i’ve handled school and working on my game before, but i just got a part time job (which i love!). i have less time to work on my game now, and in addition i recently took a break from it to work on another project and i’m having trouble getting back into the groove again. so i’ve been away from my game for approximately a month or slightly longer.
anyway, how do you guys balance work and game development, if you do at all?
edit: i also need to change my avatar as i had to shave my “tentacles” off for my job. i look like 20x better though with just stubble.
Definitely the part time job. The game will still be there whenever you want to continue it but the part time job offers more life opportunity to be happy.
It’s hard to be honest. As a genXer I can’t sustain more than about 2 weeks at a time with only 4 hours of sleep per night.
So I try to get to bed around 12-1am to make sure I get enough before I have to be at work by 6:30am.
The most difficult part for me is after getting home at 6ish, I eat dinner, spend time with family until about 9ish, then the period between family going to bed and getting home tasks complete before jumping into Unity/Max/3D coat/PS etc.
I have about 1 hour to get as much done as I can around the house, and sometimes there is more to do than I can do in one hour. This also has a nasty side effect of draining me of energy I expect to have recouped from dinner. I’ve been trying to get stuff done before family time, but sometimes it isn’t possible.
Also - winter months really get me, because I have no motivation to work out after dinner before getting back into game dev.
In the summer I’ll usually do at least 30 minutes of something before heading into game dev, which reinvigorates me for a good 3-4 hours.
But winter - blegh. Still - getting between 2-3 hours a night is progress, though not as much as I’d like to be making.
If you can manage to get to the desk and get the software open - consider checking out the pomodoro technique. I’ve been doing that for about two weeks now - and it is having some positive impact on progress. I’m currently doing 25/5.
Others say 15/5 but that is too short for me.
Posting right now on my 5 minute break.
A workplace that’s flexible about your work and supportive of personal ambition is awesome.
Part time work helps a lot, as it gets you a bunch of extra hours per week for your own stuff compared to full time.
Having clear goals, both short and long term. Better yet, an actual plan. Things probably won’t go to plan, but that’s not the point. It’s more about thinking things through as much as you can to make the most informed decisions possible.
Cut your game down to its simplest possible self. Figure out its core essence and forget everything else. One exercise I find useful there is to define the “pillars” of the game (something I got from an interview from someone at Blizzard), and then occasionally comparing my goals, tasks and game design elements to those pillars. Anything that doesn’t directly help to support those pillars gets dropped, because it’s a distraction.
Work with other people. Ideally they’ll have skills that you won’t, which will probably make your game better. Just as importantly, they’re someone you’re accountable to, and someone who can hopefully help you form productive habits with. On the flip side, if the project is commercial you do need to make sure you have decent agreements made up front about that - who owns the game, how is income divided, what happens under various different scenarios…
If your games are meant to eventually become an income stream, treat them like a job. Have a start time and an end time and be disciplined about when you’re “working” and when you’re not. When you’re “working”, behave as if you were working on someone else’s dime.
Note the qualification in that last point there - “if your games are meant to eventually become an income stream”. If so, you’re talking about business and you need to treat it like one. On the other hand, if you’re doing this as a hobby, just for fun, then stop making life hard for yourself by trying to live up to unrealistic expectations. If it’s a hobby and you can’t work on it for weeks at a time, who cares? You’re not beholden to anyone, and should just do whatever it is that makes you happy, and sometimes that’ll mean not working on your game for a bit.
Also keep in mind that it’s not just “work” and “game making” you have to balance. It’s also family, relationships, meeting your social needs, and all of the other stuff that goes into being a healthy person. Even if you think you’re fine to cave dwell for a period to get your game out, remember that doing so for too long makes you less productive. Be healthy and treat yourself well, and you’ll get more out of the time you spend working, and might end up making a better game as a result.
review code over morning coffee, add a comment, document, whatever, just 5 min a day.
Just don’t code anything, comments won’t hurt anything.
Helps to keep your head close to the project.
I have a full time job as a programmer and prioritize that and my own personal comfort over all side development. You can push yourself to work on it more and may gain something - such as progress and smarts - but you’ll also lose time you could spend socially, spiritually, relaxing, exercising, etc. If you want to be a cave troll and drill your weekends with side dev, okay, but don’t ignore the effects it will have down the road, both pros and cons.
I work full time and try to do some Unity stuff here and there, or when I’m in the mood. I generally try to also be ‘smarter’ about what I create or how it is created, either with some custom tools to speed things up, or procedural generation or whatever… trying to stay away from things which will take me a lot of time to do manually by hand.
I work full time, and commute about 3 hours a day. I work on my game at lunch, and before bed. I get some work in on the weekends as well. I’m averaging around 10 hours a week working on the game, which makes it really slow going unfortunately.
This prodded my mind a little. A point to add to my earlier list:
Don’t try to make stuff perfect. Maintain a list of stuff you’d like to come back and improve, or known bugs / issues. You don’t have to fix stuff when you find it, or make things perfect the first time around, and trying either of those things might distract you from stuff that will provide more immediate progress.
Yeah, but if you want to generate docs for your code later then try not to use summaries to handle it for you. And they also allow you to see descriptions when your’re using this code.
Got lucky and my full time job is working with Unity and I got a flexible shedule. So I can share stuff pretty eaily. I bring my personal projects to work, e.g. by Git and I can do research or write scripts that benefits both my work tasks and my personal tasks. But still finding time is hard, when I go home the least thing I think of is working with Unity.
While you grow experience you know what is to do and what to avoid so you can be more productive.
If you’re lucky enough to have somewhat steady freelance work, and pair it with passive income (e.g. Asset Store) I think would be the best approach to have the freedom that developing a game requires.
The only time I use comments is when I am trying to give myself a message about the code. Comments should be used for documenting a piece of code given to the public. At least say what the function does.
we’re talking about staying connected to a project you want to keep going but don’t work on very often.
quick 5 minute code reviews can help, everyday.
My advice was don’t add or subtract code, commenting fine, because your not changing anything,
but you don’t want to just change code, and try and figure it out next month, or in six months.
