping and sketching and/or writing before you use precious time to program it up. This gets your eyes off screens and focused on brainstorming gameplay without going down rabbit holes of implementation details. Most people on here I suspect are in the “prototype immediately” crowd, which I don’t necessarily disagree with if you have the time for it. However, depending on the game genre, you can get a lot of runway from paper prototyping things. The game Balatro could’ve been largely paper prototyped, for instance, before implementation.
Something that helps if you can do it is waking up early before your job. It sounds like a ‘grind’ mindset but really, it’s about giving your energy to yourself before spending it on your employer.
Yes, how indeed. I lived in that mode for past 2 years. AAA gamedev at day, indie at night. That is around 16 hours a day staring at Unreal Engine. Over the weekends even more. Social life took a toll. Relationship issues arose a few times. Every free minute went into the game. I gave up my other projects, like fitness, BJJ.. health in general. No dates. No family visits. No cooking, only bought food = more efficient. My headspace was full of the indie project. And it was only made worse when I saw it will be successful (paradoxically), because now there was a way more responsibility and heavier load to carry, and a lot of money involved and lot of money lost with any bug that I left in the game (The game turned out great, but it took a lot). Making something great takes sacrifice. You will have to sacrifice something. There is no other way. And be very careful what game you will choose to make, because from my experience, you will become the project. My last game was about the Backrooms. I thought I am expressing a feeling of being in the Backrooms. But instead, my life became like the Backrooms. Next time I will make a really deeply meaningful game, nothing else.
>Making something great takes sacrifice I wish I could upvote this twice, because these are real words of wisdom
I agree it takes a lot of long nights and weekends to deliver a great thing, but there's a caveat that this could backfire and you end up investing a lot of time in a not-so-great project. It's important to organize and break down the tasks into regular deliveries which you can test and get feedback from others (don't spend the whole week trying to code that perfect mechanic, make it work first and improve as needed).
Great reward takes great risk.
Great planning and constant feedback greatly reduces risk.
Risk nonetheless.
Admire your commitment man. Made me realise I wouldn’t be able to make similar sacrifices right now with small kids.
If you've got kids, you will have to make sacrifices. FOR THE KIDS! DON'T SACRIFICE YOUR KIDS! But yeah, short of a lucky break where you suddenly don't need to work, or a lucky break where the silly game you made over the weekend becomes an indie hit, I think coming to terms with the reality that trying to be a game dev in your spare time, dreaming of a time when it'll pay off, might just lead to a lot of exhaustion and frustration. But hey, when I was a kid my dad used to make little games for us to play. Treasure maps with riddles and clues. Even a short silly computer game once, in Basic. He was never interested in making it big as a game developer or anything, he just wanted to bring us some joy. And he did, and it was beautiful. If you're gonna make games, just do it as much as it brings you and your loved ones joy. Do it as much as, if you never made a dime, you wouldn't regret the time you put into it.
I worked with a guy that would have game design sessions with his 6 year old on Saturday’s every week. He let his kid be the lead and would just do the hard stuff and teach him what he wanted to learn. I thought that was cute. I hope to do the same when mine is older.
I want to do that but with coding in general with at least one of my kids
I‘m grinding as a lead engineer and making a game whenever i can. I‘m remaking an educational game my dad made in the 80‘s… in basic… he passed away when I was a kid and so i‘m really building out this world as a commemoration 30 years later. Still try to build robots whenever i can with my kids.
Yep. My game dev career basically stopped when I had kids. It’s depressing.
>Admire your commitment man. I think it's meant to be a cautionary tale, not an inspiring story. :)
You could make an extremely small game like at the size/scope of tic tac toe or a crossword puzzle if you're interested in developing them at all.
You took a big risk and it paid off, congrats. But beware of survivorship bias, there are many others who have done this and failed. Me being one of them. I sacrificed a lot of my 30's in this way toiling after hours from a AAA gamedev job and at weekends for years. All for the princely return of $10. This was in the Indie Game The Movie era so it was significantly easier than now to potentially make a return. In hindsight, the reasons for the failure were obvious, but there's no guarantee of success even if I'd done things differently. Do I regret it? Absolutely. I had no social life or memories from that time other than sitting at a desk and had a relationship break up. Would I regret it if it made a million? Of course not. You have to decide if it's worth that risk. I still do gamedev in my free time, I absolutely love it. But I restrict my time to 2-3h on evenings and protect weekends and holidays with my new partner religiously. You have to decide if such a risk is worth it and just because you sacrifice doesn't guarantee success.
Didn’t living like that affect your mental health? Was it worth it…? I mean to give up your health… I can’t imagine myself giving up so much
Everybody has different emphasis in their life. Especially artists, their devotion is what make their arts worthy
You are either depressed because you are not trying hard enough or you do what is mentioned above and pay those costs. It's a no win scenario, but I know no other way.
Sacrifices can vary. Working 16 hours a day for years is way too much. I believe in balance putting 20 hours a week in your personal project is more sustainable and manageable. It will take more years to complete but you will not reach 50 plus and regret you wasted your life. Also easier to lose motivation and get depressed. At the of the day physical and mental health is the most precious
I have sacrificed a lot, I hope I won’t regret it some day, I have failed so many times, I just love trying again too much…
Full time backend engineer here, married with two kids... I feel you. I just pushed till 2am last night. It's hard to hop out of bed and do it all again but I love my brain baby too much to leave it alone. Cheers mate , best of luck.
