Dear Creatives, I Bet You Can Relate. Let's fix it!

Dear creatives, we tend to start way too many projects at once. All of a sudden, you find yourself staring into the void wondering what the hell you're doing with your life. The depressing question you arrive at is which project is even worth spending any time on. That is exactly my problem. So, in the first section of this video, I'll show you all of my current projects so that you can see the mess I'm working with right now. And in the second part of the video, I'll try to fix it for myself, but also hopefully so you can fix it as well if you ever encounter the same problem. I'm a full-time indie game developer and we just completed our game Thronfall. I was so excited to finally take some time off or work on some cool side projects. So, guess what I did? I started a new game project almost immediately. I guess I'm here by announcing my next game. It's probably going to be called Kobako. It's probably going to be entirely free. It's a very minimalist Zokubanlike box pushing puzzle game. I found out that there's nothing quite like this on mobile yet. And I found that infuriating because I wanted something like this. So, I guess I'm fixing this problem for the world now. The mobile market is really pissing me off. So, if I can give them a little bit of payback by making a free game without any ads or anything,

I'll take it. The next project that I'm trying to juggle at the same time is of course this YouTube channel. Juggling both YouTube and game development at the same time is very difficult. So, at some point I had to ask myself, do I want to be a YouTuber or a game developer? And the decision I came to is I do want to be a game developer. I want to spend the majority of my time on game development. And that means that I'm trying to find some formats for my YouTube channel now that I can produce a lot faster because I don't want to spend as much time on my YouTube channel anymore. Like even this video is already a week of work. I'm not sure you're real realizing I'm wearing different t-shirts throughout the entire video. That's because I've been recording for 4 days now. You really seem to like my game design presentations. They always do well. So, I'm kind of experimenting with a workflow to speed up the process. What if I only had to write the notes for a presentation and then it would turn into a nicely formatted presentation automatically? So, I created a Python script that pulls all of these text blocks and turns them into HTML. Now, I have uh presentation slides. The problem is in order to make this look really good, it would require quite a bit more

work. Every slide looks kind of the same and that is a problem. I'm also considering writing some AI agents that help me improve the quality of these slides, but I'm not sure the technology is quite there yet. But yes, I'm also considering the complete opposite approach and that would be to go fully analog and basically create these analog on paper infographics for you. The advantage of these is they feel very personal. They probably stand out in a landscape where everybody's AI generating stuff. And they're also reusable. I could use them in multiple different videos to explain different things whenever I need to. I'm starting to understand why everybody's doing podcasts. You just sit down with somebody for two hours, have a little chat, send it off to your editor, and that's it. Pretty reasonably low time investment, I would say. Podcast anyone? Oh my god, Jonas is out of ideas. No, no, no, no, no. I have exactly the opposite problem. There's the flow video I promised. There's the inevitable Kobaku release delo. There's an interesting community collab I would like to try that I have not seen done before. There's a new Islanders game coming out because we sold the IP. That's something I would like to talk about. There's a mobile copycat of Thronefall that you keep messaging us

about. I have two very cool interview partners lined up, but they're kind of on hold because I told them I need to figure some things out for my channel. I really want to make a video about the balancing lessons I learned from balancing throne for. I also want to make a video about how to use AI tools for game development because a lot of people use chat bots wrong and it really hurts them. Also, just for fun, I would like to make chat play Kobaku. I would love to make and publish a board game. There has to be a new deluxe series for the next big game project that I want to make with Paul. By the way, when is the next Wowee jam? When is the next Jonas Plays Your Games? And this doesn't even include all of the game design topics I could still be talking about. In other words, I'm already feeling spread out way too thin even though I'm not even working on anything right now. It's like just just looking at it, I'm already like, how the hell do I gain some ground on that? I started writing a novel in the Will You Snail universe, but let's be honest, that will probably never be finished. But damn, writing is also so fun. It's like, damn it, why can't you do it all? This is a different side project. It's an entirely Python-based sound generator. It has insane potential

