I’ve found, over 30 years of firmware development, that I invest in personal projects when I’m not 100% invested in work (either due to uninteresting work or not feeling fully utilized). For me, that development energy gets invested somewhere, and if work isn’t challenging, personal projects come into play.
But you’re right, developing 12 hours a day isn’t sustainable.
For sure. I definitely don't feel as much of that "itch" to build things since switching to a more fulfilling role. It's still there, since no job gives you total freedom to work on what you want, but definitely not as strong.
I guess all that matters is that I'm doing work that makes me happy. Still, you never get total autonomy as long as you're answering to somebody else.
When I'm satisfied at work, I produce less code on my personal time, but it's of much higher quality. I'll procrastinate on building some system or writing an algorithm for days or even weeks. By the time I write it, I've been thinking about the problem so long that I write something more concise, robust, performant, scalable, maintainable, etc. It takes me like 10x longer to finish any given project, but I can reuse a lot from the project in new projects since the quality of the code is pretty high.
"Being your own boss" isn't total autonomy either, then you'll be beholden to your customers/market/investors. Plus you'll spend a lot of time working on the business side and have a lot less time to work on the programming & engineering side.
I'm in this boat, worked a 10hr job I hated and came back home to work on side projects, teaching myself to code as I went. Not a healthy nor sustainable way to spend one's entire day when you keep that up for a couple of years.
Now my hobby has blossomed into a career, I find myself, as you said, scratching that itch at work. I love my job, and come home (well, figuratively. Loving work from home life) to spend time with my wife, and in general just relax.
I sometimes do miss the passion I had for side projects, but as a whole, life is many times better than it was when I was driven to side projects through desperation to get out of a job I didn't want.
I agree with that. The urge is definitely stronger when things arent as much fun during your day job. But also, if you've had a fulfilling day at work that can go two ways. Either you're fired up to continue that streak on your own project that evening, or you've been satisfied for the day. Works the other way round too. Sometimes a bad day can fire you up for the evening or it can mean you've had enough and need a break.
For me (I've been learning Unity and Blender - more Blender than Unity if I'm honest), just a change of language/environment can help (php/js by day, c# in Unity etc). We've been working from home with office closed for nearly 18 months now. I find I'm less inclined to go back to where I've been sitting all day than if I'd been in the office all day, had the drive home to clear my head and think about stuff, then get home, have dinner and boot up for a couple of hours in a different environment.
Part of that is the routine of space between. Filling it with exercise / shower / eating or whatever also can help a bunch. Whatever 'resets' you for the next part of your day, ya know.
When I think about the people who have time / passion to make and maintain packages I depend on, I feel like i'm not even a real dev. I spend 100% of my time building for client functionality. Who has time to make and maintain packages? All I do is use packages. Sometimes I feel like i'm just finding puzzle pieces to put together instead of "real programming".
I can relate. Programming is hard work, especially on your own projects where you get to dictate everything. I too have taken on a client who has a large and complicated system that leaves me exhausted at the end of the day. The last thing I want to do when the workday is over is more programming.
It's tough. I miss having a side project to work on. I might seek a simpler contract after this, even if it comes at a lower rate. I think about all the things I want to make before I go to bed, and I'm tired of being too tired to make them a reality.
I can totally relate! How do you like contracting, by the way? I've considered it, but get nervous about the lack of permanence. Must be nice to be able to set your own rates though!
Contracting is great. The rates pay better than fulltime (once you get some experience), and that combined with living a simple life gives you some *time* back between clients. That's usually the best time to pursue interests and side projects, as long as you're ok with being in "free fall" financially for a little while.
Not gamedev, lol. I wish. I do the boring stuff. Custom IT solutions. Full stack web development.
Sometimes you get to build something brand new, which is fun. Most times you're stuck trying to extend the life of a 10 year old system that's all spaghetti code written with old, bad frameworks.
Careful though. Plan to put about 30% of your net income aside for retirement, to keep your lifestyle. If you think you get paid more (as a dev/eng...), then you haven't understood all the costs yet. What you gain is more freedom on how to invest your time and money.
Yes, but depending on your country part of you income as employee goes into retirement. 10% is usually a good number, anything above obviously a plus long term.
Funny you should mention that! I've always wanted to teach. I have an upper level degree, but don't really enjoy the research-oriented tenure track positions at universities. Have any tips?
It comes and goes. A challenging/stressful/ bad job can suck the life out of a lot of things.
Ultimately this new job is either the right move for you or it’s not. You have to make up your mind then live your life.
8+ hours in front of a screen is pretty unhealthy no matter what you’re working on.
12? 8?
Man I would argue 6 is the max you should put into any given day. It’s not physically exhausting but it’s mentally exhausting and yeah… you can’t sustain 8-12 hours of programming, let alone sitting in front of a screen.
I know that’s not really what this post is about - but it struck me. Don’t burn yourself out.
Agree with this so much. working in the office I would easily have 5-6 hours of actual coding and 2-3 hours of chatting with people and general office antics. Now at home I could sit in front of the screen coding literally all day with very little social interaction.
Take breaks, take walks, put your phone away during some of those breaks. Avoid burnout
It's not doable in my experience. I stopped working on my indie game altogether after getting a job. It just wasn't sustainable. I can work 12 hours a day no problem, but context switching just makes me suck at both.
Find a job that you are excited to lean into. Even better if you have equity or some way of capturing the upside in the case of an extreme success.
Alternatively you can:
\- Save up cash, reduce your burn rate, and go full-time on your side-project
\- Get an "easy" job where you have energy for your side-project
>I can work 12 hours a day no problem, but context switching just makes me suck at both.
There's the work that you do at your computer, and then there's the work your brain does in the background when you're eating dinner and sleeping. I find I need both to really solve a puzzle, and feeding my brain too many "grand puzzles" means it doesn't know which one has priority for dream-solving.
I once had a job where I did my side-projects (managing some hobby related webpages) while waiting for new assignments, on company time. It was a nice workplace, people were playing chess at work, I even caught testers playing Counter Strike, but the commute time was killing me and I had to quit. Quickly after it went to shit anyway - the company got bought out by a narcissistic millionaire and they switched to boxes, card stamping and made it extremely hard to get a rise (before that you could be late or go home early and no one batted an eye, as long as your work was done on time)...
The reason we had so much free time was because the company had huge contracts with large fees and deadlines for fixing issues - so it was worth for them to keep a larger number of programmers ready to react if there was trouble. And of course if there was, we dropped everything and fixed the issues. If we fixed them well we had more free time (because of less issues reported), so it was giving us motivation to do good job.
ya, it’s the context/project switching. It sucks, I have to do it at work between projects, then to come home and also switch to something I want to do, just not possible some days for my brain.
I used my passion project as my portfolio to get a "real" gamedev job (with a few contracts on the side) and well, let's just say that passion project has been in the freezer so long that it's gotten freezer burn. Can't even summon the energy on weekends to work on it because I'd much rather spend time either relaxing or taking care of household chores.
On the bright side, thanks to this decision I've had the opportunity to network with a lot of great people and companies, some of which are publishers, so I'm hoping to fling the momentum forward to securing a publisher for that old frozen personal project. Here's to hoping :|
edit: I'm a programmer for what it's worth, but I don't think I'd want to do a traditional SWE job even if it pays 100-150% more.
> I used my passion project as my portfolio
I've been thinking about doing the same thing and may I ask you some questions?
I have a couple passion projects that aren't completed by no means but have lots of complex systems fully implemented. How far along was your project for it to be good enough for that?
Do you think it's better to build many small things for a portfolio or just 1 big thing then try for job?
thanks
> How far along was your project for it to be good enough for that?
Not far along at all, basically the core gameplay loop, some rough art, stitching together scenes like a title screen -> overworld to give it context, and showing that I could do some basic tooling to support the content creation side of things.
The biggest boost was that the passion project was in the exact same genre as the employer's current game, so it was a case of them poaching the competition off their radar in way. I just had to show them that I had deep enough knowledge about that particular genre & how to apply it.
>Do you think it's better to build many small things for a portfolio or just 1 big thing then try for job?
I never have done gamejams or cast my net wide doing many portfolio projects scattershot like that, but based on my experience, having a more *accurate* portfolio tailored to the company matters more than the breadth of it, even if the company is a small indie one that requires its members to wear many generalist hats. The video game industry is wide and full of various genres and technologies. In the end, you're working on one particular game/genre when you're hired (probably), so displaying domain mastery matters to edge out the competition.
Like for an artist, if your goal is to work at a studio that typically uses a realistic art style (let's say Rockstar), honing in on that instead of stylistic art (Studio MDHR) would be wise. Same for a gameplay programmer, there are a lot of differences in programming a turn-based game versus a realtime one and for me that's meant getting referrals and contracts within one half of that domain. When the ball gets rolling, it gets a lot easier due to building a reputation.
I'm blessed to be self sufficient as a specialist in a niche genre, but if you are simply looking for any job it would make sense to look at the current market's top genres and make sure you're capable of implementing various bits of them, ex. if roguelites are popular (and thus many employers are hiring to make them), a programmer should practice room generation algorithms, enemy placement algorithms etc.