Full time backend engineer here, married with two kids... I feel you. I just pushed till 2am last night. It's hard to hop out of bed and do it all again but I love my brain baby too much to leave it alone. Cheers mate , best of luck.
I admire you. I can't stop myself from losing interest when working on a project and it's going nowhere. Also, I'm not paid well enough to buy food but I don't think I can make this kind of sacrifice anyway.
Either do gamedev early in the mornings, or find a way to trick your brain into resetting itself. A nap might work or just take a shower followed with a cup of coffee, just something that puts you into a place of felling like your day has restarted. Another idea is to have a concrete plan and to stop in the middle of something (counter-intuitive I know, but if you set things up so you have an obvious "I will finish this thing" it may help with being able to actually get work done).
This and lists. I am currently struggeling in adding more content to the game. I counter this by having lists with a lot of small Task broken down from bigger Task. If I have some time, pick one. Find a bug on the way -> into the list it goes for the next time. Have an idea during lunchbreak, quickly create a new list item. Got 5min during commute, break down bigger tasks. Has a few benefits: - you always have a choice what to work on next - you have an overview of planned tasks - you see progress as your done list gets longer and longer Trello (kanban) is nice to organizr those lists.
This is the main thing I bring from my professional job (product manager) into my indie project; time and task management. I have a clear goal (playable demo before my summer holidays), a Trello board full of sorted tasks and a sharp razor on any scope creep. If I'm in the mood and have time I'll do a big job, otherwise it's some bug hunting or idea testing. If I'm off line I tweak my Trello or do some research. If I don't feel like it then I park it, the deadline is still in scope.
For me planning is also just a tremendous source of stress relief. Because then I know everything is accounted for and only the tasks for today weigh on me. And it creates order and space in my mind. I'm not sure if it's like that for everyone, but it really helps me. Conversely, I sometimes gain stress from a lack of structure in my job working for someone else. Clear responsibilities, goals and timelines have so many benefits.
Easy. No life.
Oh its easy, just dont have kids! My capacity for extra work has plummeted since kids arrived - but not when they were babies - it gets harder as they get older, which is the opposite of what I expected. It could also just be me getting older, but... well I just refuse to entertain that possibility. So now, I'm limited to booking a few days off work each year to enter a select few gamejams. Sometimes when the mood takes me I can spend some evenings on my games outside of these gamejams, but its usually maintenance / new features on existing projects, not new projects.
Losing the free time has been that hardest thing about becoming a parent. I’m hoping as they get older I can get them involved somehow.
Playing in a shared minecraft world with my sons has been amazing, but one of them at least is starting to want to hang out online with his mates instead. Dad isnt cool anymore :( Programming games - both of my kids say they want to, but dont seem interested in taking those first steps / start from the beginning. Scratch and Fuze4 on the switch seem to be ways in. I kind of want to print out one of their manuals, and just give my kids time to flick through them, and try things out for themselves - like how I started learning programming.
And then they become teens and don't need you any more except to borrow your maxed out work station to game on. Ok, sure, they want money too. I'd suggest teaming with people to distribute load and give yourself a set time to work on your ideas without sacrificing your family.
>it gets harder as they get older Wait what ? Really ? Why ?
As they get older, they demand more of your time, stay up later etc etc. I'm assuming it'll drop off when they become teenagers & want to spend more time on their own, but I'm not quite there yet. Time with them becomes more precious to me.
I understand this a lot, sometimes I can only think about game dev since my hands are always keeping them alive ha ha
my full time job doesn’t have anything to do with software or programming, but i have plenty of time to think. usually i’m excited to work on gamedev at the end of the day :)
I come home and try to do something. Doesn't have to be huge. Small progress is still progress. I chip away at it every day and when I'm stressed and need a mental break I take the break.
I do what I can in the morning because my brain isn't as cooked compared to end of the day and it's quieter since everybody's asleep and nobody wants anything from me yet
My sad realisation is that I can't do gamedev alongside my fulltime job, so for years I tried to "buy" time by decreasing work time. Now I have a setup where I work 60% as a freelancer and get two days a week to do "my own sh\*t" and it's the best time of my life. It's also allowed me to really pour my heart into research, planning, prepping, technology development, and so on. If anything, I think I'm more focused these two days now that I know their value (and cost).
Hey. Similar path here. May I ask what freelance work you do? Is it gamedev related?
