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[moi]

also: indie lines of code are probably less efficient

Efficiency can be a symptom of choice of language: Indies seem to use Java a lot more than professionals, who are biased towards C++.  If a typical C++ game was remade in Java, your computer would feel >5 years older than it really is.

Don't quote me if it's just to propagate drooling nerd propaganda like this.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i also don't think indies use java all that often -- i only know of one or two prominent indie games made in java. more indie games use c++ than java i feel. although it's still true that indies use c++ less than the industry

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

it's propaganda because java isn't *that* bad that it'd make a computer feel 5 years older than the same thing written in c++. if anything. 1.5 years older max. 5 years is a long time for computers

even game maker doesn't make your computer feel 5 years older, and it's slow as molasses

[Theophilus]

Is 10 hours of sleep, on average, bad? I've pretty much only been doing it since I was out of school, which I think is normal. In the middle of the school year I usually get 8, if I don't have a buttload of homework.

[P-Flute]

My projects?  Umm...  0-0.1%?  Basically only when I can find my way over a mountain of artistic self-loathing.  Which is why I just make random posts commenting on other people's awesome.

Of course, that rate is much better when working with someone else/other people.

@Theo:  Oversleeping can be bad for you (even worse than undersleeping, from what I've heard).  But as Jasmine pointed out, what constitutes those things does vary from person to person.

[Nix]

Is 10 hours of sleep, on average, bad? I've pretty much only been doing it since I was out of school, which I think is normal. In the middle of the school year I usually get 8, if I don't have a buttload of homework.

9-11 hours is average for children. 7-9 hours is average for adults.

And those are averages. Some people are higher; some are lower.

I sleep more than is healthy if I don't have to work or do something else in the morning. I seriously believe I may have some sort of sleeping disorder. I don't like to sleep so much.

Anyway, I don't know how much I work on my project. Maybe 10 hours a week on a slow week, and double that when I'm productive.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i found an interesting program called rescuetime which records how much time you spend on various things by recording the app names or website names that you have the window focus on. it also detects if you go afk (no keyboard/mouse activity) and stops timing your current window of focus if you do

in other words, if you spend 3 hours a day with the game maker window in focus (and if you're not afk) that'll show up on the report. i'm going to try it out this week and report where my computer-use time goes

keep in mind though that it makes no distinction between using the same app productively and non-productively. as an example, i use winamp both productively (for sound effect and music editing; i use it to listen to sounds while working on them) and non-productively (to listen to music). same thing with google: sometimes i use it to research things for my game, sometimes just to mess around and search for cat pictures or whatever. but such cases will be relatively rare, usually you know which apps and which websites count as productive and which count as non-productive (e.g. sometimes i might use youtube productively, but most of the time it's non-productive). it seems like a pretty good system

it also auto-detects whether an activity is productive or non-productive, possibly based on what other people classify it as, and its predictions seem pretty accurate. here's a log of my first 15 minutes of using it



i was doing some sound editing so that's why audacity and winamp are so high, and figuring out how to use this program so that's why the rescuetime site is so high, and posting this post about it so that's why the tigsource forums is so high

[Nix]

I would like to use that program. The problem is that I usually use Linux for development ('productive activities') and Windows for games. But it's not even that precise. I do plenty of procrastination on Linux and I occasionally do real work on Windows (mostly ironing out the bugs when I make a Windows build).

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

perhaps you could email them about a linux port to it; i do know that you can use the mac and windows versions of it in conjunction (since the data is stored online). or perhaps it works under windows emulators in linux?

[XRA]

I actually started trying to estimate this stuff using a scrum/agile style spreadsheet I found online for Google docs...
I went ahead and listed 4 hours for weeknights and 12 hours on weekends, so 44 hours a week to work on my project. Almost like a second job...  Of course, now that I've actually started listing tasks and estimating the amount of time required for them, and tracking the actual time spent, I don't use the full 4 hours usually because I'm too worn out/tired/lazy/etc from my normal job, and the task estimates usually bleed over what I estimated.

The nice thing about the spreadsheet is it shows when all the tasks will be finished if I put the full amount of time to use, so it helps with planning what I should focus on, but I haven't yet reached the scary point of no return / crunch mode where I realize I have a ton of things left to do... so it looks like smooth sailing at the moment.  

so lets see, 8am - 8pm (12 hours roughly) is all spent with morning routine, work, making dinner... then around 10pm to 1 or 2 am is where my creative time happens (roughly 4 hours)... then it is sleep for 6 or 7 hours and back into the grind again.

of course it isn't always like that. But yea, about 15% of day spent towards personal project, 50% towards the workday routine.. 28% towards sleep if I'm lucky.  

I guess the thing that sucks the most, is I wake up most days invigorated and full of energy to work on my personal project, but I have to goto work.. by the time I get home it can be hard to get back into that mindset again.  Something I'd like to try is maybe shifting my sleep schedule so that I wake up around 5am, and work on my project in the morning, then head off to work.

[Christian Knudsen]

My average day is:

9:00 - 10:30AM: Wake up and get ready for work.
10:30 - 1:00PM: Work.
1:00 - 4:30PM: Write my novel or work on my game. Depends on the day.
4:30 - 9:30PM: Work.
9:30 - 1:30AM: Write my novel or work on my game. Depends on the day.
1:30 - 9:00AM: Sleep. I get more work done if I've had decent sleep.

