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[Impossible]

I've done this for the last three years and continue to do it even as a fulltime indie.  I created the project that enabled me to go fulltime indie while working at AAA studios. For me game development at home is largely a place to experiment, learn and prototype some of the ideas constantly piling up in my head. Its mostly a creative outlet, even if my tool happens to be code most of the time.

Game development at work has been a more technical, customer oriented thing.  Job vs hobby.  Those lines have blurred some now that I'm working on Shadow Physics, but even on Shadow Physics my role is 90% technical at this point.

The pretty strong separation between "Software Engineer" at work and "Creative Coder\Game designer" at home made it a lot easier.  Also having zero pressure to produce anything is important, I think.  When I worked outside of the game industry I was trying to make games that people would pay for as a part time indie.  After I got a job in the industry I was mostly making games when I wanted to, because I wanted to.

From what I've seen its very common for people in the industry to have side projects.  Sometimes it is because they are part time indies or planning on going fulltime indie, but a lot of the time its just for fun.  To some extent you need to do it to stay competitive, because your game, your team or your role might not let you learn about certain things that will be useful.

I agree with everyone saying you need some time off.  I'd work on games when I felt like it and was feeling productive or creative and never force myself to work or have a schedule.  I spent a lot more time going out, having fun, playing games, socializing, etc. than I did working on games at home .

[lowpoly]

pretty much echoing what everyone else said, the key is to try and come home and not do exactly what you were doing for the last 10-12 hours. After a full day of making art, coding or designing offers a nice break for me. Of course, at some point I fall into the rut of saying, 'ugh I don't want to make art but I'm tired of staring at gray and red boxes, think I'll start something new' and perpetuate the cycle of never finishing anything.

Furthermore, crunch absolutely kills my desire to do anything. I've been completely unproductive for the last month or 2. At some point you have to realize this and either slim down what you expect to accomplish in any given night, or just put everything on hold so you don't start second guessing a potentially good idea just because you're too tired to focus on it right now.

Lastly, when you get into your 30's (or later), realize the kind of eating and sleeping schedules you kept 10 years ago will start to have a serious negative impact on your health.

[Atnas]

I have a problem with this because when I freelance, it's not like I work in an office, so there's not really a separation of work and hobby. I wind up feeling guilty about working on the art for my own projects because I could be doing the same thing for the monies instead. and the monies let me live... so that I may make more monies...

That said, I haven't been ignoring the code, and actually began seriously composing music a couple days ago. So I suppose it's beneficial in some way...

I guess play acting and dressing up fancy to do my work and then getting into my underwear for my own projects is the way to go.

> w >

[nihilocrat]

Surprised I didn't see this thread to know, and happy there are plenty of other "doppelganger" indies or whatever you want to call them.

I don't really do it any differently than anyone else here. It's a bit odd if you are working on a compo game to go to work, develop videogames, and then come home to develop more video games. My day job does a particularly good job of avoiding crunch so I don't find that to be a problem. My job officially takes precedence over my hobby, but there are many times during the day when I'd rather be working on my own game.

Developing on your own and developing on a team of 100+ are very different experiences, namely I have to be a good generalist on my own but a good specialist in a team, so they don't really feel like the same thing. Often it's a lot easier to quickly accomplish things in hobby development because the codebase is written by one person over a time period of a year or less, whereas at work I get to deal with code that might be 8 years old, has been through 5 maintainers, 3 of which no longer work there and the other 2 which had only fixed a few bugs. This huge difference is how I can keep things with my hobby games fresh and interesting pretty easily.

Sometimes I just want to waste a few days to a week playing games instead of making them, but I think that would happen anyways. Going to a place where 100+ are paid for making videogames really does reinforce the idea that I'm making something of value in my hobby. I remember before entering the industry that hobby games slowly started to feel more and more like something that I would never get anywhere with, that no one really cared about.

[increpare]

I was more or less in the same boat as nihilocrat.

[randomshade]

Very fortunately, I don't have to worry about that anymore and can concentrate on being a full time indie. However, I spent 3 years trying to achieve a good work/indie balance and it was pretty difficult.

Out of all the things I tried, only 2 really helped keep my life sane and indie work productive.

(1) I changed my sleep pattern. At my mainstream job, we had to be in office before 10 a.m. so instead of working on games at night when I got home, I started going to bed earlier and getting up at 6 in the morning. Fortunately my commute was short and I don't take long to get ready, so I usually had 3 solid hours every morning to dedicate to my indie ventures. It was also more productive time, as I was fresh and not mentally drained. The first two weeks, I was probably less productive and hated life, but after my body adjusted to going to bed at 9 or 10 pm instead of 1 or 2 am, I was way more productive.

(2) The second thing which was helpful, was to plan my vacations around milestones for my indie work. This helped me to stay on schedule so my vacation time would line up with my milestone week, but also gave me a week here and there to really concentrate on my indie game; at critical times in the development no less. This is probably not practical for people with families, but at the time I was still a bachelor and it worked really nice.

Just to throw it out: I never forced myself to work weekends. If I really wanted to work weekends, I would, but not having the pressure of getting 20 hours of indie dev in 2 days at the end of each week allowed me to generally be more happy about my work.

[Cthulhu32]

Pretty much what I've learned trying to do full indie games and my full-time 8-5 job (plus wife and responsibilities beyond fun stuff) is you sacrifice your down time for fun project time. Sometimes its really relaxing for me to bang out a huge chunk of code, but I find myself not finishing projects because of this need for down-time. Usually I'll come up with a prototype in my spare time, show it off, get some feedback of whether people think its interesting, then scrap it if nobody likes it, or poke at it sporadically if I get time and motivation.

The big thing with projects for me is the initial phase and a little over half-way through are the most fun parts. The other bits sometimes feel too much like "work" so it loses its appeal for most projects. I think thats partly what happened with Spuck (my Gamma4 game I worked on Phubans with), it really started feeling like work. Paul was juggling school, but he had a lot more hours to dedicate to the project so I felt like I was constantly letting him down when I spent some down-time playing games or watching a movie with my wife.

And also when I make games in my spare-time, I'm not doing it for money so I feel less pressure to release or finish anything to the masses. When you're rent money is on the line, its much more important to bang out something good, vs. when you are playing around with the idea of putting Ryu into the Mega-Man universe, you don't have to finish crap. With that said, I'd love more vacation time at my current job to spend a good solid week on my own crap

[nikki]

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.

i though the 40 hrs week was introduced so the factory workers had the time to grow into consumers...

[Montoli]

i though the 40 hrs week was introduced so the factory workers had the time to grow into consumers...

Well, I'm citing this, which cites this.  I'm not sure where they get it from though.

The IGDA article has some pretty graphs though.

[hareball]

I work a normal job every day, and it's really hard to do game programming outside normal work hours.. my mental energy is usually sucked pretty dry. I find coffee helps, as does someone that can support you while you lock yourself away in your cave.