Yes. I've had the fortune of working in gamedev since 2006 and have freelanced part-time as game designer, programmer, and teacher of both off and on since 2012. This year I dialed that up and stopped having an employment, while also reserving two days a week for my own project. It's been 18 years in the making. :)
I am glad to hear that you have found a good balance and are working in the industry. I have been doing full stack web development for startups the past 15 years - that had nothing to do with gamedev.. Meaning there was no time to improve my skills while working in order to also benefit the assigned game dev days. I had to stop freelancing about 7 months ago to focus entirely on learning unity and programming for games. I am now considering doing some freelance work on the side but only if it is game development related. Do you have any tips on what kind of specific skills / tech stack should a game programmer know to be able to freelance in the games industry? And maybe also give us a tip or two on how you got into finding the clients to freelance for. (I don't think the usual Upwork/Fiverr routes are what pay the bills in the end, in my personal experience it was getting to know people in the web dev industry who could put in a good word for you in their networks to bring you jobs)
Skills-wise, I think there's always need for programmers. But some areas that are usually in high demand because few people specialise in them is animation programming, audio programming, network programming, AI programming (game AI; not LLM nonsense), and physics programming. But all of those are fairly in-depth areas and you need to find the right place to stay in-demand. As to your other questions, I have no good answers, since I've done this for a majority of my professional career (I was a journalist briefly before games). Most of what I get today is through contacts.
Just work with a different period - 4 working days of 12 hours, then 4 days off. The computer is turned on only for programming, creating resources and game levels. Designing in a notebook.
I just game dev on days when I feel like I have the capacity. It's also a late night thing for me. After work, I chill for a bit, then do game dev for an hour or 2 before bed. Progress isn't that fast, but I'm only doing it for fun anyway. It also helps that my job is in non-game programming.
But some sort of programming?
Yes. Web dev type stuff, JS/React. I use Godot and GDscript for game dev.
Many people gamble. Quit your job and live with savings for a while. Accumulate enough to live off until the project is done and try to gain fanbase while monetizing the process. Seen one dev that I actually pitty a bit. Total Indie that released very mediocre game while keeping his job. Development time was like 10 years. He managed to endure this much pain for project that didn't show promise of any returns or profits.
Seems like that would be pretty stressful just burning through savings? I have enough in the bank to keep me afloat for several years but I don’t trust my ability to be successful right now.
Thats good opinion, but i, for example, cant quit, because my savings dry fast. I think, a lot of people in same situation. So, pain is fate)
YMMV but here's what works for me- when I sit down to work on a game project, I virtually always know the "big picture" of what I need to do and/or the specific pieces I'm trying to accomplish. Throughout the day/week/whatever, I think about what needs to be done/fixed *and* how I might want to go about that. How am I going to represent that inventory? How many animations am I going to need for this NPC? You get the idea. So once it's go-time, I have a plan of attack and probably a stopping point as well. If I get everything done I wanted too, session complete. If I run into a snag or really am just out of it, I can stop, too- and I even still have my list of tasks for next time. A lunch analogy... You can mosey over to the fridge, open it, and spend a surprisingly amount of time glancing at what's in there before you end up with a meal. The indecision might even leave you walking away hungry. But if you step into the kitchen and the bread, cold cuts, lettuce and tomatoes are all already sitting in a line on the counter, the process becomes a lot more streamlined.
https://imgflip.com/i/8vs0gn
I usually try to do it on weekend, where I somewhat have a bit of free time. But then again, while I"m an adult, I'm not a parent. So I have less responsibilities. And I'm also a bit new on game dev (and programming) and my job is unrelated to tech, so everything is still so fascinating to me. Maybe try doing it with a partner, and start with a for fun project, instead of full-fledged project?
So I am just like full time dev, kids, wife. All of which take up a majority of my time. With what little is left it's very hard to want to do a hobby let alone something as taxing as game dev. So how do I manage? Well I am honest with myself. I'm not building a game for production or sacrificing the family time or health for a passion project. I typically take time when I have it to implement something fun as a little activity say learning tilemaps, or sprite animations. Maybe it's building a dialogue system. The sum of these right now isn't a game but it satiates my desire to build something in the space. Long term I'd love to complete a real project but for now it's not really in the cards and being honest with myself helps that. Some folks out there will tell you to grind away, to make time. The reality is you will pay for it elsewhere, it may be your kids missing a few nights of story time. Your wife losing a date night, or even your own sanity and personally i wouldn't do that for my job, so I'm not going to do it for a hobby. 🤷♂️
I’m kind of on the same page as you here. I guess the choice boils down to what’s more important to you. I think I need to remind myself of the choice I made and not get frustrated on those nights where no progress is made.
Bit late to the thread, I have 4 rules for myself with my hobbyist game dev. 1- Make sure what you're working on is fun. It's ok to drop a project in extra for something you're going to like working on more; carry the experience you got from that project over and try something you'll enjoy making. 2- If you can't work, don't force it. Spending 30 minutes looking at the game engine doing nothing isn't productive. Try to get into it, but if you can't; try spending your time doing something else and come back to it later. This could mean taking a break of a couple hours, days, weeks ect. Try not to let breaks be too long, but you shouldn't make game dev into a chore. You should also build spending some time working on games into your routine 3- Keep scale small. Don't try and make your magnum opus, you shouldn't gamble a crap ton of time working on a huge game that you hate working on just for it to be a dud. In my opinion the best part of game dev is releasing and sharing your work, so do that frequently. You'll learn more this way then toiling away on the same project. 4- Keep a notebook or something similar of different game ideas. Forget scale, or achievability. Just keep some place to get out your ideas. I find this helpful to keep track of the ideas I have. I know my advice is different to some people here, and you absolutely can go all in, sacrifice most other areas of your life, and spend every spare moment grinding. But in my opinion, you'll just burn out and your mental health will suffer. It's a hobby for most of us here, and a hobby should bring you joy. If it brings you joy, then you're going to be motivated and more likely to produce better stuff in my opinion.