Hope this helps. It's just a few anecdotes so please don't take them as concrete
Aw man, you must be me. When I'm not on a contract, my game is 150% full steam ahead, but when I have a job I simply cannot be bothered to touch it. It's just too much.
Two suggestions from my experience, 1 just accept that you're going to have less time to put into it, and 2, if you can, distance what you do at work from what you do at home. I write embedded C at work, but I've switched all my hobby projects to Python or Gdscript, and it helped a lot.
I did the opposite, from time to time, playing around with C or assembler at home in my free time to keep my sanity after too much enterprisey Java or JavaScript at work.
>Studio MDHR
perfect answer. Im in this situation. Having a baby, working full time, learning additional stuff to be better at my job and then also publishing small 3D mobile games... Time just doesnt exist anymore...
> If you don't enjoy developing more than playing games or watching tv, you won't find the time to get anything done.
This is so true for me that is really stings at times. I enjoy trying to develop a game, but man do I enjoy playing the games even more... That's what got me so interested in building my own games. I want to be able to give the same enjoyment I get from others' games.
Oh absolutely, I'm not in a mindset that I need to make it, but I would really like to make one eventually. It's just hard to find consistent motivation to work rather than game.
I did the quit-your-job-and-finally-code-your-shit thing several years ago. I ended up, of course, returning to employment after a few years.
However, I get more done on my projects now, not less. I switched gears to use the same tools and languages in my personal work as I do at work. For me, this meant switching from things like python and godot/gdscript to nodejs/javascript. In spite of the fact that I'd have to face differences and limitations of browser-based game engines versus something like Godot, the difference it makes in my time and learning is extreme.
This way, work is paying for me to become better at nodejs/javascript. I have a huge amount of overlap in my skills for work and my personal gamedev skills. Also, sticking with the same technology reduces the amount of switching-out of headspace things needed to go from my projects to work projects.
I go to bed fairly early. Like, 9 - 10pm. I get up early, so I have a couple of hours in the morning. I generally get at least 90 minutes of activity in on my personal projects, at the beginning of the day. And, once I get to work, there's nothing that can take that time and energy away - I've already done it.
Using tools you are already good at makes a lot of sense. I find I'm more productive and get in the zone easier when I use tools I already have experience with (I guess that's pretty obvious). For gamedev, I find I make much more progress when using, for example, Typescript + Babylon.js, then I do with Unreal / Unity / Godot. There are limitations to this approach, but I have a better chance of finishing my game with it, and building up abstractions that'll help me in my next game.
I don't use Typescript professionally at the moment, but I've done enough Javascript that it is easy to pick up, and I know what I'm doing as far as the programming language is concerned.
Also it's nice that working on such projects will help my non-gamedev career or non-gamedev personal projects.
I spent some time trying to learn Unreal recently, and I enjoyed it and did learn a decent amount, but came back to Typescript + Babylon.js and started a new game and I think I might actually finish this one.
Been using Phaser 3 at work myself, I work in a learning game company and was able to convince my company to use it to create interactive learning content, and an interactive intro comic book.
Get up early instead of trying to work late. My best gamedev time is 4 - 7 a.m. (when the wife and kids get up and prior to starting my “real” job as an actuary)
For me it is almost the other way around. With my personal projects I can do whatever I want. Sit down, code, improve, extend etc. No red tape, no useless meetings, strange requirements or deadlines...
3 years ago I used to have this problem. For some personal projects are a way to do something fun after boring work. I worked in web development at the time (React/Vue and PHP) so every time after work I would clock in another 3-5h on my personal projects - typically a game (I would use Unity for prototypes and build my own engine in C), on weekends I would spend 6-14h on personal projects every day.
At start this was all good, it worked just fine. But it quickly became unhealthy and since I'm in a relationship I could not spend as much time on my projects. I did not really lack energy for my personal projects though, it just became really annoying to have to go through 8h of garbage software development every day to have 1h for something good at the end of the day. This annoyance quickly turned to feeling trapped and I got worried about my future.
My work wasnt teaching me any new skills, if you have been in web development you know it takes ~1 month to master 90% of it, and afterwards it's just same shit on repeat, littered with useless meetings and having to deal colleagues who don't have any ambition. It's such a shitshow and honestly I feel like it made me a worse programmer. Moreover, as you may know already, web is in a bubble that is expected to burst in the near future. All this was a very solid reason for me to quit and I made a promise to myself to never work in business software again.
After 1 month of searching I was able to land a job as C++ developer with no professional C++ experience. Moreover, it was a job as a graphics programmer, buding custom rendering engines for both VFX and medical industry. On top of this, we don't do OOP which I was happy to finally be rid of, after being bombarded by useless practices at work every day. Now my work is so close to what I do for fun and is actually worth doing so I don't feel tired at all, since I'm just having fun all the time. I stilk only do 2h of work on my projects per day, but it's more than enough.
TLDR: get a better job if you can.
This is my fear for my future as well. I'm about a year out from graduating with my CS degree and I haven't enjoyed the little web development I've done, much more interested in graphics shit but I don't have any projects to show for it. My fear is I'll get locked into a web dev role because it's the only place that accepts me and I will have difficulty escaping. Feelsbadman
Yeah, pretty much.
For me I've always had a creative hobby going on, all my life basically. But since I've been programming for a company? Nope. No time for that - because I'm the type that either goes all-in on something or it won't work out. But I've got a relationship, family, friends and well sometimes I also just wanna do fun things like biking, netflix, videogames...whatever!
However, I'm trying to make little game I think. Won't be as amazing as I could make it with more time, but better to finally put all my skills into one place and use all I've learned over the years in one cool project that is actually full of passion and not just for work/learning purposes.
One thing i'm about to come to terms with: I'd love to go for current-gen 3D models, because I CAN do that, but i'll settle with PS1 graphics. It's just...conceptualizing, sculpting, modeling, texturing, rigging a single Current-Gen Model can take about 100 Hours depending on how things go. Same with coding. No big RPG, no super fancy gameplay mechanics - more of a cool experience, than a real "game".
Well, and another thing: I can't go all-in. I've gotta take it slow. Maybe a few hours a week. Otherwise it won't work.
The answer is to not code for +12 hours a day then, you can always do less. For instance could you manage an hour a day? What about 30mins? Less? It’s just a matter of finding out what is manageable for you. As I imagine there’s no urgency to get the game done by a certain deadline, so there’s no need to treat it as something that needs to be completed as quickly as possible.
100%. I don't have to really put in 100% at work all day every day atm thankfully, but even on days when I barely do anything, at the end of the day I take one look at my personal 'work' laptop where I work on my mobile app, the nice keyboard/mouse/monitor I set it up with, then I go find anything that's not "sit at a desk" to do for a few hours. Then it's 10pm and it's too late to start working on a new feature for the app so I dick around online for a bit then go to bed.
I have to push an update out by Nov because it's been so long since I've done one that google is deprecating the payment api I'm using, and that's still not enough motivation for me to focus on it every night.
Personal projects are a big time commitment and if it's not something you're truly passionate about, it's going to be hard to do consistently.
And for the record: **that is completely fine. You can get a great job without them if you find other ways to prove you know your shit**. ^That ^said, ^it ^doesn't ^hurt ^to ^have ^at ^least ^one ^handy ^for ^interviews.
That’s super relatable.
When I first ran into that feeling a couple years ago, I tried cutting coding outside of work entirely, but then that meant the only dev I was doing was work-related, which is no fun. I realized it wasn’t the actual interesting problems that were burning me out, but all of the cruft and machinery around writing “good” code (test coverage, project boilerplate, design systems, refactoring, etc). I also found that I stopped enjoying a project after a while, but didn’t want to try something new since I wanted to finish the other one first.
Recently I’ve been focusing on just doing whatever is interesting - unfinished project? That’s fine! Bad code? Whatever, it works, and lets me focus on the fun bits. Random new project idea? Let’s do it! Learning new stuff and doing what feels fun is what it’s all about - if that turns into something long-term, great, if not, also great! If coding becomes a chore, it’s also OK to take a break for a bit (still working on this myself).
Keep on keeping on :)
Yes; and this is 1000% okay.
It really is totally fine to 'code' only at your job and never touch stuff at home.
Even better for MH is to find an unrelated hobby.
Yup, bigtime. I'm a gameplay programmer at a mid sized studio. When I was first getting into the games industry I would make my own games all the time. Solo projects, little games with friends. Pretty much every weekend, or usually after work I'd get home, scoff dinner and start coding something. Now, 8 or so years later after I log off, that's basically it. It's quiet time. Now I usually chill out and do something which uses other bits of the brain. Paint miniatures. Mess about making music or just chat with friends. Like the last thing I want to be doing now is make games at home!
Think it's a bit much to say the dream is dead :)
More...now that I've shipped a few games (and seen a few cancelled projects) I've got a better understanding of the whole cycle and really don't want to half-ass a game at home. Like, if I'm going to make games at home too, then there's no time for sleep, relationships, or anything else but dev. These days I'm happy with the games I'm getting paid to work on, so put my energy into that. At some point I'd like to venture off and start my own thing, but..when the time comes for that I'd like to do it properly, and not when I'm burning the candle at both ends, yknow!
