Hey everyone, how’s it going?
Hope you all had a great weekend! This weekend I decided to put a bit more structure to my mornings in order to help me develop a long term plan towards becoming a full time indie dev. I decided to treat the mornings like a normal weekday and get up at 6am. I crept downstairs to avoid waking my two year old and set up in the kitchen with my laptop and a coffee and got stuck in. I found myself being really productive and managed to get a lot of the movement mechanics of Glow sorted (who’d have thought wall jumping could be such a pain!). Around 9am my wife and son came down to start the day, we enjoyed a nice breakfast and I finished off some little fixes until 10:30am, after which we had the whole day to enjoy family time.
It was really good to have satisfied my creative urge earlier in the day and to have ticked off quite a bit on my to do list. The thing about trying to do indie dev whilst balancing a full time job and a family life is that you don’t often get a solid few hours to really get stuck in. It’s usually half an hour here or an hour there. Getting a good four hours really helps to build up a flow and gain some momentum. I was then able to enjoy the rest of the day with my family without thinking when I could squeeze in an hour somewhere (although I still couldn’t help thinking about the next steps in the prototype but that’s just because I’m really excited about it!).
I enjoyed the routine so much I couldn’t wait to wake up for Sunday morning to do the same again! It definitely makes a difference having such a structure and it not only benefits my game development but also helps ensure I don’t sacrifice any quality time with my family as I try and build a business doing this. I thoroughly recommend to anyone in a similar situation to me, to put some kind of structure in place to their day, whether it is for indie dev or any other endeavors. Having that structure in place helps to settle the worry of when can you squeeze some effort in and lets you get on and do useful things like getting through your to do lists, creating new ideas and spending quality time with the people you care about.
Oh yeah and I finally got my next episode of Making An Indie Game uploaded!
Thanks!
Stav