Glad to hear that all those other things you are doing are adding to you physical and mental health and skills.

One good thing to try is time logging. Track your time use down to the minute, noting down even the most trivial interruptions. It’s surprising how hard it is to put down even 5 hours of solid development time.

As with all things, measure it and it will improve.

Also, I’ve really streamlined my life. Everything that I do in some way relates to my game dev work. For example, I take art classes, go to Toasmasters meetings and run each morning. These help me stay sane, but they all benefit my indie plan for world domination in some way.

@Skn3: Yep keeping a balance between work and family is vital otherwise you might end up with much more programming time that you bargained for due to being alone! However, I heard a funny story from an Indie once: he said that now his wife allows him to take his laptop to family events and do work because his games make so much money. He said: “that’s what I call ‘arriving’!”

@BLaBZ: That’s a really good point. It’s like going to the gym or some other sport regularly. Also I used to do lots of meditation as a teenager and a tip was always meditate in the same place at the same time so you can get straight into that mode.

@Robert: yep, my original framework took 3 months and then I began to sell it! As I made new games I just improved the framework as I went along. Now it’s a bit convoluted in places and I could make a better one if I started from scratch, but it might take a while.

@Greg: Cool, so you find you are able to focus on the important stuff due to being short of time. That’s a vital skill in many situations, one I’m still mastering!

One of the things that has helped me a great deal is to look at my “paying job” as an asset rather than a liability. (After all, it does pay the bills)

Being “short of time” has forced me to be more directed, goal oriented, and realistic about what I need to achieve. I have found great value in being forced to stop working on something (for whatever reason) and take a step back. It gives me pause to see if the direction I’m going in is worth-while.

As Robert above said, you are forced to make certain choices and I think those ‘forced choices’ really bring to light what is important to your life. If it’s your game, then it just gets better!

(Oh and the “ongoing to do/design doc” has been absolutely critical to being able to jumping into and out of the zone easier).

I find that I’m adding more structure to my games as they are made. The first game was a complete hack-job. The second is an improved hack job with more clarity and oop. Revising code is best when you know what you’ll be reusing time and time again.

I totally agree with the sentiment that people over-oop and make the perfect game engine, by that time those people will have nothing but a perfect game engine and no commercial games to show for it.

It’s like learning to drive, you can theorise as much as you want but you still need to go and do it. The best thing for a framework is working code thats done the job.

2 other things that I’ve found have been really helpful are…

1.) Find a place to program either at the library or an office where all you really do there is program.

2.) Go to this place to program on a consistent routine basis forming a habit.

This way you don’t really think about “motivating” yourself and struggle to whip out that project, you just do it.

For me the most difficult point as raised above is that I find it hard to “start”. I always seem to find something else interesting to do, but I would say I am averaging an hour a day (when including weekends in the equation).

@Robert: I’m on the fence with “good code”. I’ve found that in the latter stages of bigger projects “bad code” can mean it’s really hard to add new features and fixing bugs can be awful (especially in code written by a team). But yes, sometimes you just have to chuck the code in there and get the game out. Some people over OOP their code and add in loads of stuff that they’ll never use. So clearly finding a balance between good/bad is what is needed One handy rule, if you find yourself copy/pasting code, maybe the second time allow it, but a third time means you should refactor.

@charlie: Agreed. In the end it’s up to you to control your own life and make room for your dreams.