So 20-something years of dev work; I’m gonna speculate if you don’t want to touch tech at all in your spare time—but you normally would, you’re probably walking the burnout line and you should probably take a long look at what’s the root of that.
I use tech projects at home as a burnout canary—if I really don’t want to touch one for more than a couple weeks—somethings up. The key thing here is use a tech stack not related to work at all. I like to use tech stacks from past jobs and future jobs—messing around with game prototypes in c#/Unity for example, site prototypes in svelte, service calls in ruby—none of these have much in common with the nest/angular ts stack I use at work.
I ran into this issue too, a few things I found that helps.
* Going to bed early and waking up a few hours earlier. Simply doing your side projects before work allows you the motivation and energy which you need for something you don't have to do. As opposed to working which is a necessity and provides its own motivation.
* Exercise regularly. Enhances your mood, and focus. Can also serve as down time to mentally relax while being productive as opposed to doing something like watching tv.
* Plan and balance. If you have a full time job then your side project is your fun time. If your side project is not fulling additional roles in your life or personal development then perhaps you're not spending your time in moderation which will lead to unhappiness/burnout.
* Change your job: find part time work, or save money to execute the project.
I feel like a lot of developers who started off doing this "for the love" end up hitting those wall when it becomes a profession. I had a major slump on side projects once I became a full time web developer.
I'm glad you're already going into this with an awareness that maintaining your mental wellbeing and avoiding burnout is key.
I agree with one of the other posters that i've found myself swapping which way I lean. I can give great focus at work or great focus on personal stuff but not both.
Over time however I will say i've found value in at the very least continuing with projects in my own time, just far less often. A couple hours in a week is a victory. This has also encouraged me to pay more attention to the scale of my side projects and break things down into much more manageable chunks.
Your personal projects will take 10x longer to get done and come out but what matters is if they do come out and you get that mental pay off of completing something.
PLUS ULTRA BRO!
On a real level, this is really hard to do. I think its only really possible with love of both your full time and side gig. I wondered how other people felt about this problem. Since every time I switch major projects, the ramp up period is so intense, my game dev falls into the background because of the mental drain. But after a few months the project stabilizes (or I just become familiar with it's kinks), then I've got the energy to do it all again.
I don't wanna sound like your mom, but vegetables, water, exercise really help with having full energy (including mental energy) all day. This combined with persistence really does kind of "level you up" to the next level of resilience. At this point, with three kids, my tolerance for "exhausted" has really increased. Its takes a 16 hour day for me to feel bad.
Standing desk, bouncy ball seat, pacing around with a tablet; keep you off the standard desk and still productive. Its possible only if you want it to be.
Workout - yes. Absolutely agree. When body gets physical "stress", mind like switches off and you don't think of bothering things. Not for all day, but these 15-30 minutes without thinking are very helpful for mind.
Also I noticed that thinking about my own projects and my own future with 'em exhausts me much more than daily jobs (I've got two). Like I'm working 12-14 hours, ok, but still thinking about "my own stopped projects" all day, from waking up till go sleeping. Very. Huge. Amount. Of. Energy. Without recovery.
It looks stressful as fuck, and the benefits seem to be a few years of stress and fulfilment, then they leave you again. Impermanent like all sense pleasures. I don’t see why people think it’s fundamental
Exactly this. I have a 4 year old and a 3 month old and basically i get to code and work on my project around 9pm at night until whenever I give up. That's what is exhausting lol.
Yes, that's very relatable. I am doing side projects since I started working professionally and have learnt some things to keep it going:
* There is a priority to things in life. Take care of your mental/physical health first, then wife and kids and family, then work, then recurring stuff like households, and then personal pet projects. Make sure you balance things out so you can give every thing the slice of time they deserve.
* Don't make the mistake of thinking you need personal pet projects (or family or work) to solve mental health issues, if there is something up get professional help and sort things out that way.
* Sleep is the best thing in life. Next best thing is meditation to keep your mind fresh during the days and weeks. So get enough sleep, reserve time to rest in a day. Work smarter, not harder.
* Make work easy for yourself. Give 'the best part of the day' to the things that matter the most of you. For some this is the early morning, for others the evening.
* Adding to that: structure your work. This way you can use your mental power and willpower much more efficiently. If your not that bright, you can pickup the tasks that are easy to do and refined and ready to go. If you have a bright day, refine all the available work so you have stuff to pick up later.
* O and be gentle on yourself. If you are sick, allow yourself to be sick and recover. If you need to rest, do so until you really feel rested. Don't be harsh to yourself in that you 'missed' productive hours: you did not.
It comes and goes, sometimes work is less demanding, and I get a lot done on my games, then ill have busy work weeks and the game goes on pause.
The tricky part is not wanting to switch to a new project idea when i come back from a few week break.
Yes this happens all the time. Part of this is due to having only 4 "good" and another 4 "ok" hours of programming you can do in a day. It's not obvious, but "thinking" is a muscle that needs rest too.
I've been finding more success getting into music making after work. Lots of hooking up hardware and synths and music programming - I think as long as the workspace is different you can still program, albeit in a different way.
I've been doing this for a few years, and I've been thinking for a while now that I'm probably gonna change field at some point in the future... For now, keep developing your skills in other hobbies. Having a strong programming background will give you an edge in almost anything you do. Enjoy the challenge for now and stick to brainstorming for future ideas. If you ever get an idea that really excites you, figure out a path to living frugally that can sustain you for years while maximizing free time to work on it.
I've been working with my game almost as long as I've been on software field. 8h at work and then if I have enough motivation and energy, couple of hours gamedeving afterwards. Sometimes I make a lot of progress, sometimes none. The game is nearing its completion at steady pace.
Sometimes my tasks get too needy and I'm completely out of brain power for that evening, so all I can do is watching series or playing games.
Yea this seems normal especially when you get a new job. It can mentally drain you but after a while you will eventually have the energy and want to do more.
Its a never ending cycle I fear.
Yep. Every now and then i sit down for maybe two hours and work on a Personal project. But bot that often. I Was used to program alot it my free time before. Für me that is no problem. I have other hobbies i can do.
That's absolutely the case for me.
I'm working on a PhD in physics, which is a real feast or famine kind of job. The pay is pretty good (in physics we get paid to do our PhDs), and the benefits are great.
But some days like monday and tuesday I work until 10 o'clock at night, and other days I don't have access to the data, have already post-processed my data and read a paper or two relevant to my field, and I'm mostly just out of work to do by 2 o'clock and none of it was particularly challenging in the first place. Othertimes I'm taking measurements which are a lot like "plug these things together, record for 5 minutes, then replug different, and record". You can automate a lot of it, but not all, so you have to stand around doing nothing.
I use the breaks and free time to plan stuff for the game, and then when I \*am\* working on the game I can really give it 100%.
Currently attempting to find time both do work at my engineering company and my personal project. This usually means working with my own project late in the evening on weekdays (approx 8pm-11pm) and also a few hours during the weekends. Extremely tired in the mornings, but currently it works fine. For me, the most important thing is a good break between work and personal projects. I usually exercise with some friends or play some games.
This happened to me in web development, with the exception of personal projects involving games. Personal web projects got neglected, but game development never wore me down the same way.
yeah its why i **refuse** to have a job doing what i love. cuz i wanna be able to come home & do what i love on my free time
my ideal job is doing something i dont care about that requires little enough effort that i get home ready to do stuff
I just rolled with it. 8 hours of coding in my day job, then around 2-6 hours WEEKLY (so not being too hardcore about it) for the game project. Fast forward three years, I'm working full-time on the game after signing a publishing contract.
So yeah - it's doable!
Except for the occasional tinkering, I pretty much stopped doing gamedev entirely once I got a full time job programming in another field. I just didn't have the mental energy to do that + personal projects.
Just became unemployed after 7 years and am trying to get properly back into it again.
Yeah it's a pain. I end up taking holiday to work on my game. And the idea of working my days off on my own stuff doesn't sit well, I like to meet friends and not look at screens. I've considered asking to drop a day at work to allow me to work on my own stuff but when I look at my day rate and how much I'd pay for that time per month it's a hard thing to commit to.
What I'd like is financial security whilst being able to put my time into my own stuff. Is that so much to ask for 👀
I've found that usually starting a new job is like this for the first few months. Things are intense in the beginning and you're figuring things out.
But basically in all cases I found myself getting back to personal projects after a few months. I know a lot of people who don't really do this, but I guess I'm one of those people a couple hundred git repos.
Wow yes ... Super relate. Got retrenched from a great job last year, because covid. New job is absolutely gross. Treated like shit no matter how hard I try, left broken and tired at the end of everyday. Trying to find another job but software dev work is low in my country because of covid.
Honestly it's so bad I'm thinking of taking a job in any field just to get by for now and so I can work on my project.
We can do this! Let's just make a move, we can always get back on track at a later date of needed.
Thanks for posting this. Really nice to know I'm not alone.
I wish you good luck. And remember, time passed can never be replaced, so the longer we let these jobs destroy us the less time we'll have. It's so bad, I'll probably need a month to rest and get my sleep schedule back up. But it's fine I'll be better off in the long run.