This is excellent advice for someone like me, thank you.
**1. Work smarter** >Most nights I sit there looking at my game engine for 30 minutes and just end up turning off the PC and going to bed. Use Notion, Trello or something to organize your work into tasks. The smaller the tasks are, the better. I usually have cards with a todo list inside it like : Hunger system - \[ \] Thirst bar - \[ \] Hunger bar - \[ \] Item: Bottle of water --- \[ \] Sprite --- \[ \] Item stats - \[ \] Can drink the bottle - \[ \] Item: Burger - \[ \] Max health reduction when hungry - \[ \] Max Stamina reduction when thirsty Don't look at your project aimlessly. Open up your kanban and pick a task and/or subtask (or sub-sub-task, basically any checkbox in your kanban that you can check once done\^\^) that you have time to do entirely. Like "okay, it's really late, I'm exhausted, let's just create that bottle sprite". It should then be easier to jump to the next task once you've started. **2. Reduce your dayjob time** Ok, this one isn't for everyone, but if you can afford it / it's actually a possibility, you should probably go for it. I think a lot of people CAN do just that but refuse for bullshit reasons and for being indoctrinated by the idea that we should work all day long until we die. I did change my dayjob schedule from 5 days a week to 4 a few years ago. The day gained I use to sleep a ton and work on my game. This improved my life A LOT. It's not that I work that much on the day I've taken back, but I'm less tired all the time so I actually work more on my games the other days (evenings and weekends). People around me lost their damn mind when I announced them I was going to drop one day of salary. To them it's like I would ending up sleeping under a bridge or something or that I was just lazy. But, when one year later I've got a raise and basically got back to my 5 days salary but in 4 days, I didn't sense the same level of reaction from them. The human brain is averse to loss so I guess that's because of that. What I'm trying to get at is that you (and you and you and you) should probably consider reducing your dayjob work time. Maybe working 5 days but finishing the day earlier would work too, I think. Especially if you plan to make money from gamedev but I think we should also have the right to just take time for us and not having to justify our life decisions (that's what I did the first years when I should just have said "fuck off, I need to sleep" :D And that's it. I think if you do both those things, you should see an incredible boost in your project's progress :) Also: That "cooked brain" thing can be a sign of a possible incoming burnout, so take care OP
Would that be considered a full time or part time dayjob?
It's part time here in Belgium. Basically everything I get is divided by 5 and I lose 1/5 (less legal leaves, less salary, less retirement benefits....)
I tried learning how to be a game designer and developer for some time next to a full time job. it was absolutely futile. My brain was cooked after a whole day of working a high position management job. Next month I'll be unemployed - I arranged getting fired so that I can spend the next year on German social payments, which are 60% of my average monthly salary, for a whole 12 months. This is enough to cover my bills. And with the money I have saved up, I can even think about collaborating with people who can cover my weaknesses, such as illustration and asset-creation. I'll be using 100% of that free time to study and work on the game I want to make... I want to deliver something... at the end of those 12 months. Whatever it is, success or failure, I will at least have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge. I wish more people would have the opportunity to just do something creative and new for some time, while not having to bother with existential dread / not knowing how to pay rent. and I am now doing exactly what you described. breaking everything down to sub-tasks using trello. and not just for the game, but also all administrative things... because if you ever want to release a game you need a whole company that needs to be set up.
Nice trick :D I too wish people could get some time for them. I feel like most of us are miserable but don't even realise it because our metrics for hapiness; a nice car, a big house and a marriage with a few kids; are all wrong. once we get all that but are still feeling miserable, we don't understand why, and think this must be our fault somehow. Which is why, I think, burnout is such an insidious thing. It seems like things are changing though, 4 days week are becoming more common and some countries are trying UBI (universal basic income) with great success (not in my country, Belgium, though, we just elected a bunch of morons stuck in the past) so I guess there is hope for a society that values people hapiness a little more. For kanban, I know some people use it in their daily lifes too. Checking those boxes is a hell of a drug :P Best of luck with your project. Be careful with your deadlines though, if you're starting from nothing, one year is pretty short to release some commercial project, especially while learning.
I just need it to be marketable by that time. My business plan requires some kind of Kickstarter campaign anyway. If I end up needing a job afterwards to continue playing bills, I'm positive I can find something within the gaming industry as a remote position. Maybe as an associate producer. I'm a bit older and have 10+ years of IT management experience. It's a now or never situation for me. I wish all of us best of luck 🤞
Ah, yes, I guess that's doable then (I have frankly no experience in the gaming industry, I only work alone on small games nobody play\^\^).
Can’t offer much insight, but you made me think…. I honestly couldn’t imagine working a full 8 hour job and then coming home to dev. Unless maybe you’re someone who finds game dev relaxing. Weekends might be your best bet!
I have plenty of time at my job to mess around with gamedev. At home I'm usually too busy.
what is your job?
