[ca6d8815]

Good tips... but in reality if you're working full-time (especially in a software related role), you may find yourself depleted before you get to the keyboard.

It took us 5 years to finish our game (everyone started from 0 knowledge on how to make games, so it was a rocky road), and for the last 1.5-2 years my life was absolute hell.

I'd push hard at work for 9 hours a day, eat, then push hard on the side project for 8-9 hours a day, sleep, wake up, and just keep going. One day a week maybe I'd just sleep. Not having "pure energy" for the side project meant that everything suffered.

We had to learn-by-trial virtually _everything_, I don't recommend ever doing a big project that way.

If you want to finish a game, choose a small game. Start doing game jams. Practice _finishing_. You can do more and more later.

Or, go for it, do it our way, all in to win (win is subjective, the pride is real, the monetary result didn't really do anything meaningful for so much investment). I wouldn't do it this way again, but I understand people who do.

All that said, the joy of doing something for us by us is not something I've encountered in my 15 year career yet. So... if you've never built something (and truly finished!), but you want to try... go for it.

[capableweb]

> I'd push hard at work for 9 hours a day, eat, then push hard on the side project for 8-9 hours a day, sleep, wake up, and just keep going. One day a week maybe I'd just sleep.

No wonder you feel like hell, where is time for people, leisure, exercising and all the other activities that will help you move faster by feeling better? The true optimization for becoming a more efficient person is to do less of the thing you're doing most of, and do more of the other stuff you do less of.

[the_only_law]

This has been my line of thought for a while. You spend a minimum of 8 hours working, and ideally you get 6-8 hours of sleep. Let’s say you have a couple more daily responsibilities that take 2-4 (could be commute, cleaning, some other maintenance).

There’s almost no time to do anything, and some of the hours you have left may be at non-prime times of the day.

> The true optimization for becoming a more efficient person is to do less of the thing you're doing most of, and do more of the other stuff you do less of.

The problem is this means sleep or work. I’ve opted for the former, and suffer for it. Sacrificing working, at least any notable amount, just means trading time-loss for money-loss which may or may not work depending on person.

[ZephyrBlu]

> No wonder you feel like hell, where is time for people, leisure, exercising and all the other activities that will help you move faster by feeling better?

You can't do all of that and have a job and also make significant progress on a side project. There isn't enough time in the day.

https://blog.asmartbear.com/two-big-things.html

[jbluepolarbear]

I work 1 hour a day on my personal projects. It’s slow going but I make steady progress. I read about someone doing it 10 plus years ago and I’ve stuck with it. Of course I miss someday, but I try and get at least my 1 hour a day.

[core-utility]

This book Finish by Jon Acuff is a great book on practicing finishing. He also has Start for the very opposite.

https://www.amazon.com/Finish-Give-Yourself-Gift-Done/dp/052...

[mehphp]

I've ironically only read about half of Finish

[_benj]

Just picked up the book and seems to be taking about me in specific!

Thanks for sharing it :)

[sabjut]

What I learned from other people who have success in their side projects is to choose a workplace that allows you to do a sub 40 hour work week. Of course you would have to live a tad more simply than your standard upper-middle class software guy.

[AuryGlenz]

I specifically started doing photography so I could do game development in the off-season.

It turns out it’s hard to completely drop projects in the spring/summer and pick them up in the winter. I’d love to keep pecking at them over the photography season but I have a hell of a hard time getting anything done when I can only dedicate an hour or so an evening to it.

[watwut]

> Of course you would have to live a tad more simply than your standard upper-middle class software guy.

Actually, many software jobs are like that. All it requires is for you to not be ambitious to create. You can have very good salary in many companies while slacking a lot. Sometimes you might have to be in office for a lot of hours, meaning doing leisure, socialization and side project in the office.

[ultrasounder]

I totally can attest to it. Work for a subpar legacy medical device company where my input is constantly less than 40 hrs a week thereby allowing me to learn skills like React and solidity to consider opportunities in web3 which wouldn’t be remotely possible with FAANGMULATAD

[snarf21]

Yeah, this is my issue. After a long day of (sometimes pointless) software dev, strapping in for more is draining. So as a contrast, I design board games (not digital) as my hobby. It is very analog and tactile and so energizing partially from just being a nice change of pace.

Your advice to start small is spot on though. I would even say one of the best first things to do is start by making a game mod. You don't have to invent so much, you just get to enhance. You get to something playable much quicker and learn about all your false assumptions.

[paulryanrogers]

Fair warning, game mods can take over your life too. Though I'd agree they can be easier and often can build on the community of the game your modding.

Another risk with mods is the game owner can shut you down at any moment, if public. I'll probably never do another mod or reuse someone else's IP for anything beyond very small prototypes. There are just so many tools now that you shouldn't have to.

