After sharing this blog on social media, I got some comments talking about the lack of motivation that some people felt while trying to do their own personal projects and I would like to address that from my experience with this project.
I immediately remembered a video I saw on youtube that tackles this issue from Toniko Pantoja called The Harsh Reality about Personal Projects in the Long Run , there is this misconception that creating games is easy and this couldn’t be farther from the truth, making a game requires a lot effort and specific skills, it is exactly like any other kind of project and when people find this out, that is usually when the motivation ends.
I have seen a lot of people talk about creating personal projects, how aspiring game devs should do them and how these projects can help you get a job in game dev and while I do think that it is true no one really talks about the enormous effort that it takes to do one of these projects outside of work, while still taking into account a healthy life style, having time for friends and family and also time for leisure and resting.
Decisions before starting
In the beginning of the project I had to think about that I would like to change in my process not to suffer from lack of motivation again, I have had multiple projects in the past where I start working on something and then quit after 1, 2 or 3 months due to lack of motivation.
One restriction that I had to keep in mind while creating this game was that I wouldn’t have much time to work on it, I’m currently working full time at a AAA studio and I have a family with the small child so usually I don’t have a lot of spare time, but I still wanted to create and finish a game. I started planning objectives I wanted to deliver first but I didn’t give them an end date because of the decision I took, I wanted to be flexible with myself and not feel pressured, I didn’t want to work on the game when I felt tired, I didn’t want to force myself to work on the game every day, I could just take a break without feeling about not reaching that weeks objectives.
One issue I now see with my decision is that because I don’t have end dates on my tasks (or official sprints) I don’t have information on how much time a task was overdue for delivery but I can get I rough idea from my GIT repository, of how many days I worked during a month, what did I work during that month and how many commits per day or per month I did in that time.
Tracking work tells a story
The development started on August last year and the first month had great promise, during the month of August I worked almost every day on the project. First interesting fact from the beginning of September till the 26th I didn’t do any work, I was on holidays and spent all my time with family, you may ask “why not keep working during that time to finish the game faster”, I didn’t want to feel pressured there is a time and place for everything, and it paid off, the next months October and November were great worked on the project almost every day, of course in December I noticed another drop in the amount of work but that was to be expected, as I was spending more time with family.
After New Year’s however I observed an interesting fact in January I didn’t work a lot on the game only 7 days and in February I didn’t do a single commit, I remember feeling tired at that time, I had to stop working on the project, instead I played a couple of games during that month I started and finished Moonlighter and Sparklite as homework for the game, I started feeling energetic again and in March I started working on the game again but I took it slowly only 9 days that month, and it worked yet again during April and May I worked almost every day during these two months.
Conclusions
I’m pretty happy with progress of the game so far and I think there are 2 main reasons why I’m not feeling the lack of motivation on this development like other projects I had in the past, the decision that I took in the beginning not to have set dates for deliveries really helped me out through the development, I never felt pressured to do something, if I didn’t have time and if I had to take time for family I would just do it and then come back to work on the game again with more energy. I also didn’t try to force myself to work a specific amount of time each day, I would only work the time that I felt comfortable with, it could be 5 minutes or an hour but that would be it, no more.
These 2 decisions might seem to be the same but to me one is working to achieve a goal and the other is planning my life to schedule time to work, from my point of view they achieve different things and these 2 changes are there the biggest difference from other projects that I have done in the past and never finished.