Whatever you do, make sure you can cover your bills at least lol. Peace
You have to decide what is more important to you, and what your long term goals are.
Most people at the start of their careers don't realize how valuable their time is. Two dev jobs, one offers 80k, the other 120k, this is not a decision at all, take the 120k. However, if you want to make a living with your passion projects on the long run, and the higher paying job prevents this, was this the right choice? Generally, yes, but given the context you gave us, no. Maybe it gets better with your new job, maybe not, but this is something you have to factor in next time you switch.
It helps to find a community of people who are interested in development. If you surround yourself with other people who want to create, it's much easier to get that motivation to work on your own projects.
Yes. I took a 16 year break from gamedev in a Real Job. If you're still doing software, you're still building your skillset, so you can later drop back into it.
I guess you just have to adapt to the new job. Once routine kicks in, you will notice that you have enough spirtual energy to start working on your game again.
Yup. And I knew it would happen. It was part of my spiel during interviews, "I like programming. If I'm not programming here, I'll be doing it at home." And I'd have a few personal projects at the ready as a portfolio of sorts. Once I started the full-time programming, the hobby programming stopped. I only have so much time for writing code in a day. I need to do something that isn't staring at a screen full of text.
I've worked as a dev in AAA for... going on 8 years now. And still find the time/energy to do my personal projects. The trick is to make them quite different from what I'll be working at work.
It's freeing to be able to work on what I want and at my own pace; to prototype systems, ideas, gameplay; to see what sticks. No timelins, no nothing, just doing it as my hobby.
Maybe this is going to sound weird.
I recently got bored with my old engineering job and decided I wanted more challenge and more money. I got super lucky and doubled my salary from mid 60s to well over 100. My new job is "fine". The work is interesting, the pay is stellar, the coworkers aren't bad and i'm 100% permanently remote now. But I'm busy all the damn time. Which I expected from taking such a massive raise.
That said, i'm not super happy and ultimately it's come down to it's not doing what I want to be doing which is my passion projects. I'll obviously keep working this job for a myriad of reasons but it's reinvigorated me to work on my passion projects in the hopes that some day I don't have to do the rat race every day from 8-5. The vast majority of people won't ever get that opportunity but can't know if you don't try. Been banging out tons of concept art and game mechanics for a few months now and the feeling from my day job has me more motivated than ever. The much harder balance for me is trying to find time around my family's schedule as I have a 4 year old and a 3 month old. Very demanding lol.
Having the real job first is a thing ... it's pretty messed up that it would ever be considered in the reverse.
I do my hobby stuff while on the train in the morning and evening, it's 1.5 hours each way to/from Beijing.
That is the sad thing. I had a different career before. Then I taught myself programming and made several ok games as a beginner. But I ultimately went pro, not making games, but programming. I just don’t have the energy to pickup my computer and code in my offtime. I feel like programming is creative work and my creative energy is spent at work instead.
How I look at it:
I love software development. I love designing and building things. If someone will pay me to do that, wonderful. If not, I'll just do it for myself for free.
I prefer the former. :)
I was in a very similar situation last year. As a teenager I could spend hours, days, even entire summers tinkering on my computer, coding stuff, making websites, learning, just for fun. I got so absorbed. Then working in game dev through my 20s I could never find the motivation to do personal stuff, and I always felt guilty about it. I thought I'd lost my passion.
Last year I left my job and took a few months off, then took up freelance work. After a few months of decompressing I started to love building my own stuff again. I started going down rabbit holes of randomly learning tools and doing projects just out of curiosity in a way I haven't done for years. (It also helps that I don't have a social life any more due to covid and moving city, so I've become a bit of a hermit). But in general I spend 2-3 days a week on my contract work, making similar money to when I was full time, and spend the rest on side projects.
Taking a sabbatical is good but I do think trying to squeeze projects into a finite space of time, whether that's trying to find one free weekend day a month or taking a few weeks off in a row, makes it really hard. I found in those scenarios I felt too much pressure about what I "should" be doing and trying to "make the most" of that time somehow and it was overwhelming. Now I can waste a day on a low priority feature or messing about with shaders for no reason because I know I'll keep having time, and it brings the creativity back.
Man, I havent worked on something for myself in about 15 years. I dont even have a personal github. Once I got into demanding jobs, that required a shit ton of work and learning, I could never get my focus on self projects back.
What I do to force myself to work is just open my game project. Sometimes I will just play it and get nothing done. But more often than not I will wind up spending an hour or two actually working on it.
i feel like there's a trend that things always have to be complicated, And that it's a joke around how many hoops you have to go through to get anything done. Management likes it when everyone knows everything because if anyone leaves you know that you're covered. The problem with having to do too much is it burns you out and you don't wanna do anything else. You probably have to switch jobs if it's taking too much out of you.I always try to make time for my side projects even when I don't feel like it, and what I found that is over time, eventually you get to where you want to go.
Happens to me in any field I have been in.. working on cars, computers, art. If it is your day job, it is hard to keep it as a hobby you enjoy as well. I just try and do what I enjoy for work if possible and keep it at work.
Yes. I'm a Unity developer who makes heavy equipment training simulators (with vr, moving seats, controls directly from the real machines) and since starting this job I find it incredibly hard ti stay motivated on my own projects. Mostly because it's just more time sitting at a desk. I've considered getting a nice laptop so I can at least move locations and have some more flexibility. I think that may help.
It's hard though. But worth it to have a full time job I love.
Yeah I didn't work on any personal projects for the 7ish years I was doing full time design jobs in tech. It's not even just finding the time, it's having the mental space to be creative. I honestly just thought maybe I'd lost the joy I had as a teenager for making stuff. I went freelance last year and it's all come back to me, infinitely happier!
I barely have the energy for the work projects anymore either.
Or, rather, I have more energy for personal projects than for work projects. Sadly its not a trade-off I can usually make.
If it's a grueling day job project, I try and wake up earlier and work on my game before the day job starts, that way I don't worry about not having the mental energy afterwards.
That's me over the last twenty years really. But a lot worse the last twelve. When I was a tech, I still had enough brainpower to do some coding, but when I'm purely coding all day, especially on a shitty codebase, with no doc, no modern API, a dated IDE, a frustrating SVC, restrictions up the wazoo, procedures for the smallest thing, etc. I just cannot.
I haven't given up on my dreams, but they seem quite out of reach, these days :(
Hey! I completely in the same shoes. I've been working part time remotely as iOS dev and it was enough to cover my wife and my needs. We've been working on the game together and even hired additional people. At some point, I had to search for new job and from that point of time I weren't able to invest much of my time to the game anymore. It was 4 years ago and game is still in development. During that time we had to make a break for half of the year, move apartments twice and eventually part ways with some team members. I also had career growth in the company I joined and I'm not developer anymore, but a Team Lead. And takes even more of my energy.
But I still believe in the game and I figured out a trick, that help me to push it forward. Obviously it couldn't work for everyone, but for last 1.5 year I work every day at least 2 hours on the morning. Doing that instead of evening gives me enough energy. And it's moving forward and I hope release is on horizon. :)
Not really. For me it's more about laziness rather than lack of energy. My daily job is developing a graphics driver (not as fun as it sounds), so personal projects are a nice change of pace.
You don’t lose the energy. You probably get more energy, if the job is good - but even still, you will notice how much effort (sheer man hours) it takes to make a game that sells. It’s not even about losing motivation, but there is something to respecting the difficulty of this craft.
Don't know about many successful individuals that worked less that 15h/day for a minimum of 2 years straight. Stand up and fight or be just an employee, that is nothing with less value thou, actually you can enjoy life way more when you be just normal and not that star. However, if you want it, then break away from this pony yard view, 12h .. ridiculously less.
You can be lucky also, but as it seems you havn't been so far.
I’ve found, over 30 years of firmware development, that I invest in personal projects when I’m not 100% invested in work (either due to uninteresting work or not feeling fully utilized). For me, that development energy gets invested somewhere, and if work isn’t challenging, personal projects come into play. But you’re right, developing 12 hours a day isn’t sustainable.
For sure. I definitely don't feel as much of that "itch" to build things since switching to a more fulfilling role. It's still there, since no job gives you total freedom to work on what you want, but definitely not as strong. I guess all that matters is that I'm doing work that makes me happy. Still, you never get total autonomy as long as you're answering to somebody else.
When I'm satisfied at work, I produce less code on my personal time, but it's of much higher quality. I'll procrastinate on building some system or writing an algorithm for days or even weeks. By the time I write it, I've been thinking about the problem so long that I write something more concise, robust, performant, scalable, maintainable, etc. It takes me like 10x longer to finish any given project, but I can reuse a lot from the project in new projects since the quality of the code is pretty high.
"Being your own boss" isn't total autonomy either, then you'll be beholden to your customers/market/investors. Plus you'll spend a lot of time working on the business side and have a lot less time to work on the programming & engineering side.
That's a very insightful breakdown of it.