to be extremely useful for sound design. However, this is one of those projects that just honestly killed by AI. I really don't see any point in developing this further. Another Zite project. I'm currently trying to learn some Photon Quantum. It's an online multiplayer engine that you can use in Unity from Unity, whatever you want to call it. But it's almost like a standalone engine and has quite a bit of a learning curve, but it's also extremely cool. We might end up using it for our next bigger game. I had this project of trying to handcraft neural nets to understand them a bit better. So I started out by building a couple of different logic gates slowly working my way up to more complicated networks like this multiplier here. This one takes two inputs numbers from 0 to one and multiplies them. So as mentioned the interesting thing about this is that these networks aren't trained as you usually do with neural nets. They're handcrafted. So in theory I know what every connection does. Obviously I don't know anymore. Multiplication is not something linear neural nets can do natively. So if you want higher accuracy you need to add more neurons. This is a handcrafted neural net that can play perfect tic-tac-toe. For the input, you provide the current board state and for

the output, you receive a rating for each possible move. I would have loved to continue this project further and to make a standalone video about it. The only question is when when the f am I going to do that? So, the ideas up for grabs. If you want to take this over, then then please do. I'm I'm not looking at anyone specifically, right? I'm I'm I'm just saying if if you're out there, if you if you I had another look at GDO making a couple of little mini games to sort of get back into it. It's already so much better since the last time I tried this engine. I'm really rooting for good old. Not sure I quite want to use it for bigger projects yet, but it's getting there. Sure, we're adding it to that. I spent a couple of days learning N8 just to figure out that I don't really have a use case for it yet. We're researching a couple of other online multiplayer solutions. And I also want to spend some time playing cool new indie games so that I stay in touch a little bit. I think that's very important. And it's not even like I'm out of ideas already. I have so many more ideas for silly projects that I might want to tinker with. The result from all of this is that I end up staring into my screen not knowing what I should best spend my time on today. There are just too many options. A lot of the projects would demand quite a lot

of time and I'm not entirely sure what would be worth investing time into. I know this is a problem very common for creative people. We tend to juggle way too many projects at once and it sort of stuns and paralyzes us in a way. Solution. This video is sort of like a self- therapy session. So, let's see if we can pull ourselves out of the mat a little bit. The core question is what should you spend your time on? And there are a couple of obvious answers like your health, family, friends, making great memories, making great experiences. And just to clarify, that's also not what I struggle with. I'm pretty happy how that is going in my life. What I'm talking about specifically is projects in the hierarchy of priorities. That obviously comes below all of that other stuff I just mentioned. But for your projects, which projects should you spend your time on? Which progress? Which projects are worth pursuing further? That is the main question. The first place where I found some really good answers is a Japanese concept called eeky guy, which means something like a reason for being. The idea is

that you're trying to find the overlap between something you're good at, something you love, something you can be paid for, and something the world needs. Wa eeky guy, that is exactly the four things I care about in my projects. How did you know? Typically, this model is meant to be used to find your purpose in life or whatever. But I think it's also very very nicely used on a projectto- project basis. So for every individual project, you check which of these four conditions does it meet. For example, my next little indie game satisfies three out of these four conditions. It's something I love. It's something I'm good at. It's something the world needs. It's just not something that I will be paid for because that would destroy the purpose of the entire project. If you're like, "The world doesn't actually need video games." I disagree. I'll make a video about it sometime. And then for my YouTube channel, it actually falls into the same category. Yes, I know I'm earning some ad revenue. I also know I'm getting some indirect benefits from the YouTube channel as well. However, believe me, it's quite far away from paying my rent, and I don't think it's going to get there anytime soon. There are things I could do to make it much more profitable, but then I wouldn't enjoy it as much

anymore. I think meeting three out of four conditions is already very decent. You can turn them into decent side projects. They're worth pursuing, but they're not worth spending all of your time on. for your main project. Ideally, you find something that satisfies all four conditions. For example, for me, Thronefall did fall into this category and it was very fulfilling as a result of that. So, just making proper indie games, releasing them on Steam, that seems to be the one thing that satisfies all four conditions for me personally. Yeah, now that I think about it, I think starting a new proper game project is going to fix a lot of these meaning issues that I'm experiencing at the moment. Unfortunately, there's yet another completely different way to look at it. The exploitation versus exploration problem. I think I can best explain this with a little game. You have 10 moves and you're trying to get as many points as possible. In every move, you can stand on any tile you want. You turn it around and then you get as many points as are displayed on the tile. There are no points here. So, you get zero points this turn. Now, you have nine turns left. Let's go here next time. So, now every turn we stand on this tile, we get two points. Now, the

