Sunday 29 January 2012

My Working Week

One of the trickiest things in indie game development is finding enough time to do everything. This is especially true when you have a full time job.

When I wrote Hard Lines I was working 40 hours a week for Filmlight, and squeezing all my dev time into evenings and weekends. It's safe to say that it was one of the hardest projects I've ever worked on (especially after release, but more on that soon). Racing home from work, eating microwave meals, cutting out all TV, staying up too late and getting up too early became a way of life for me. Unfortunately I'm not blessed with limitless energy and I realised that if I wanted to do more games development, and ever see my girlfriend, then something had to give.

Other, braver, people in this position would quit their full time job, live on super noodles and cheap cider and make games with no regard to their personal circumstances. I'm not like that, I like shiny things, I like going out for meals, seeing bands, going to the cinema, and generally not worrying about paying the rent. Basically I'm totally spoiled and the idea of that changing terrified me.

Fortunately I happen to work for a bunch of lovely, lovely, people who understood that making silly games was, for some unfathomable reason, really important to me. My boss has let me cut my hours at work to 4 days a week, and so far at least, it's one of the greatest things I've ever done.

I now work for myself on Mondays. It's brilliant. Properly brilliant. Having one day set aside exclusively for games dev every week focusses me to make progress but doesn't take over my life. Right now it feels like a brilliant balance between "real" work and "fun" work, and fingers crossed will lead to me producing some great games without completely killing myself in the process.

Good times.

N x