Private security
In my capacity as an Arcade manager, the majority of my time is dedicated to addressing technical concerns and ensuring team satisfaction. Once my emails, meetings, and daily tasks are completed, I dedicate my attention to my personal video game project on my PC. However, I can empathize with your current situation, where you may feel depleted of energy after work, hindering your creativity and motivation. A strategy that proved effective for me during my tenure as an attendant was to carry a compact notepad. During periods of downtime or breaks, I would jot down ideas, tasks, goals, or even snippets of code to test at home. This practice allowed me to maintain focus and prioritize my efforts upon returning home, thereby expediting progress.
Yes, always write down your ideas when they come to you. (For me, I add them to a tasks/todo app) they usually come to me when I'm just laying in bed trying to fall asleep. Also, I lack creativity, so I also kind of use my dreams/semi conscious state to have more "out there" ideas come to me. Note: I am not yet developing games. I'm currently learning C++ on Udemy in my spare time.
I have no social life and no friends. So you have to pick what you love in life..
I don’t manage haha - I do get occasional success from getting up earlier, working out, and using that energy bump to dev before work. If I anticapate a rough work day (in a similar role to yourself) I will plan to skip dev entirey as to not burn myself out.
I'm in the same boat, and I feel like I have absolutely no time to do game dev alongside working full time and household responsibilities (which was made even worse with the Elden Ring DLC coming out). My only actionable piece of advice is to plan ahead. In my experience, a lot of the mental struggle of adding a feature or fixing an issue comes from solving how it is integrated into the project as a whole. If you spend some time considering the issue and solving it hypothetically before actually working on it, it can become easier to solve once you sit down and get to it. It's a "measure twice, cut once" sort of deal. I like to have a notebook and pen with me while I'm at work so that I can just throw out all of my random game dev thoughts onto paper and then try to spend some time honing everything down into something I think I can manage.
Spend your work money to fund other people to do gamedev for you. Outsourcing overseas while annoying does give you some leverage.
Do you have any experience with this? I've been tempted but it seems like a big risk
Yes. It's what i do. Overseas like romania, indonesia, africa are great for leverage - just be aware the overall quality is much harder to achieve. You need to be diligent in your hiring process and in general just be ready to help them learn if needed. Some are scammers but majority are not.
Find a reason. Find people enjoying your work. It's a very nice motivator - at least for me, without motivation it's hard to justify investing your time for others.
Who needs a social life anyway? you can make NPC friends 😅
I have no life and a lot of free time... I think at the end making a game for me it's just my comfort zone :(
There simply are a limited number of hours in a day, if you are "grinding" a full time job, AND being a parent, you should really evaluate your priorities on if you want to be doing a 3rd very time consuming thing at the same time. Now, if you decide this is important to you, then the real answer is - slowly. You take the time you have, and ensure you pick a project that is feasible for you to make with the time you have. Don't plan on building MMORPGs or other massively ambitious projects, start small and build something you can ship. Do not listen to the adderall "accomplishment" addicted people who think there is any real need for you to burn yourself out and burn everything around you while you're at it just to work on a project that sounded like fun. It's incredibly rare any of these people are successful in the slightest, it's even more rare that they don't end up seriously regretting the sacrifices they made, and do you really want to gamble away the rest of your life? Step 1: Take care of yourself. Step 2: Take care of your important responsibilities - like working and being a parent. Step 3: Do what you feasibly can without sacrificing on 1 & 2. On a side-note, if it's feasible for you, you can consider asking for a reduction in working hours.
I don't have family, so I have lot of time after work.
Balancing game dev with a full-time job is tough. Try setting small, achievable goals and enjoy the process. It's okay to take breaks and not force productivity. Keeping it fun is key!
I do it on weekends where I can, and I don’t beat myself up if I miss a few days. I track hours using an app called Clockify, but any time tracking app will work. That allows you to see exactly how many hours you are putting in. The tracking also helps you keep it in perspective how fast you are progressing. That’s it. There’s no secret.
Luckily, I work from home and I don’t have any kids, so I have extra time lying around
Project planning, plan out your work for the week or month and then break it down day by day and then break it down even further in task by task. If your brain is cooked after work then following a checklist of tasks will be much easier than trying to do it on a whim
get a less mentally demanding job maybe?
Building momentum. Force yourself to start, even just 30 minutes a day, and then it will become part of your routine. It's like finding the time to do some sports or anything else. You have to fight inertia.
What I do is work in the early morning and I just use a no-code/low-code engine. It also is easier to go back to after being interrupted. I probably will eventually go on to use a different engine, but for now what I'm using works for me (Gdevelop). It also helps me focus more on learning the design part and abstract the programming part sufficiently so as to not burn out, since I'm somewhat new to game dev.
Perhaps it’s a boring answer but scope down the project and use a tracking tool like Trello of Jira. Try to scope the tasks such that they are achievable within a or a few hours. That way, you can still see progress and structurally work towards a goal.
I try to go for small, easy objectives every time I work on it. I accept I won't be able to make progress everyday and that it can easily take me 10 years to finish it. In my case, I see solo-developing as a form of self-expression, so if you are not ok, your game won't be ok either. Make enough exercise, spend time with your family and friends and eat healthy. Your game will collaterally benefit from it. I have no deadlines, no pressure. If the game doesn't sell or it's a flop, it will be fine because I will be happy with it. If I'm not, then it's not finished. This works for me because I don't intend, in the short/middle term, to develop games for a living.