problem is what do we do next turn? Do we just keep standing here exploiting the two points or do we move to a different tile hoping for even more points because I still have eight turns left. I could just be standing here for eight more turns and get like 16 more points. So let's say we move here for example. Turns out it would have been better if we had just kept exploiting. Maybe we keep exploring and we dig ourselves even deeper and deeper into the into the grave. So now perhaps it's best to cut the zost fallacy and just return to exploitation. And actually in many cases that might be the best strategy. You don't know what the highest number is. There might not be any higher numbers anywhere on the field. If we go here though, oh my goodness, what do we do now? Do we keep exploiting or do we keep exploring? There could be an even higher number somewhere. Explore or exploit. Ah, so every side project, every experiment is an explore. And

every time you stick with something that you already know works for you, it's an exploit. If you only ever try one thing in life and then you keep standing on the tile forever, that's clearly a very bad strategy. But only doing explore or just hopping from tile to tile trying out every single one, that's also a very very bad strategy. So clearly the best strategy is somewhere in between. But finding that balance, ah it's so difficult. Exploit wants to tell you that you should just stick to your main project. Everything's going to be fine. But Explore has a very good question and that is well, how do you find your main project? So, making indie games is like a solid plus six for me. I'm chilling on the plus six, but I'm always like, there might be a plus eight somewhere, and you know, there probably is. I still have time. I still have plenty of time to find the plus eight. Why should I stay on the plus six? But then I wander around with my side projects and find one X after another and I get very frustrated. It's the good news is at the

very least we understand which game we're playing now. And that means we can try to be a little strategic about how we approach it. One thing's very clear, you need to play a mixture of both exploration and exploitation. And you need to be emotionally okay with finding some X's because they are necessary to find some higher numbers. There is however another problem with this and that is that you don't even always know which projects will be worth it in the long run. Like a project is not always like a card that you can just flip around and immediately know the outcome. And that's why I think thinking in bets is also very much part of the full answer here. The simplest possible bet would consist of a cost, a payoff probability and a payoff. In a case like this, you can simply calculate the expected return on investment by multiplying the probability of the payoff with the payoff and dividing it by the cost. Let's for example say I have a project lined up that would take me 100 hours to finish and has a 20% probability of paying me 5,000 cash. Then my expected return would be 10 cash per hour spent. And I can use that number to compare this project to other projects that I could be taking on

instead. You never know these numbers for sure. So you kind of have to estimate them for each project. It's a useful thought experiment, but unfortunately bets are almost never this simple. The payoff doesn't need to be cash. It can take very different forms that makes it difficult to quantify. Even worse, the probability isn't set into stone, but you can influence it with the amount of resources you spend. And whether you receive a payoff is not just a yes or no question, but there's an entire spectrum with a lot of different outcomes that makes the exact math almost impossibly difficult. But you can still try to intuitit the return on your investment at the very least a little bit. I have a pretty good idea what I can expect from making a game like this one, for example. I can intuit it that writing a full-on novel takes too much time for me to be worth it. And also know that making a sound design tool when AI generated sounds are just around the corner is probably not a very good bet either. On the other side, there are some projects where guesstimating your return on investment is just impossibly difficult. In those cases, it's probably best to just consult a different framework instead. Another extremely important one is what can you actually learn from each project. Some projects aren't meant to succeed. They are meant to make your

future projects more successful by teaching you new skills, tinkering with a new game engine, learning how to make online multiplayer games, dabbling with AI automation, or handcrafting neural networks all fall into this category. But even for your bigger main projects, what you can learn from them is probably still quite an important factor to consider for which project to pick. What impacts your long-term success more than anything else is how quickly you're learning and how quickly you're improving. That's why picking the best projects that teach you the fastest is quite crucial. I have two rules to identify the best learning projects for me. The first rule is to practice exactly what you want to get better at. For example, if you want to get better at making indie games, then you should be making indie games. Most skills are not as transferable as everybody says they are. So, practice exactly what you want to get better at. The second rule is to follow the fun. If you're having fun, that means you're in flow. And if you're in flow, that means you're working on a challenge that has the correct difficulty for you. I think fun is a reward from evolution and nature to indicate that you're productive and that you're learning. If you pick a project that's too difficult for you, you'll end up frustrated. And if you pick a project that's too easy for you, you'll end up