Since I make my own schedule for my day job, I sometimes take the 4:30 - 9:30 shift off and instead, you guessed it, work on my novel or game. Add in varying amounts of girlfriend time per week also.

I'm just going to quote this, since it's freakishly similar to my own schedule. Just move all the times one hour up, i.e. I get up at around 8-8:30 and got to bed at 12-12:30. I imagine my "girlfriend time" has been a bit higher the past couple of weeks, though, as we're getting married this Saturday.

[davidp]

yea, i've been working on my project for last few days nonstop, even during work time (real work work, the one that pays money) and i'm nearing the completion now.

but it's not a game, if i'd be a game i wouldn't do shit by now.

normally i loose enthusiasm after more or less completing engine.

[Mstrp]

About 25%, i work on my regular job up until 6 p.m (18.00) and then i work on my game for the rest of the day. This doesnt include time for food and that stuff though. At weekends, unless i'm doing something with my friends of gf, probably 30%.

[Mega]

...Something I'd like to try is maybe shifting my sleep schedule so that I wake up around 5am, and work on my project in the morning, then head off to work.

That would be the best thing. Early mornings before the birds wake.. there's no better time. also everyone else is asleep.

Then in the day your morning and project seems like a distant memory, and a pleasant one, and you're eager to continue where you left off. putting the rest of your daily activities on a backburner or autopilot.

That morning energy should be going one place. lol.

I've tried it before and there's some major "inertia" to over come. so the first day you'll have to force yourself to sleep as soon as you get home, and or REALLY force yourself to get up at 4am and not doze off in the afternoon. in the morning as soon as the alarm sounds just do some jumping jacks or something. its actually easier than trying to go to bed before your bed time. good luck.

Paul I made this program which generates a log file for projects and other things, from a start date for a given number of days. you can use it to see how many days have passed since a given date, (eg: your birth day or project start date)

[eiyukabe]

related to that: an interesting thing (and jon blow mentioned this in one of his talks) is that the average 'lines per day' of a professional programmer is only about 10 -- and the average professional programmer writes 4000 lines of code per year

Yeah, I'm going to need him to give a citation for that one. I listened to that talk, and while I agree from personal experience that it's much easier to write many lines of code in a personal project that _you_ have full control over without other programmers writing code you have to spend time understanding and producers wanting to hold meetings and passion making you work faster, I'm not buying the 4000 (I thought it was 3000, but same order of magnitude) lines of code a year figure. Some single files I've run across were 20K lines. Many many files I've seen are in the thousands of lines. A lot of it does get copied over from previous projects, sure, but it feels like the power players that end up writing the original engine code and libraries will bring the average way up, and that the game play patchers will still produce more than 10 lines of code a day on average. Of course, if he's just measuring the number of lines of code at the end of a project, then he's discounting any time you have to rip out and replace a method or refactor or whatever; the removed method isn't going toward your line count even if you wrote it too. So maybe from that point of view we only add an extra 4000 lines of code a year... it could be, I really don't know, but he kind of just said it without explaining how he came to that conclusion and I would be really interested if he gave a citation, especially since he is an influential speaker that people will trust at face value (I usually do due to his sincerity).

Or maybe it's so low because people in this industry (programmers included) spend much of their time unemployed  ... 

[SolarLune]

That amount does sound very, very low. I'm pretty sure I've written hundreds of lines in a single day, so 4000 sounds like it's very low for a whole year. However, like you say, eiyukabe, perhaps that's the total amount - most of those hundreds of lines are just getting basic functions to work - after that, it's a lot of "Hmm, I wonder what I should do next?"

As for the amount of time I spend developing, it's dangerously low on some days, 0% on others, and on select few, somewhat respectable.

[AndrewFM]

For me, it really varies a lot. I'd say I fluctuate between three different phases:

Productive Phase: I'm usually in this phase for no more than a month. It happens most often when I have very little in my workload outside of game development, or immediately after a period where I had a heavy workload (such as immediately after midterms or finals). During this phase, I usually can work on my games for 4+ hours on weekdays, and 8+ hours on weekends.

Exploration Phase: This happens at various times, also usually when my workload isn't very high, and often happens immediately before a productive phase. During this phase, I don't work on my projects much, and when I do, I only put in around 2 hours. During this phase, I spend a lot of my time reading books and tutorials, experimenting, and making prototypes.

Fatigue Phase: This happens when my workload is high, or after I've tired myself by being in a productive phase for too long. During this time, I rarely work on my projects, and when I do, I often cannot keep my focus, and spend no more than an hour on them per day. This also tends to happen more frequently the further I get into a project. Unfortunately, these phases usually last the longest, sometimes spanning for several months.

[Mega]

...Fatigue Phase: ... Unfortunately, these phases usually last the longest, sometimes spanning for several months...

This is interesting

[XRA]

thanks Mega, I'm going to give the early mornings a shot starting this Monday

[antymattar]

Its currently 11 am and I am making my game for 2 hours now. I usually slack off quite a bit too so...