(Star Wars Quake 1997-2002)

[throwaway894345]

I've had good luck with using my best time/energy for hobby projects and what's left over goes to work. Of course, this assumes that your hobby project is more important to you than whatever might be achieved by putting your best energy/time toward your job, but I also think a lot of people over-index on "whatever might be achieved by putting their best energy/time toward their job".

[yamaneko]

Can you elaborate on how you design your board games? How do you approach it?

[xwdv]

You guys realize there’s software engineering jobs where you might only do 4 hours of real work a day?

And now with remote work being a norm, sometimes it feels like you barely work at all, and yet still accomplish the same amount of work as before.

Get paid for the value you bring, not the time you spend.

[awkward]

Keeping the side project work different from day to day work is huge, too.

- Frameworks are great when you need to keep a team to a standard, and keep standardized answers available. There's no way I'm going to debug someone else's dependency errors on my own time though.

- Dev tools and automation are nice to have, but if I spend a whole night fixing tooling that's time I could have spent on the project. Some loose unit testing and tools that work without configuration is all that's I'm willing to use.

- A while ago I would have said that paid tooling is worth it if it saves you time. Open source and freemium products have gotten good enough now that that's no longer the case for a small enough dev team.

[e19293001]

> Practice _finishing_. You can do more and more later.

This struck me. Thank you for the reminder.

[bick_nyers]

I followed that exact same lifestyle for 2 years (and also 2 years prior of us not knowing what we were doing), I would consider it impossible to have any relationships, romantic or casual. Now that I am older and have more responsibilities, I don't think it's something I could pull off.

Learned a lot though, got pretty good at programming because of it (I am early in my career).

My thinking now is that if I want to make a somewhat complex/ambitious game, I will need to take the route of other successful artists, become independently wealthy first.

[BongoMcCat]

Just out of curiosity, when you spent 9 hours at work, was that in a software field?

If so, why would you choose to do the same thing 18 hours a day for 5 years?

[ca6d8815]

> Just out of curiosity, when you spent 9 hours at work, was that in a software field?

Yes, however the day job and night project were _completely_ different disciplines. Someone wrote that gamedev isn't really software engineering... I'd agree with that (not putting it down, but its not like anything I've done).

> If so, why would you choose to do the same thing 18 hours a day for 5 years?

Those long days came in the last 1.5-2 years. Why? I don't think we would have finished otherwise, or at least not anytime soon.

We found that momentum for us was critical. If we took it easy, then it slow days would turn into slow weeks and it would turn into slow months. We wanted to finish at some point. Even when we had a slow week or day, or when we'd go do something that wasn't the game, there would be a shadow of guilt that we are not finishing. I think that is personal, everyone does this differently.

And the second why? The reward loop of doing something with a realtime 3D game is simply joyous. I would sometimes have _so much fun_ making the game that on the good days I dreamt of quitting the day job and starting up a studio full time.

When the dust settled though, it took me almost a year to think about using the computer at home for anything other than playing a game or reading news / experimenting with homelab stuff. The burnout was harsh.

I don't regret it... but I'll never do it like that again.

[Viliam1234]

> If you want to finish a game, choose a small game.

I know a few people who tried to make a big game first. None of them finished.

Even a small game will take much more time than you imagined, because there are so many details to consider. (Then it gets faster, because you can reuse the ideas, maybe even parts of code.) It is easier to try new concepts in a small project.

[devwastaken]

For games we don't have to start from scratch either. If you want a little multiplayer game people can have fun in, vrchat is a good platform for it. Gets the game into the hands of people and you can even just join them. A lot of stuff already handled for you.

[marceldegraaf]

Out of curiosity: which game are/were you working on, if you can share that? Thanks!

[ca6d8815]

This is the game we made, The Shattering: https://store.steampowered.com/app/596000/The_Shattering/

[ffitch]

Sounds like very intense five years! I understand you wouldn’t do it the same way again, but still, was the result in any meaningful way comparable to the effort?

Do you feel comfortable sharing game name?

[ca6d8815]

Yes, the result was something I have never achieved. I've been a part of a lot of projects, successful and not, but always as a participant and not as a true stakeholder.

Going from start to finish on something, and then getting the opportunity to hear from fans (and critics alike), it is still making me smile a year and a half after launch.

When they say "money isn't everything" in this case its true, but I had I (and still have) a day job. If I had bet the monetary-farm on the project, I'd be singing a different tune.

The game name is "The Shattering", there's a link below somewhere to it on Steam :)

[afterburner]

You worked 18 hours a day? Yes that is obviously hell.

[markus_zhang]

Agreed. It's a LOT difficult to finish something, especially something to sell.