That's the neat part, you don't.
Gamedev is my job but basically what I do to prevent burnout is: Set a goal that you can complete in a single session. That way you got something done and you feel accomplished but because it was an attainable goal in a short time frame you dont feel like you have to make as much of a mental commitment either. I hope this helps if you end up doing something similar 😊
Remote work lol
What I do is try to make a little something every day, no matter how small. Been working on a roguelike engine since 2018, started working on a data editor this year. Maybe someday I'll finish it lol.
2 hours, every weekday
I need to change my whole lifestyle if I want to have the energy and motivation to work on my game. Maybe being a nomad living in a van, barely working as a waiter just to survive.
Find a less demanding work from home gig even if you need to take a paycut. You’d have tons of time.
I find working with a small team really helps. Thanks to a fantastic scripter, my wife's 3D and myself we've put out some simple, but popular games in Horizon Worlds (VR and now mobile) that made me realize: I'm balancing my full-time job with gamedev. :-)
Personally I don't spend that much time, but I generally set aside a few tasks, then churn them out. I don't get lost in it, and I don't have schedules. Like today I haven't done anything, but I plan on adding the camera switch button. Yesterday I wired up a few input actions. The day before I fixed up some procedural mesh generation. Think of it as "mini-sprints" I don't think far ahead at all, I just write down my goals, try and achieve them, then come back tomorrow.
Wait until you add a kid to the mix :D
OP mentioned they were a parent?
Oh you're right! I totally skimmed over the '/parent' bit. Probably because I'm a parent and it's brutally hard. You're basically a zombie at the end of the day.
I love working on games. The process (minus the marketing) is very enjoyable to me and doesn't really take much effort to just do at this point. I struggled with balancing my life and stuff, but an hour for fitness + walking 10k steps helps. I don't have kids or a spouse; live alone so that makes some things easy. There are late nights, but I just enjoy designing, programming and creating tasks for the team.
I save that post for when i wake up, just came back from work...
It's hard. Many nights I don't want to do it but I want to make progress. I try to do at least something every day even if it's just playing the current build or writing up tasks for the future.
I just tell myself if I don't try I will die working a 925. But with every game I release I get a lottery ticket to freedom.
its really hard to do so. but i would think about my game at work, i would visualise the game and test it in my head while working a mindless job. i would write notes down and read forums when i could. on my weekends i would work on the game, it was a slog. i didnt work very efficiently when i was that stressed and busy all the time. but the job ended up allowing me to have a better career which in turned gave me more time to work on game. so it was necessary
Quiet quitting.
You need rest, and it seems you need to plan a tiny task for each session so you know before what is the goal for this session, if you just do 30 min/day, break things down into tiny chunks that you can finish in that time.
I started to get up early before my kid is awake. These 1-2 hours are more efficient than 4 hours in the evening. Additionally I finally made a todo list and visualised it in Trello (free). When I get on the computer I instantly know what I want to work on without wasting any time. However the most important thing I had to realize is that, in my case, gamedev is a hobby and the worst thing I can do is to put pressure on myself. That's the freedom I get for working full time. I want to have fun and be creative. When there is no room for this because the job is stressful or my kid has one of its episodes I accept it.
dont have kids and my wife lets me have alone time.
I think it really depends on the financial situation and the will to sort of "put it all on one card". You can do an 8h job AND try to make a game. However it's questionable how far you can get with that little time to put into it. If you do it as a hobby, all good. If you want to make it with your game, it could be an option to get a half-time-job, turn down your living-costs if possible and use the time you have then. At least that's what I do, but I'm still young and fresh out of college, I don't need much to live.
I work part time on purpose. Working in the morning also helps and gets over the barrier of "I don't want to start"
What's that thing you are calling a "full time job"?
I mainly do it on the weekend. I've accepted that after work I'm not always going to be in the mood to grind 8 hours of game dev, so I'm just not putting any pressure on myself to do it. My routine now is to get up early on a Saturday morning, go out for breakfast, and then sit in my favourite coffee shop and get a few hours work in. I usually find that once I get started it's pretty addictive and I'll work all weekend. That enthusiasm sometimes spills into the week and I might manage to get a few things done Monday-Friday if they're related to what I was doing at the weekend. At some point I'll run out of steam, have the rest of the week off, and start again on Saturday. Works well for me. I probably do 20-30 hours a week on my game dev project on average and I really enjoy it. I think if I forced myself to do more or work every night I'd burn out and start to hate it.
Start small and keep in mind that you're doing it for fun, since you have a day job and no need to worry about paying your rent or similar expenses. If it's not fun at the moment, just don't do it for a while. Avoid burnout is the top priority from my point of view. Take care of yourself and your family.
You can have a job in a small company with a low workload. For example you can be a DevOps, who can have some free time when all the servers are working fine, you have nothing to deploy and you just monitoring everything. If you have higher workload then you can work faster. If you are developer, then you can automate everything as much as possible. Automate all the building and deployment pipelines, use fastest editors like neovim, spacemacs, doomemacs. When you got some free time you can switch to your own project and then switch back to your job.