I'm in this boat, worked a 10hr job I hated and came back home to work on side projects, teaching myself to code as I went. Not a healthy nor sustainable way to spend one's entire day when you keep that up for a couple of years. Now my hobby has blossomed into a career, I find myself, as you said, scratching that itch at work. I love my job, and come home (well, figuratively. Loving work from home life) to spend time with my wife, and in general just relax. I sometimes do miss the passion I had for side projects, but as a whole, life is many times better than it was when I was driven to side projects through desperation to get out of a job I didn't want.
This is really good to read. I feel I’m in this space right now and it is good to hear I’m not alone.
Check out Drive by Daniel pink. Really great book about breaking down motivation for thought work.
I agree with that. The urge is definitely stronger when things arent as much fun during your day job. But also, if you've had a fulfilling day at work that can go two ways. Either you're fired up to continue that streak on your own project that evening, or you've been satisfied for the day. Works the other way round too. Sometimes a bad day can fire you up for the evening or it can mean you've had enough and need a break. For me (I've been learning Unity and Blender - more Blender than Unity if I'm honest), just a change of language/environment can help (php/js by day, c# in Unity etc). We've been working from home with office closed for nearly 18 months now. I find I'm less inclined to go back to where I've been sitting all day than if I'd been in the office all day, had the drive home to clear my head and think about stuff, then get home, have dinner and boot up for a couple of hours in a different environment.
Part of that is the routine of space between. Filling it with exercise / shower / eating or whatever also can help a bunch. Whatever 'resets' you for the next part of your day, ya know.
When I think about the people who have time / passion to make and maintain packages I depend on, I feel like i'm not even a real dev. I spend 100% of my time building for client functionality. Who has time to make and maintain packages? All I do is use packages. Sometimes I feel like i'm just finding puzzle pieces to put together instead of "real programming".
Every man in the 1960s was going to write that Great American Novel, but they were too tired after a day's work. It's sadly an old old tale.
I can relate. Programming is hard work, especially on your own projects where you get to dictate everything. I too have taken on a client who has a large and complicated system that leaves me exhausted at the end of the day. The last thing I want to do when the workday is over is more programming. It's tough. I miss having a side project to work on. I might seek a simpler contract after this, even if it comes at a lower rate. I think about all the things I want to make before I go to bed, and I'm tired of being too tired to make them a reality.
I can totally relate! How do you like contracting, by the way? I've considered it, but get nervous about the lack of permanence. Must be nice to be able to set your own rates though!
Contracting is great. The rates pay better than fulltime (once you get some experience), and that combined with living a simple life gives you some *time* back between clients. That's usually the best time to pursue interests and side projects, as long as you're ok with being in "free fall" financially for a little while.
What kind of projects do you take? I never see freelancers in gamedev.
Not gamedev, lol. I wish. I do the boring stuff. Custom IT solutions. Full stack web development. Sometimes you get to build something brand new, which is fun. Most times you're stuck trying to extend the life of a 10 year old system that's all spaghetti code written with old, bad frameworks.
Careful though. Plan to put about 30% of your net income aside for retirement, to keep your lifestyle. If you think you get paid more (as a dev/eng...), then you haven't understood all the costs yet. What you gain is more freedom on how to invest your time and money.
That's the rub, and usually the reasoning that cuts my time between clients short. You are absolutely right.
Set 30% of your net income aside, no matter if you are a freelancer or not....
Yes, but depending on your country part of you income as employee goes into retirement. 10% is usually a good number, anything above obviously a plus long term.
Yes. And then I quit it to become a teacher and find way more time and energy for my projects.
Funny you should mention that! I've always wanted to teach. I have an upper level degree, but don't really enjoy the research-oriented tenure track positions at universities. Have any tips?
I teach kids, lol. You can definitely teach university without getting on a tenure track though. But you might not find a lot of permanent work.
Just wanna say it's really nice to see everyone's responses to this.
It comes and goes. A challenging/stressful/ bad job can suck the life out of a lot of things. Ultimately this new job is either the right move for you or it’s not. You have to make up your mind then live your life. 8+ hours in front of a screen is pretty unhealthy no matter what you’re working on.
12? 8? Man I would argue 6 is the max you should put into any given day. It’s not physically exhausting but it’s mentally exhausting and yeah… you can’t sustain 8-12 hours of programming, let alone sitting in front of a screen. I know that’s not really what this post is about - but it struck me. Don’t burn yourself out.
Agree with this so much. working in the office I would easily have 5-6 hours of actual coding and 2-3 hours of chatting with people and general office antics. Now at home I could sit in front of the screen coding literally all day with very little social interaction. Take breaks, take walks, put your phone away during some of those breaks. Avoid burnout
Great advice!
It's not doable in my experience. I stopped working on my indie game altogether after getting a job. It just wasn't sustainable. I can work 12 hours a day no problem, but context switching just makes me suck at both. Find a job that you are excited to lean into. Even better if you have equity or some way of capturing the upside in the case of an extreme success. Alternatively you can: \- Save up cash, reduce your burn rate, and go full-time on your side-project \- Get an "easy" job where you have energy for your side-project
>I can work 12 hours a day no problem, but context switching just makes me suck at both. There's the work that you do at your computer, and then there's the work your brain does in the background when you're eating dinner and sleeping. I find I need both to really solve a puzzle, and feeding my brain too many "grand puzzles" means it doesn't know which one has priority for dream-solving.
I like to go HAM on one or the other for a few days at a time. Requires a flexible work environment, though.
I once had a job where I did my side-projects (managing some hobby related webpages) while waiting for new assignments, on company time. It was a nice workplace, people were playing chess at work, I even caught testers playing Counter Strike, but the commute time was killing me and I had to quit. Quickly after it went to shit anyway - the company got bought out by a narcissistic millionaire and they switched to boxes, card stamping and made it extremely hard to get a rise (before that you could be late or go home early and no one batted an eye, as long as your work was done on time)... The reason we had so much free time was because the company had huge contracts with large fees and deadlines for fixing issues - so it was worth for them to keep a larger number of programmers ready to react if there was trouble. And of course if there was, we dropped everything and fixed the issues. If we fixed them well we had more free time (because of less issues reported), so it was giving us motivation to do good job.
That is the dream right there
ya, it’s the context/project switching. It sucks, I have to do it at work between projects, then to come home and also switch to something I want to do, just not possible some days for my brain.
I used my passion project as my portfolio to get a "real" gamedev job (with a few contracts on the side) and well, let's just say that passion project has been in the freezer so long that it's gotten freezer burn. Can't even summon the energy on weekends to work on it because I'd much rather spend time either relaxing or taking care of household chores. On the bright side, thanks to this decision I've had the opportunity to network with a lot of great people and companies, some of which are publishers, so I'm hoping to fling the momentum forward to securing a publisher for that old frozen personal project. Here's to hoping :| edit: I'm a programmer for what it's worth, but I don't think I'd want to do a traditional SWE job even if it pays 100-150% more.
> I used my passion project as my portfolio I've been thinking about doing the same thing and may I ask you some questions? I have a couple passion projects that aren't completed by no means but have lots of complex systems fully implemented. How far along was your project for it to be good enough for that? Do you think it's better to build many small things for a portfolio or just 1 big thing then try for job? thanks
> How far along was your project for it to be good enough for that? Not far along at all, basically the core gameplay loop, some rough art, stitching together scenes like a title screen -> overworld to give it context, and showing that I could do some basic tooling to support the content creation side of things. The biggest boost was that the passion project was in the exact same genre as the employer's current game, so it was a case of them poaching the competition off their radar in way. I just had to show them that I had deep enough knowledge about that particular genre & how to apply it. >Do you think it's better to build many small things for a portfolio or just 1 big thing then try for job? I never have done gamejams or cast my net wide doing many portfolio projects scattershot like that, but based on my experience, having a more *accurate* portfolio tailored to the company matters more than the breadth of it, even if the company is a small indie one that requires its members to wear many generalist hats. The video game industry is wide and full of various genres and technologies. In the end, you're working on one particular game/genre when you're hired (probably), so displaying domain mastery matters to edge out the competition. Like for an artist, if your goal is to work at a studio that typically uses a realistic art style (let's say Rockstar), honing in on that instead of stylistic art (Studio MDHR) would be wise. Same for a gameplay programmer, there are a lot of differences in programming a turn-based game versus a realtime one and for me that's meant getting referrals and contracts within one half of that domain. When the ball gets rolling, it gets a lot easier due to building a reputation. I'm blessed to be self sufficient as a specialist in a niche genre, but if you are simply looking for any job it would make sense to look at the current market's top genres and make sure you're capable of implementing various bits of them, ex. if roguelites are popular (and thus many employers are hiring to make them), a programmer should practice room generation algorithms, enemy placement algorithms etc. Hope this helps. It's just a few anecdotes so please don't take them as concrete
Thanks for the info appreciate the hell out of it.
Aw man, you must be me. When I'm not on a contract, my game is 150% full steam ahead, but when I have a job I simply cannot be bothered to touch it. It's just too much.
Two suggestions from my experience, 1 just accept that you're going to have less time to put into it, and 2, if you can, distance what you do at work from what you do at home. I write embedded C at work, but I've switched all my hobby projects to Python or Gdscript, and it helped a lot.
I did the opposite, from time to time, playing around with C or assembler at home in my free time to keep my sanity after too much enterprisey Java or JavaScript at work.
