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[migrafael]

Hi,

I hope this post gathers those who are troubled by the same dilemma, how to give it you best at home on you own games when at work you are also working on games.

I work as a designer making causal adventures at work. I also do some iphone games on the side. Unfortunately its getting increasingly difficult to give out 100% on my projects when at work I'm doing 120% (hurray for #("=)!/(" crunch time!). I haven't given up nor will I do  in the near future , but I'm wondering, what keeps YOU going, what makes you get home and code/draw/design/write some more.

Masochism? Desire to produce Win? Make something you are proud to show others? Making the game you want to make i assume is one of the reasons

Since I like to make opening posts short, who else suffers the martyrdom of the game dev at work and at home?   And why do you endure it?

Miguel

[moi]

1-give priority to your real work because chances are your home projects are just a fluke. Unless you are really serious in which case you could consider going full time indie
2-at home, adopt a work ethic. Schedule your working hours, don't work late into the night. And consider it as a real work. Chances are you're only doing this as a hobby and you get burned out when you realize the amount of work for reals. If you really want to succeed with working at home you have to put the hours in and be serious like a machine.

[Alistair Aitcheson]

I heard some people, who've been employed by game companies, say as part of their contracts they cannot release any new projects of their own. I think it's because the company worries about their staff developing projects that compete with their own.

Is this normal, or quite unusual?

Myself, I work entirely on my own, but I treat it as a full time job. So myself, I don't have the same issue as yourself, but I may do if I decide to get a job in a studio.

[migrafael]

I heard some people, who've been employed by game companies, say as part of their contracts they cannot release any new projects of their own. I think it's because the company worries about their staff developing projects that compete with their own.

Is this normal, or quite unusual?

That's quite normal but it's not so much about competing with the company, its more about making sure we don't use the company's tech to produce our own products (at least that's what I think it is)

@moi: Work ethic at home is the hardest thing to achieve when your putting overtime in your day job, but I've been working hard to keep up the pace and keep self imposed deadlines (without neglecting family of course)   
I'm already on my second project on the iphone (with FakePup), so I know how hard it can get.

Thanks for the replies, keep them coming.   

[PoV]

I did compos (Ludum Dare).  Aside from that, I had to quit before I could regularly work on my own games.

[J. R. Hill]

I think it's best if you just switch it up.  If you work on physics systems at work, don't go home and work on more physics systems cause it'll just be boring.  Work on pixel art or music or something new because it'll be more interesting.  You can make a lot of fun games with a minimal amount of programming.

[XRA]

My biggest problem is keeping the work at work.. not letting the extra crunch creep into working at home in the evenings..

Ideally for me, at home it is more of an escapism thing, working on stuff is just what I do, where spur of the moment ideas flare up, usually I'm more motivated at home since there is a freedom to bounce between small ideas or focuses (scripting, art, audio etc).  Because of that I hardly get any personal projects finished     (i intend to start doing shorter small projects to practice finishing)

However earlier this year I started writing down all ideas/inspirations in a little moleskin notebook that I keep with me (prior to that it was on scraps of random junk mail / paper), I've found this helps a ton with clearing up my head, instead of trying to shelve ideas for future use in my brain or deal with them getting all intertwined into a mess of too many mechanics I just write them down, sometimes noting bits from older ideas to use with more recent ideas.   I've also noticed that many times a new idea or inspiration will actually benefit/strengthen a prior concept that has been brewing...always a cool feeling when that happens.

Anyway I forget what my point was, I guess currently I don't manage both and need to figure out a good way to get it all under control, I'm taking a break from doing work-related level design while still scribbling in the idea-notebook in front of me (and reading TIG)

[migrafael]

JR Hill got it right, one needs to do something different at home, something new and exciting. That's why I'm working on a fast paced platformer at home while at work I do puzzle adventures.

Of course there's always that problem that your little games will eventually take forever to finish if can only put 2 hours a day every other day at home, but we need motivation to go full time indie right?

[J. R. Hill]

If you wanna be really indie you only need 2 hours a day anyway.

[handCraftedRadio]

I've kind of been getting the same feeling lately as I am trying to balance out my own projects as well as school work and a coding job. It's only been 3 weeks into the semester so far but I've been able to get a lot of work done on my stuff by focusing on getting all of my school work and work work done during the week so I can leave friday night saturday and sunday free for game development.