I started sleeping about 5 hours a day 8 years ago or so, not because of gamedev, just because I wanted more awake time. Even though I have a full time job and two quite young kids (2-6 years) I feel like I have plenty of time, basically everyday between 8PM-1AM is dev time. =)
I came down with an incurable disease. More or less most leaving the house is a lot less worth it to me (restaurant dinner or drinking will make me sicker). So it opened up a lot of free time. It's also sort of last hope for me in general (I know a long shot) but it's the motivation that I know I only got so much day job left in me before it's no longer worth it to live with this illness AND have a boring 9-5 life. Pushing through to work on it is more like "I better make something successful before I decide to hit up Dignitas and see if they'll take me" lmao
It means I consistently go to sleep around 1- 2 am waking up in a few hours for work, then time with family ( two kids). I start working on my game once the last kid is asleep which usually ends up being around midnight. Like another poster said, it's not sustainable. If I didn't have an approximate end date I couldn't do it.
Just follow the No Zero Day rule. You dont have to do much, even a single method, one new item icon - something every day. You will progress slower, but you will progress and wont loose motivation witch happens with working in bursts with long pauses
I don't have kids yet so after work I tend to take an hour or so off, then spend one or two hours at a time working on my game with breaks inbetween, and on weekends it's also on and off working on my game except when I have something going on that weekend. I'm basically going for slow progression and just trying to keep burnout at bay so I can stay consistent
I keep a ton of notes on my phone, any free time I get I do it instead of scrolling (mostly, obviously not now). Then when I do get a chance I already know what to start with and I can plan it down into smaller achievable chunks. Zero non days is a good intention, not 100% realistic but a good practice. Sometimes I don't even code anything, l just load it up and have a think about what the next steps are.
I'm a bit lucky in this regard, but I don't need a ton of sleep. 5ish hours is fine for me. So when the wife goes to bed at 9:30-10 I work until about 2 on the project. Everyone else is asleep and this is consistent time I can dedicate. The important part though is that there can be no missed days. They don't all need to be a full 4 hours of work, but in general my GitHub should have no blanks for commits. Even if it's just 1 little improvement, something goes up.
By not having kids. Now that I have a kid, realistically I don't think I could have done it in that situation.
You don't. At least not if you intend to create a game that others will want to play for more than half an hour.
A sense of duty to my girlfriend and co-creator. I'm lucky enough that we're in it together, both working towards the same goal, so I have someone depending on me to do my share. It means I don't have to be reliant on self-motivation. If it were just me, my project would have died with my brother over Christmas. The only reason that it didn't is because I refuse to see her talent and effort go to waste because of me.
By being constantly exhausted.
Lived the same, 60-70-80 hours a week, but i came to unterstand that once you have a team that supports you and work can be done, you feel more accomplished.
Get 30min to an hour of dev time in your lunch break and then another hour in the morning or evening. You’ll need to sacrifice something to make up that time. For me it was sleep and fitness, but I’m moving more towards cutting screen time that is otherwise unrelated to game dev.
Simple: start after kids sleep, go to bed at 2am, wake up at 8:30 for job if kids dont wake me up first.
I'm in a very similar boat, for me what's helping is thinking through a schedule. It will help you see what your priorities are and what's realistic. If I know that Tuesday nights are dev nights, then it's easy to build my schedule around it. If I want to squeeze in more dev time, then I'm forced to look at a calendar and prioritize. Do I need to prioritize room for playing with the kid? For going to the gym? For other social events?
Well I'm dodging punches and being sworn at most 8 hours a day so sat drawing sprites or coding is comparative calm. Also, my genre is simple - mostly storytelling and writing gags (point and click). Wouldn't maybe feel the same if I had a big scope 3D project. So get a more loud and dangerous job!
work on it in the morning before work, or take a nap after work, then work on it. try moving your sleep schedule. you have to give up any and every activity during the week. if you like pain, there are 40 hours in the weekend.
I feel this. my Special Trick is to not work very hard at your day job 😎👍
Dude. I am literally in this position right now. I work full time and I am working on my first game on the side. Alongside all the advice given already like maybe separating some time in the early morning, I would also suggest two things: First, find something specific about the game dev process that will motivate/drive you. This is especially important on days when you don't feel like doing anything. For me it was art. I would draw my characters and put them into the scene(s) and try to make them move/interact. That would really drive me to put in more work. Second, if you're married, or have a partner to help you around the house, be open and honest with them and explain what you want to do and ask for their support. My wife was apprehensive at first. But now she's incredibly supportive and she really helps me out with chores and stuff while I dedicate maybe an hour or two to my game after work
If you want to do real gamedev you save money, quit your job and just do it full time…
I don't, which is why I made gamedev a full time job despite the salary cut. Up to you to decide whether its worth the pain or not!