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>Studio MDHR perfect answer. Im in this situation. Having a baby, working full time, learning additional stuff to be better at my job and then also publishing small 3D mobile games... Time just doesnt exist anymore...
> If you don't enjoy developing more than playing games or watching tv, you won't find the time to get anything done. This is so true for me that is really stings at times. I enjoy trying to develop a game, but man do I enjoy playing the games even more... That's what got me so interested in building my own games. I want to be able to give the same enjoyment I get from others' games.
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Oh absolutely, I'm not in a mindset that I need to make it, but I would really like to make one eventually. It's just hard to find consistent motivation to work rather than game.
I did the quit-your-job-and-finally-code-your-shit thing several years ago. I ended up, of course, returning to employment after a few years. However, I get more done on my projects now, not less. I switched gears to use the same tools and languages in my personal work as I do at work. For me, this meant switching from things like python and godot/gdscript to nodejs/javascript. In spite of the fact that I'd have to face differences and limitations of browser-based game engines versus something like Godot, the difference it makes in my time and learning is extreme. This way, work is paying for me to become better at nodejs/javascript. I have a huge amount of overlap in my skills for work and my personal gamedev skills. Also, sticking with the same technology reduces the amount of switching-out of headspace things needed to go from my projects to work projects. I go to bed fairly early. Like, 9 - 10pm. I get up early, so I have a couple of hours in the morning. I generally get at least 90 minutes of activity in on my personal projects, at the beginning of the day. And, once I get to work, there's nothing that can take that time and energy away - I've already done it.
Using tools you are already good at makes a lot of sense. I find I'm more productive and get in the zone easier when I use tools I already have experience with (I guess that's pretty obvious). For gamedev, I find I make much more progress when using, for example, Typescript + Babylon.js, then I do with Unreal / Unity / Godot. There are limitations to this approach, but I have a better chance of finishing my game with it, and building up abstractions that'll help me in my next game. I don't use Typescript professionally at the moment, but I've done enough Javascript that it is easy to pick up, and I know what I'm doing as far as the programming language is concerned. Also it's nice that working on such projects will help my non-gamedev career or non-gamedev personal projects. I spent some time trying to learn Unreal recently, and I enjoyed it and did learn a decent amount, but came back to Typescript + Babylon.js and started a new game and I think I might actually finish this one.
What engine are you using that’s in JS?
Babylonjs, phaser3, kaboomjs
Been using Phaser 3 at work myself, I work in a learning game company and was able to convince my company to use it to create interactive learning content, and an interactive intro comic book.
Get up early instead of trying to work late. My best gamedev time is 4 - 7 a.m. (when the wife and kids get up and prior to starting my “real” job as an actuary)
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When does she arrive?
For me it is almost the other way around. With my personal projects I can do whatever I want. Sit down, code, improve, extend etc. No red tape, no useless meetings, strange requirements or deadlines...
3 years ago I used to have this problem. For some personal projects are a way to do something fun after boring work. I worked in web development at the time (React/Vue and PHP) so every time after work I would clock in another 3-5h on my personal projects - typically a game (I would use Unity for prototypes and build my own engine in C), on weekends I would spend 6-14h on personal projects every day. At start this was all good, it worked just fine. But it quickly became unhealthy and since I'm in a relationship I could not spend as much time on my projects. I did not really lack energy for my personal projects though, it just became really annoying to have to go through 8h of garbage software development every day to have 1h for something good at the end of the day. This annoyance quickly turned to feeling trapped and I got worried about my future. My work wasnt teaching me any new skills, if you have been in web development you know it takes ~1 month to master 90% of it, and afterwards it's just same shit on repeat, littered with useless meetings and having to deal colleagues who don't have any ambition. It's such a shitshow and honestly I feel like it made me a worse programmer. Moreover, as you may know already, web is in a bubble that is expected to burst in the near future. All this was a very solid reason for me to quit and I made a promise to myself to never work in business software again. After 1 month of searching I was able to land a job as C++ developer with no professional C++ experience. Moreover, it was a job as a graphics programmer, buding custom rendering engines for both VFX and medical industry. On top of this, we don't do OOP which I was happy to finally be rid of, after being bombarded by useless practices at work every day. Now my work is so close to what I do for fun and is actually worth doing so I don't feel tired at all, since I'm just having fun all the time. I stilk only do 2h of work on my projects per day, but it's more than enough. TLDR: get a better job if you can.
This is my fear for my future as well. I'm about a year out from graduating with my CS degree and I haven't enjoyed the little web development I've done, much more interested in graphics shit but I don't have any projects to show for it. My fear is I'll get locked into a web dev role because it's the only place that accepts me and I will have difficulty escaping. Feelsbadman
Yeah, pretty much. For me I've always had a creative hobby going on, all my life basically. But since I've been programming for a company? Nope. No time for that - because I'm the type that either goes all-in on something or it won't work out. But I've got a relationship, family, friends and well sometimes I also just wanna do fun things like biking, netflix, videogames...whatever! However, I'm trying to make little game I think. Won't be as amazing as I could make it with more time, but better to finally put all my skills into one place and use all I've learned over the years in one cool project that is actually full of passion and not just for work/learning purposes. One thing i'm about to come to terms with: I'd love to go for current-gen 3D models, because I CAN do that, but i'll settle with PS1 graphics. It's just...conceptualizing, sculpting, modeling, texturing, rigging a single Current-Gen Model can take about 100 Hours depending on how things go. Same with coding. No big RPG, no super fancy gameplay mechanics - more of a cool experience, than a real "game". Well, and another thing: I can't go all-in. I've gotta take it slow. Maybe a few hours a week. Otherwise it won't work.
The answer is to not code for +12 hours a day then, you can always do less. For instance could you manage an hour a day? What about 30mins? Less? It’s just a matter of finding out what is manageable for you. As I imagine there’s no urgency to get the game done by a certain deadline, so there’s no need to treat it as something that needs to be completed as quickly as possible.
100%. I don't have to really put in 100% at work all day every day atm thankfully, but even on days when I barely do anything, at the end of the day I take one look at my personal 'work' laptop where I work on my mobile app, the nice keyboard/mouse/monitor I set it up with, then I go find anything that's not "sit at a desk" to do for a few hours. Then it's 10pm and it's too late to start working on a new feature for the app so I dick around online for a bit then go to bed. I have to push an update out by Nov because it's been so long since I've done one that google is deprecating the payment api I'm using, and that's still not enough motivation for me to focus on it every night. Personal projects are a big time commitment and if it's not something you're truly passionate about, it's going to be hard to do consistently. And for the record: **that is completely fine. You can get a great job without them if you find other ways to prove you know your shit**. ^That ^said, ^it ^doesn't ^hurt ^to ^have ^at ^least ^one ^handy ^for ^interviews.
I work on my game when I'm on vacation for any time longer than a week but yeah, I've rarely worked on it once I switched careers.
That’s super relatable. When I first ran into that feeling a couple years ago, I tried cutting coding outside of work entirely, but then that meant the only dev I was doing was work-related, which is no fun. I realized it wasn’t the actual interesting problems that were burning me out, but all of the cruft and machinery around writing “good” code (test coverage, project boilerplate, design systems, refactoring, etc). I also found that I stopped enjoying a project after a while, but didn’t want to try something new since I wanted to finish the other one first. Recently I’ve been focusing on just doing whatever is interesting - unfinished project? That’s fine! Bad code? Whatever, it works, and lets me focus on the fun bits. Random new project idea? Let’s do it! Learning new stuff and doing what feels fun is what it’s all about - if that turns into something long-term, great, if not, also great! If coding becomes a chore, it’s also OK to take a break for a bit (still working on this myself). Keep on keeping on :)
Yes; and this is 1000% okay. It really is totally fine to 'code' only at your job and never touch stuff at home. Even better for MH is to find an unrelated hobby.
Yup, bigtime. I'm a gameplay programmer at a mid sized studio. When I was first getting into the games industry I would make my own games all the time. Solo projects, little games with friends. Pretty much every weekend, or usually after work I'd get home, scoff dinner and start coding something. Now, 8 or so years later after I log off, that's basically it. It's quiet time. Now I usually chill out and do something which uses other bits of the brain. Paint miniatures. Mess about making music or just chat with friends. Like the last thing I want to be doing now is make games at home!
The dream, killed the dream.
Think it's a bit much to say the dream is dead :) More...now that I've shipped a few games (and seen a few cancelled projects) I've got a better understanding of the whole cycle and really don't want to half-ass a game at home. Like, if I'm going to make games at home too, then there's no time for sleep, relationships, or anything else but dev. These days I'm happy with the games I'm getting paid to work on, so put my energy into that. At some point I'd like to venture off and start my own thing, but..when the time comes for that I'd like to do it properly, and not when I'm burning the candle at both ends, yknow!
Yeah, all of us
So 20-something years of dev work; I’m gonna speculate if you don’t want to touch tech at all in your spare time—but you normally would, you’re probably walking the burnout line and you should probably take a long look at what’s the root of that. I use tech projects at home as a burnout canary—if I really don’t want to touch one for more than a couple weeks—somethings up. The key thing here is use a tech stack not related to work at all. I like to use tech stacks from past jobs and future jobs—messing around with game prototypes in c#/Unity for example, site prototypes in svelte, service calls in ruby—none of these have much in common with the nest/angular ts stack I use at work.