[LemonScented]

what keeps YOU going, what makes you get home and code/draw/design/write some more.

Masochism? Desire to produce Win? Make something you are proud to show others? Making the game you want to make i assume is one of the reasons

All of the above

I've been pretty lax with the working at home thing over the last couple of months. Normally when the dayjob projects are good then doing some more work in the evenings doesn't seem like a chore, and when the dayjob projects are going a bit crappy I get super-motivated to do cool stuff at night. But the mire of the project at my previous company left me almost catatonic with creative inertia, both in work and at home. So then my evenings got filled with job-hunting, and then house-hunting, and then moving, and now I'm in a new place at a new company, feeling happy, and all of a sudden I'm itching to get back onto my own project in the evenings again. I can't do yet because I don't have a proper desk for my development PC setup, but that's arriving this week and it's brilliant to feel motivated again.

Regarding the "don't make games at home" parts of employment contracts - yes, that's pretty standard, but in my recent job interviews I've found it fun to ask companies about their attitude to that. Some of them are assholes about it, but the guys I'm working for now have been very cool and have deliberately omitted that kind of stuff from my contract (although obviously there's still an understanding that I won't use work time, work tech, or make anything that directly competes with their stuff), so there are companies out there who are open minded about that kind of thing if you've got the balls to ask them about it.

I agree with the people that say it's important to do something different in the home projects than what you're doing in the dayjob, and it's good to have a disciplined approach involving "X hours per day/week, no more, no less" because if you're not strict with yourself it's too easy to either burn yourself out or get lazy and let projects grind to a halt. I kept up the same pace in the evenings whilst crunching in the old job by just sleeping less. It didn't matter much that I went to work in the mornings tired - the whole team was exhausted anyway, and the knowledge that I had a solid working practise on a good project at home did me more good psychologically than the sleep would have done. Your mileage may vary.

[I_smell]

When I was makin games at work, I stopped makin games at home.

Simple as that. Don't wanna spend my whole life on this thing.

[Montoli]

Don't force it.  If you're already doing game dev for a job, then you need to make sure that any extra you do is for fun.  If it's not fun, then it just becomes more job, and this becomes very hard to sustain, mentally.  So do everything you can to keep it in the realm of "leisure".

This is especially true during crunchtime at work, but really, any time.  Personally, I find it all too easy to work on programming games at work, and then come home and spend all my evenings/weekends also programming games.  And then wonder why I'm feeling burnt out a week or two later and my brain isn't working.

I consider it VITAL that I get at least one complete, utter "goof off" day every weekend, where I don't program at all, and I don't feel guilty for not programming at all.  That gives me one full weekend day per week, (not usually spent 100% programming of course, but at least it's there) and a smattering of evenings and weekends.

This has been serving me well lately.  And a funny thing is, the productivity does not seem to scale linearly.  Doubling the time I have to spend on personal stuff does not double my productivity.  I find that some significant parts of the work (especially design tasks, like coming up with new level gimmicks, or some programming tasks, such as coming up with an elegant solution to a problem) happen in the background of my head, whether I'm programming at work, or at home.

Or to put it another way, even though it looks like I'm not putting in much time on my personal projects if you just chart the minutes, I find that my few scant hours I can dedicate to them turn out to be incredibly prodouctive because I can just sit down and implement the good solution that I came up with over lunch and refined on the bus ride home.

Oh yeah, and if you find yourself needing motivation, I have found that keeping a dev journal and regular playtests go a long way towards keeping me motivated.

[migrafael]

(...) and the knowledge that I had a solid working practise on a good project at home did me more good psychologically than the sleep would have done.

That has happened before. Great input, thanks LemonScented

Funny that right after your post comes I_smell

I agree with I_smeel, its good to do something else besides fading away behind a computer screen all day and night, but when your day job doesn't fulfill your creative need, what can you do? My answer is do what you want at home! And what I want right now just happens to be more game dev


@montoli: great advice there. Fun is the key and avoiding overwork essential. When we where making our first game, Snowball Smash, we just slaved away during the night for the last month or so and in the end everybody was sick of the game.

