I’ve been programming in unity for so many years, and in the recant months I’ve been feeling a constant, endless exhaustion. Just the thought of learning more C#, or making a new game causes such a mental drain for me now days. Don’t get me wrong, game/software development is still my passion, it’s just for some reason my mind gets so deflated even thinking about it…
Can anyone relate to this? Is this a normal feeling that will pass as time goes by? Should I take a good long break from programming, and do something else for a while? Will I ever get that super intense, never-ending flow of energy back?
Stop trying to learn, and start doing. Make simple games that only use the knowledge you already have, and enjoy yourself. Practice what you know, and don’t worry about what you don’t.
When you stop feeling so stressed about it, start branching out in little ways and adding on to your knowledge.
Its the same for us artists im sure. Always trying to learn, redoing and hating ur own stuff later really drags me down. For me its simple, i do what i know, then i simplify it. Just do what u know, have breaks, learning is not fun for most ppl. Doing is.
I’m a professional web developer as my day job. Then I go straight to more programming in my game. I’m to the point where I usually only work on my game on Weekends. It’s slow going, but it keeps me from getting crazy exhausted dealing with code non-stop all day. It also helps that I use PlayMaker then write custom re-usable actions for it so I’m not dealing with a ton of raw coding all day. This also allows me to rapid prototype features without having to commit to writing entire scripts for it as I can use my generic re-usable actions to easily implement.
I suffer from the same problem, but, look, there is nothing wrong with taking a break. Sometimes that break is 2 hours, sometimes is a week, sometimes its 6 months. When you are living and breathing the code it is easy to get too involved. Just keep in mind that if you take a break it will still be there when you come back. Sometimes you don’t break from the code so much as switch a new area to keep things interesting. It happens to everyone. To you mix and match.
Part of the “craft” of being a professional or whatever developer is being able to step away, and, as you do, pick up some new perspective.
It WILL be there tomorrow.
Don’t beat yourself up too much. It happens to everyone. What separates good developers from shitty ones is the good ones can step away, if even only for a bit, when they are overwhelmed. No shame in that. You recoup and charge back later.
I also find that I remain at my most motivated if I always make sure I stop on a high note, and always know the next thing to do.
It’s super hard to get started if I’ve just finished something huge and don’t know what to do next. I’ll take ages poring over what’s already done, listing out things I could do, making a decision about where to spend time, so on and so forth. Whereas, if I actively list things I want to get to before I have to decide what to do, I just pick the biggest thing on the list and do it. And if I stop while I’m still rocking’ out at something, I find that I want to get back to it, which makes it easy to start when I come back because I come straight back to the excitement of whatever I was doing. Whereas if I finish it then I’m starting off at a trough rather than a peak.
I had this feeling recently. I was trying to get into Photon Server and the documentation is lacklustre the examples are “all right” but certainly not usable in a real project IMHO. I spent a lot of time with it and was getting frustrated and my personal life was failing, my girlfriend would pressure me to go out I’d just tell her I’m too busy. She would sit next to me on her computer and I’d get frustrated every time she said a word to me…I don’t think I would have made much headway if I continued like this, I was too burned out to think properly and the frustration didn’t help.
I spent a long time reading docs as well as source code and I tried to watch the video series but I simply cannot stand videos for numerous reasons and much rather text. I took a month break and focused on my reverse engineering game hacks which went very, very well. When I came back to photon, it clicked for me and I was able to work on a framework I was happy with my base frameworks for the client server that are performant. I’d say this is thanks to my one month break to focus on something else that I’m passionate about as well.
My passion didn’t go away; it actually grew in comparison to how it was when I was burned out.
Yeah it must be some kind of programmer burnout, or something. I think I’ll probably take a solid month break from it one of these days; however it’s a tad difficult when it’s my main source of income. Maybe switch jobs, temporarily?
Yeah take a break. If you don’t already do it join the gym start going three times a week and you’ll have more energy, start eating healthier, since programming is a very sedentary job. Say your working on a project that takes six months you should take a month off to unwind. If you work for a company they are going to use and abuse you but if you work by yourself you can do what you want