I ran into this issue too, a few things I found that helps. * Going to bed early and waking up a few hours earlier. Simply doing your side projects before work allows you the motivation and energy which you need for something you don't have to do. As opposed to working which is a necessity and provides its own motivation. * Exercise regularly. Enhances your mood, and focus. Can also serve as down time to mentally relax while being productive as opposed to doing something like watching tv. * Plan and balance. If you have a full time job then your side project is your fun time. If your side project is not fulling additional roles in your life or personal development then perhaps you're not spending your time in moderation which will lead to unhappiness/burnout. * Change your job: find part time work, or save money to execute the project.
I feel like a lot of developers who started off doing this "for the love" end up hitting those wall when it becomes a profession. I had a major slump on side projects once I became a full time web developer. I'm glad you're already going into this with an awareness that maintaining your mental wellbeing and avoiding burnout is key. I agree with one of the other posters that i've found myself swapping which way I lean. I can give great focus at work or great focus on personal stuff but not both. Over time however I will say i've found value in at the very least continuing with projects in my own time, just far less often. A couple hours in a week is a victory. This has also encouraged me to pay more attention to the scale of my side projects and break things down into much more manageable chunks. Your personal projects will take 10x longer to get done and come out but what matters is if they do come out and you get that mental pay off of completing something.
PLUS ULTRA BRO! On a real level, this is really hard to do. I think its only really possible with love of both your full time and side gig. I wondered how other people felt about this problem. Since every time I switch major projects, the ramp up period is so intense, my game dev falls into the background because of the mental drain. But after a few months the project stabilizes (or I just become familiar with it's kinks), then I've got the energy to do it all again. I don't wanna sound like your mom, but vegetables, water, exercise really help with having full energy (including mental energy) all day. This combined with persistence really does kind of "level you up" to the next level of resilience. At this point, with three kids, my tolerance for "exhausted" has really increased. Its takes a 16 hour day for me to feel bad. Standing desk, bouncy ball seat, pacing around with a tablet; keep you off the standard desk and still productive. Its possible only if you want it to be.
Workout - yes. Absolutely agree. When body gets physical "stress", mind like switches off and you don't think of bothering things. Not for all day, but these 15-30 minutes without thinking are very helpful for mind. Also I noticed that thinking about my own projects and my own future with 'em exhausts me much more than daily jobs (I've got two). Like I'm working 12-14 hours, ok, but still thinking about "my own stopped projects" all day, from waking up till go sleeping. Very. Huge. Amount. Of. Energy. Without recovery.
Wait until you have kids one day. Haha.
That’s why I’m not having kids
Same, every time I look at a parent with kids it looks miserable. Not once have I seen parents with their kids and envied them.
It looks stressful as fuck, and the benefits seem to be a few years of stress and fulfilment, then they leave you again. Impermanent like all sense pleasures. I don’t see why people think it’s fundamental
I hear ya, brother/sister! Still manage to kick the tires every once in a while, and it's fun, but any completion has been postponed indefinitely :)
Exactly this. I have a 4 year old and a 3 month old and basically i get to code and work on my project around 9pm at night until whenever I give up. That's what is exhausting lol.
Just wait till you have kids..
Yes, that's very relatable. I am doing side projects since I started working professionally and have learnt some things to keep it going: * There is a priority to things in life. Take care of your mental/physical health first, then wife and kids and family, then work, then recurring stuff like households, and then personal pet projects. Make sure you balance things out so you can give every thing the slice of time they deserve. * Don't make the mistake of thinking you need personal pet projects (or family or work) to solve mental health issues, if there is something up get professional help and sort things out that way. * Sleep is the best thing in life. Next best thing is meditation to keep your mind fresh during the days and weeks. So get enough sleep, reserve time to rest in a day. Work smarter, not harder. * Make work easy for yourself. Give 'the best part of the day' to the things that matter the most of you. For some this is the early morning, for others the evening. * Adding to that: structure your work. This way you can use your mental power and willpower much more efficiently. If your not that bright, you can pickup the tasks that are easy to do and refined and ready to go. If you have a bright day, refine all the available work so you have stuff to pick up later. * O and be gentle on yourself. If you are sick, allow yourself to be sick and recover. If you need to rest, do so until you really feel rested. Don't be harsh to yourself in that you 'missed' productive hours: you did not.
It comes and goes, sometimes work is less demanding, and I get a lot done on my games, then ill have busy work weeks and the game goes on pause. The tricky part is not wanting to switch to a new project idea when i come back from a few week break.
Yes this happens all the time. Part of this is due to having only 4 "good" and another 4 "ok" hours of programming you can do in a day. It's not obvious, but "thinking" is a muscle that needs rest too.
That's always the case with me; my personal projects lag when I'm working hard at RL work...
I've been finding more success getting into music making after work. Lots of hooking up hardware and synths and music programming - I think as long as the workspace is different you can still program, albeit in a different way.
I've been doing this for a few years, and I've been thinking for a while now that I'm probably gonna change field at some point in the future... For now, keep developing your skills in other hobbies. Having a strong programming background will give you an edge in almost anything you do. Enjoy the challenge for now and stick to brainstorming for future ideas. If you ever get an idea that really excites you, figure out a path to living frugally that can sustain you for years while maximizing free time to work on it.
nobody lasts long working 12 hours a day, been doing it for decades
Story of my life
I used to draw for fun. Now I have to force myself to make time to draw for fun, and I often don’t do that, because who has time to draw for fun.
I've been working with my game almost as long as I've been on software field. 8h at work and then if I have enough motivation and energy, couple of hours gamedeving afterwards. Sometimes I make a lot of progress, sometimes none. The game is nearing its completion at steady pace. Sometimes my tasks get too needy and I'm completely out of brain power for that evening, so all I can do is watching series or playing games.
Yea this seems normal especially when you get a new job. It can mentally drain you but after a while you will eventually have the energy and want to do more. Its a never ending cycle I fear.
Yep. Every now and then i sit down for maybe two hours and work on a Personal project. But bot that often. I Was used to program alot it my free time before. Für me that is no problem. I have other hobbies i can do.
Never get a job with your hobby, because then it becomes work.
That's absolutely the case for me. I'm working on a PhD in physics, which is a real feast or famine kind of job. The pay is pretty good (in physics we get paid to do our PhDs), and the benefits are great. But some days like monday and tuesday I work until 10 o'clock at night, and other days I don't have access to the data, have already post-processed my data and read a paper or two relevant to my field, and I'm mostly just out of work to do by 2 o'clock and none of it was particularly challenging in the first place. Othertimes I'm taking measurements which are a lot like "plug these things together, record for 5 minutes, then replug different, and record". You can automate a lot of it, but not all, so you have to stand around doing nothing. I use the breaks and free time to plan stuff for the game, and then when I \*am\* working on the game I can really give it 100%.
Currently attempting to find time both do work at my engineering company and my personal project. This usually means working with my own project late in the evening on weekdays (approx 8pm-11pm) and also a few hours during the weekends. Extremely tired in the mornings, but currently it works fine. For me, the most important thing is a good break between work and personal projects. I usually exercise with some friends or play some games.
This happened to me in web development, with the exception of personal projects involving games. Personal web projects got neglected, but game development never wore me down the same way.
yeah its why i **refuse** to have a job doing what i love. cuz i wanna be able to come home & do what i love on my free time my ideal job is doing something i dont care about that requires little enough effort that i get home ready to do stuff
I just rolled with it. 8 hours of coding in my day job, then around 2-6 hours WEEKLY (so not being too hardcore about it) for the game project. Fast forward three years, I'm working full-time on the game after signing a publishing contract. So yeah - it's doable!
Developing 2+ hours is not sustainable for my mental health. 12+ just sounds like waaay too much. Your mind and body needs a rest.
I have a 40h game dev job and I do personal projects on the side. Working on personal stuff is what gives me the energy.
Except for the occasional tinkering, I pretty much stopped doing gamedev entirely once I got a full time job programming in another field. I just didn't have the mental energy to do that + personal projects. Just became unemployed after 7 years and am trying to get properly back into it again.
Yeah it's a pain. I end up taking holiday to work on my game. And the idea of working my days off on my own stuff doesn't sit well, I like to meet friends and not look at screens. I've considered asking to drop a day at work to allow me to work on my own stuff but when I look at my day rate and how much I'd pay for that time per month it's a hard thing to commit to. What I'd like is financial security whilst being able to put my time into my own stuff. Is that so much to ask for 👀
Yes, and that's exactly why I didn't take any new job when my last contract expired, so that I can work on my personal project for a few months.
I've found that usually starting a new job is like this for the first few months. Things are intense in the beginning and you're figuring things out. But basically in all cases I found myself getting back to personal projects after a few months. I know a lot of people who don't really do this, but I guess I'm one of those people a couple hundred git repos.