I am not a software developer by day, so my testimony may be less relevant to you, as I do a net 0 coding, art, or anything at work. However, i work 9 hours a day and used to be military, so i absolutely understand the struggle of being *drained* after a work day. My first commercial project had major scope creep, so i brought on some artists for revshare to help out with it. The team dynamic was awful, didnt work out, and killed the project. Im glad both of those things happened because they were important lessons for a couple years later when i decides to hop back into game dev: -I need to keep the scope as small as commercially viable. -i need teams that are energy additive and not energy negative. Now I work with 6 fantastic people that make every weekly meeting a JOY to be at, composed of people i met doing game jams, friends, and colleagues. I love it more every day, and were going to be launching our steam page soon after about a year of work, and bringing on another artist. Not everyone enjoys Revshare, or working in a team at all. Only you can find what energizes you, and you knew coming into this itd be (excuse my language) really damn hard. You just need to find what reinvigorates you, and a schedule that works for you. Not works WITH you, but works FOR you, so you can look forward to working on your passion. Good luck.
I’m a parent and a swe by day. Keep scope and tasks small. Small things over time will become a game. Once my kids become teens, maybe I’ll have more time then lol
It's rough honestly. I don't sleep well so because I need to pull off like 16 hours days, wanting to do game dev and actually make some progress everyday has gotten me to change how I eat, when I eat, how to manage my energy, how to sleep better, how to exercise as well since I work a physically demanding job and how to make the use of my time on the weekends. Progress is slow but I am actually doing better. You need to figure out how to manage your time and the best time to do game dev. It's all about managing your life to become healthier in order to do the things you want. Also have realistic expectations on what you are making. Currently working on the narrative design and writing for a game with a team of 8 people that could be done in 18 months and it's a simple turn based rpg. Stay positive, stay healthy. You'll get there.
Do under an hour a day in the morning before you stand your dayjob. That's the only way to not burn out.
I’m currently living by myself and my commute time to work is ~5 minutes or less one way. It takes discipline & for you to create a routine. I still procrastinate even now, but I’m always working on reducing it lol.
Memory IS ram oh boy
Wow I thought I would learn some tips and tricks here in this thread but turn out every body has the same problem as mine. For the longest time I tried and tried but it wouldn't work, either I lost interest or life get in the way one way or another. Sometimes after work I'm just exhausted and want to play games, instead of sitting in front of the computer and do it all over again. And then having kid make a whole different story, there is just no time anymore. In the end, once I accumulated enough saving I just discussed with my partner, quit my job, and full-timing on the project instead. I don't know if it was a correct decision or not though, I wouldn't advise anyone to do the same - it definitely has more cons than pros. But at least this way I wouldn't have any regret - at least I tried once in my life.
I just my game stuff after work sometimes, sometimes I do on weekends and sometimes in holidays, I mean, it's not like we don't have time or something, we just decide to spend it in something else (like family, entertainment, home care, etc.)
Doing game design and having a full time job at the same time is possible. But you have to organize it right. Just as we have to make sure we have a Balanced diet. Our minds needs ballance aswell. If you are on the computer programming for your main job and then your programming for your game as well of course your gonna be burned out. A better solution would be to not even have a job that involves computers and then get home and work on your project. I work a blue collar job working in the Texas heat, digging holes, welding, concrete etc all sorts of things, but even though I'm tired I'm able to work on my project when I get home as my mind is not burned out. So balancing what you do and giving yourself variety will help you able to accomplish and sacrifice without beating yourself up.
I do my side projects in my spare time. It's for fun not money so sometimes I spend a half hour and sometimes I spend all night. It depends on the groove I'm in.
The short answer is "slowly". I don't try to make big changes. I have a list of things I want to implement, and I just pick any one of the ones that doesn't have pre-requisites and start going. If I make a mess, I can discard the changes. The joy of Git. If I make progress, I can commit it. Either way, I go to bed knowing i tried, and maybe got somewhere. In the last month and a half, my game has shaped up to a point where I can actually "play" it.
Pavlovian responses to external stimuli. My home laptop is at a desk on a shared wall with a 70 inch screen where five children play fortnight with three controllers. I set the oven timer to certain intervals so I have to get up to reset it, so that unique sound triggers desired behavior in me and the kids. We're up to twenty minutes of focused work time for me and a time length they can live with. I use the time to have a routine, like use bathroom, drink water, relax from intense focus. The kids swap turns on the control and seek arbitration for perceived wrongs done upon them during the previous twenty minutes. It's amazing how the kids care that I'm sitting with them even if I'm not paying attention to them though. I can buy time getting an older one to play test because he'll spend an hour testing to see if he can " glitch my game" by falling though a collider.
The key for me is that I chose not to breed.
Do a bit every day. Doesnt matter how small, as long as it's something towards your project. Inevitably you always do a more than you planned, and you dont feel overwhelmed with the giant expectation you have put on yourself. Keep going and then it's just a matter of time :) ... and enjoy your life!
If you already have game dev experience, I would recommend LOTS of paper prototyping and sketching and/or writing before you use precious time to program it up. This gets your eyes off screens and focused on brainstorming gameplay without going down rabbit holes of implementation details. Most people on here I suspect are in the “prototype immediately” crowd, which I don’t necessarily disagree with if you have the time for it. However, depending on the game genre, you can get a lot of runway from paper prototyping things. The game Balatro could’ve been largely paper prototyped, for instance, before implementation.
I am in the the great luck to be able to have game dev as a fulltime job
Something that helps if you can do it is waking up early before your job. It sounds like a ‘grind’ mindset but really, it’s about giving your energy to yourself before spending it on your employer.