Funny you mention a dev journal, I just  started one like two days ago. http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=14714.0

[LemonScented]

Montoli's advice about taking at least one day off a week from making games altogether is extremely good advice. When I'm running on full steam, I work 5 or 6 evenings on my pet project, and 5 days a week on the dayjob. Yes, even during Crunch. I'll work late into the evenings if needs be, but there is not a job, project, studio or reason in existence that will get me to do unpaid overtime at the dayjob on the weekends. Fuck. That. Shit.

[supershigi]

My boyfriend went through something very similar... he was working full-time at Blizzard on Diablo 3 while also trying to finish an indie game in his spare time.  It was pretty rough on his wrists since he was constantly on the computer, but he was able to stick with it and finish the game.  I think he enjoyed being able to express himself creatively, and he was motivated by the hope that people would be able to have fun playing his game.

I'm also in a position where my day job and hobby are quite similar... I work as a video game composer, but I'm also creating an indie game in my spare time that requires a ton of music.  I often find it incredibly difficult to summon the creativity for my own game after working on others' projects all day long... but what gets me through it is imagining people playing the game and enjoying it.  I imagine my mom playing the game and getting to the really sad or revealing parts of the story, and that really makes me want to compose music that fits.  I also have a bunch of piano students that have tested my game, and they always ask me when I'm going to have something else for them to test because they "want to know what happens next"... for some reason I find that incredibly motivating ^_^ 

[migrafael]

Fortunately I never had too much work leak into the weekend, so there's always some time for my projects. But sometimes the head is just so tired that all it needs is a book or a stroll and none of these flashy screens we keep looking at all day.

It's been said in this thread before, you have to keep it fun or else you might just stay put. And do something different from what we do in our day job for sure.

 

[increpare]

Don't force it.  If you're already doing game dev for a job, then you need to make sure that any extra you do is for fun.  If it's not fun, then it just becomes more job, and this becomes very hard to sustain, mentally.  So do everything you can to keep it in the realm of "leisure".

I don't like this sentiment at all.  This feeds a little too much into the notion that your work life should dominate everything else : when you're not working, you're recovering from work.  I had productivity dips, but never scheduled 'recovery time' at the sole expense of my personal work.

[Wilson Saunders]

When I am in work crunch mode I don't spare time for home projects. Fortunately work crunch only lasts a week due to the nature of my company. The rest of the time I am doing home projects to keep my skills sharp while work wastes my talents having me update their website, data base, or other trivial programming matters.

As for motivation, some times a idea just gets lodged in my head. It will not leave me alone and keeps me from sleeping. That is where my passion for game development comes from; taking an idea and telling it "you deserve to be made a reality."

[Montoli]

Don't force it.  If you're already doing game dev for a job, then you need to make sure that any extra you do is for fun.  If it's not fun, then it just becomes more job, and this becomes very hard to sustain, mentally.  So do everything you can to keep it in the realm of "leisure".

I don't like this sentiment at all.  This feeds a little too much into the notion that your work life should dominate everything else : when you're not working, you're recovering from work.  I had productivity dips, but never scheduled 'recovery time' at the sole expense of my personal work.

Hmm.  I guess you could frame it like that, but I'm not sure that at its core, the sentiment is a bad one.  Creation of any sort takes nontrivial amounts of effort and energy, which is a finite resource for most people.  Creating things at work takes energy.  Creating things at home takes energy.  It is the same thing, so if you're trying to sustain it for long periods, you need to manage both.

There is a reason that 40 hours a week is the standard work week in the US.  It is not because all the corporations decided "hey, let's be nice to people and let them have weekends off."  It is because Henry Ford experimented, and determined that 40 hours a week was the peak point for working people sustainably.  Make people work longer than that and productivity actually decreases.

So I don't think it's unreasonable to take the view "I have a limited amount of creative energy in me each week, after which I need some time to recover."

That's my view on it at least, but YMMV.  Particularly since this is all based on observing how I[/i] work, and there is no guarantee that other people work the same way, I guess?

Yes, even during Crunch. I'll work late into the evenings if needs be, but there is not a job, project, studio or reason in existence that will get me to do unpaid overtime at the dayjob on the weekends. Fuck. That. Shit.

Fuck. That. Shit. indeed!


/seconded.