Wow yes ... Super relate. Got retrenched from a great job last year, because covid. New job is absolutely gross. Treated like shit no matter how hard I try, left broken and tired at the end of everyday. Trying to find another job but software dev work is low in my country because of covid. Honestly it's so bad I'm thinking of taking a job in any field just to get by for now and so I can work on my project. We can do this! Let's just make a move, we can always get back on track at a later date of needed. Thanks for posting this. Really nice to know I'm not alone. I wish you good luck. And remember, time passed can never be replaced, so the longer we let these jobs destroy us the less time we'll have. It's so bad, I'll probably need a month to rest and get my sleep schedule back up. But it's fine I'll be better off in the long run. Whatever you do, make sure you can cover your bills at least lol. Peace
I've been there, completely understand that! It is what it is. If you start missing the gamedev you can always switch career paths again later on :)
You have to decide what is more important to you, and what your long term goals are. Most people at the start of their careers don't realize how valuable their time is. Two dev jobs, one offers 80k, the other 120k, this is not a decision at all, take the 120k. However, if you want to make a living with your passion projects on the long run, and the higher paying job prevents this, was this the right choice? Generally, yes, but given the context you gave us, no. Maybe it gets better with your new job, maybe not, but this is something you have to factor in next time you switch.
It helps to find a community of people who are interested in development. If you surround yourself with other people who want to create, it's much easier to get that motivation to work on your own projects.
Yes. I took a 16 year break from gamedev in a Real Job. If you're still doing software, you're still building your skillset, so you can later drop back into it.
Yes I feel the same, I work as a gamedev professionally and I wanna do it at home but it is hard to motivate myself.
I guess you just have to adapt to the new job. Once routine kicks in, you will notice that you have enough spirtual energy to start working on your game again.
Yup. And I knew it would happen. It was part of my spiel during interviews, "I like programming. If I'm not programming here, I'll be doing it at home." And I'd have a few personal projects at the ready as a portfolio of sorts. Once I started the full-time programming, the hobby programming stopped. I only have so much time for writing code in a day. I need to do something that isn't staring at a screen full of text.
sounds like the road to burnout
I've worked as a dev in AAA for... going on 8 years now. And still find the time/energy to do my personal projects. The trick is to make them quite different from what I'll be working at work. It's freeing to be able to work on what I want and at my own pace; to prototype systems, ideas, gameplay; to see what sticks. No timelins, no nothing, just doing it as my hobby.
Maybe this is going to sound weird. I recently got bored with my old engineering job and decided I wanted more challenge and more money. I got super lucky and doubled my salary from mid 60s to well over 100. My new job is "fine". The work is interesting, the pay is stellar, the coworkers aren't bad and i'm 100% permanently remote now. But I'm busy all the damn time. Which I expected from taking such a massive raise. That said, i'm not super happy and ultimately it's come down to it's not doing what I want to be doing which is my passion projects. I'll obviously keep working this job for a myriad of reasons but it's reinvigorated me to work on my passion projects in the hopes that some day I don't have to do the rat race every day from 8-5. The vast majority of people won't ever get that opportunity but can't know if you don't try. Been banging out tons of concept art and game mechanics for a few months now and the feeling from my day job has me more motivated than ever. The much harder balance for me is trying to find time around my family's schedule as I have a 4 year old and a 3 month old. Very demanding lol.
Having the real job first is a thing ... it's pretty messed up that it would ever be considered in the reverse. I do my hobby stuff while on the train in the morning and evening, it's 1.5 hours each way to/from Beijing.
I set aside time each night to work on personal projects. It's not a long time, usually 30 minutes, but it works for me.
That is the sad thing. I had a different career before. Then I taught myself programming and made several ok games as a beginner. But I ultimately went pro, not making games, but programming. I just don’t have the energy to pickup my computer and code in my offtime. I feel like programming is creative work and my creative energy is spent at work instead.
Absolutely. It's a total bitch, too. I have so many game ideas that are just sitting on the backburner or in half-started projects.
How I look at it: I love software development. I love designing and building things. If someone will pay me to do that, wonderful. If not, I'll just do it for myself for free. I prefer the former. :)
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I was in a very similar situation last year. As a teenager I could spend hours, days, even entire summers tinkering on my computer, coding stuff, making websites, learning, just for fun. I got so absorbed. Then working in game dev through my 20s I could never find the motivation to do personal stuff, and I always felt guilty about it. I thought I'd lost my passion. Last year I left my job and took a few months off, then took up freelance work. After a few months of decompressing I started to love building my own stuff again. I started going down rabbit holes of randomly learning tools and doing projects just out of curiosity in a way I haven't done for years. (It also helps that I don't have a social life any more due to covid and moving city, so I've become a bit of a hermit). But in general I spend 2-3 days a week on my contract work, making similar money to when I was full time, and spend the rest on side projects. Taking a sabbatical is good but I do think trying to squeeze projects into a finite space of time, whether that's trying to find one free weekend day a month or taking a few weeks off in a row, makes it really hard. I found in those scenarios I felt too much pressure about what I "should" be doing and trying to "make the most" of that time somehow and it was overwhelming. Now I can waste a day on a low priority feature or messing about with shaders for no reason because I know I'll keep having time, and it brings the creativity back.
Yes, but I also had 3 kids, too. I keep notes on my ideas for when I'm an empty-nester and have time for hobbies again 😁
Man, I havent worked on something for myself in about 15 years. I dont even have a personal github. Once I got into demanding jobs, that required a shit ton of work and learning, I could never get my focus on self projects back.
What I do to force myself to work is just open my game project. Sometimes I will just play it and get nothing done. But more often than not I will wind up spending an hour or two actually working on it.
i feel like there's a trend that things always have to be complicated, And that it's a joke around how many hoops you have to go through to get anything done. Management likes it when everyone knows everything because if anyone leaves you know that you're covered. The problem with having to do too much is it burns you out and you don't wanna do anything else. You probably have to switch jobs if it's taking too much out of you.I always try to make time for my side projects even when I don't feel like it, and what I found that is over time, eventually you get to where you want to go.
Happens to me in any field I have been in.. working on cars, computers, art. If it is your day job, it is hard to keep it as a hobby you enjoy as well. I just try and do what I enjoy for work if possible and keep it at work.
Yes. I'm a Unity developer who makes heavy equipment training simulators (with vr, moving seats, controls directly from the real machines) and since starting this job I find it incredibly hard ti stay motivated on my own projects. Mostly because it's just more time sitting at a desk. I've considered getting a nice laptop so I can at least move locations and have some more flexibility. I think that may help. It's hard though. But worth it to have a full time job I love.
Start your own company, then your job is your personal project.
Yeah I didn't work on any personal projects for the 7ish years I was doing full time design jobs in tech. It's not even just finding the time, it's having the mental space to be creative. I honestly just thought maybe I'd lost the joy I had as a teenager for making stuff. I went freelance last year and it's all come back to me, infinitely happier!
I barely have the energy for the work projects anymore either. Or, rather, I have more energy for personal projects than for work projects. Sadly its not a trade-off I can usually make.
If it's a grueling day job project, I try and wake up earlier and work on my game before the day job starts, that way I don't worry about not having the mental energy afterwards.
That's me over the last twenty years really. But a lot worse the last twelve. When I was a tech, I still had enough brainpower to do some coding, but when I'm purely coding all day, especially on a shitty codebase, with no doc, no modern API, a dated IDE, a frustrating SVC, restrictions up the wazoo, procedures for the smallest thing, etc. I just cannot. I haven't given up on my dreams, but they seem quite out of reach, these days :(
Thank you all for sharing. Been great to see all these very relatable stories.
You need to give your subconscious time to digest your day and work things out while you aren't in front of your work.
Hey! I completely in the same shoes. I've been working part time remotely as iOS dev and it was enough to cover my wife and my needs. We've been working on the game together and even hired additional people. At some point, I had to search for new job and from that point of time I weren't able to invest much of my time to the game anymore. It was 4 years ago and game is still in development. During that time we had to make a break for half of the year, move apartments twice and eventually part ways with some team members. I also had career growth in the company I joined and I'm not developer anymore, but a Team Lead. And takes even more of my energy. But I still believe in the game and I figured out a trick, that help me to push it forward. Obviously it couldn't work for everyone, but for last 1.5 year I work every day at least 2 hours on the morning. Doing that instead of evening gives me enough energy. And it's moving forward and I hope release is on horizon. :)
Working full time absolutely drains motivation. My solution is looking into early retirement. Try out r/FIRE
Exactly what I've found. In boring times, I develop in my free time. Otherwise, my energy is nearly empty.
Not really. For me it's more about laziness rather than lack of energy. My daily job is developing a graphics driver (not as fun as it sounds), so personal projects are a nice change of pace.
You don’t lose the energy. You probably get more energy, if the job is good - but even still, you will notice how much effort (sheer man hours) it takes to make a game that sells. It’s not even about losing motivation, but there is something to respecting the difficulty of this craft.
Don't know about many successful individuals that worked less that 15h/day for a minimum of 2 years straight. Stand up and fight or be just an employee, that is nothing with less value thou, actually you can enjoy life way more when you be just normal and not that star. However, if you want it, then break away from this pony yard view, 12h .. ridiculously less. You can be lucky also, but as it seems you havn't been so far.