bored. Both frustration as well as boredom are like swamps on this graph. They're like areas where you get stuck and where you can't get better effectively. And that's why fun is a super good indicator that you're learning. Unfortunately, it's not an indicator that you're learning something useful, but it is an indicator that you are learning. I mostly want to get even better at making games, and I also find Kobaku quite a fun project for me to work on. So, I think I'm on the correct path with that. Very similar to learning projects are tools and automations. Just in this case, the goal is not to improve myself. The goal is to improve my workflows and my tool sets. The end goal is the same. I want to make future projects easier and I want to make future projects more successful. An example for this would be my notes to slides project that I'm working on. The goal for that is not to gain any crazy new skills. The goal is to make video production easier for myself. Or same thing when I'm tinkering around with an analog workflow. I don't necessarily want to get better at drawing or painting. Not really something I care about. The point of this would merely be to make video production easier. Same for the sound design tool. The goal would have been to make sound design easier for future projects. One thing

I'm noticing for myself is that these workflow/automation projects are really the kind of projects that are the most difficult for me to make an estimation on whether they are worth pursuing further or not. And I think the reason for that is that the reward is very very delayed and it's very uncertain. Like it's very unclear which of these tools would end up being useful in the end. And in order to make them useful, I would have to invest quite a bit of time. And then I'm also wondering which of these tools are going to be made obsolete by AI directly and which of these tools are going to be far far easier to create just a couple of years from now. Because if that's the case, maybe now is just not the correct time to make them. I'm starting to think maybe the art is more in timing than anything else. Knowing when is the correct time for each project, but also knowing when is the correct time to abandon or leave a project. You're always stuck between two fronts there. On the one side, you're fighting against sunk cost fallacy. Sunk cost fallacy is

continuing a project even though you shouldn't. Oh, I have already invested so much time into it. I should continue. I should keep going. I should finish it even though it's a completely stupid project and you just should just leave it. And on the other side, you have shiny object syndrome, which is quitting, constantly quitting your projects even though you shouldn't. You're constantly restarting. You're not getting anywhere because you're constantly seeing something, some shiny new thing that you want to pursue. Both of them are going to kill the success of your projects. In a way, it's kind of the exploit versus explore dilemma all over again. Shiny object syndrome is like constant exploration and zank cost fallacy is constant exploitation. Don't continue a project that you should not continue. That is sunk cost fallacy. And don't leave a project that you should not leave. That's shiny object syndrome. The difficult thing is differentiating between the two because they're complete opposites. You never know which fallacy am I falling victim to at the moment. How do you avoid both of these fallacies? I think you need to get

feedback. It's very difficult to avoid these fallacies on your own. You need some external feedback, some people looking at your work, at your projects. That's partially why I'm showing you all of my projects now, so that maybe you can help me sort through them a little better as well. But show your projects to other people. They will help you make sense of the mess a lot better than you can do on your own. But let's say there are multiple great projects you could go for. How many projects can you even juggle at once? Like how much is too much? I've been doing creative projects for a very long time. So I have sort of developed a rule of thumb that works well for me and that is you can have one main project, one side project and as many learning projects as you want. It is very important I think to have this hierarchy or this priority list established. If you have more than one main project then your attention is just too split. It's too stressful. It freaks you out. Don't do that. I every time I tried having multiple main projects it

it never goes well. Don't you can have one side project. The reason for that is so that if you get tired of your main project, you can swap back and forth a little bit. You get some variety in your work. Makes it more enjoyable, makes it more fun. But it's important to know which is the more important one out of the two. And then learning projects. These can also be workflow or tool projects. Anything that will make future work easier. Just go for them whenever you want to. Basically, it's just important to know that in the hierarchy, they're the very bottom layer. They kind of fill up the small spaces in between. You only work on them every now and then. They should not take up the majority of your time. Maybe sometimes if you're in between projects like I am right now, then these learning projects, they can take over a little bit, you know, and but in general, it's quite stressful. I'm experiencing that at the moment. It's more comfortable to have them sort of sitting in that bottom layer and just fill up the gaps here and there. Let's go through this exercise together. You can follow along if you want to. My main

project at the moment is Kobako. My side project is YouTube and my learning and research projects are mostly focused on how to make YouTube video production more efficient as well as preparing for my next bigger game project with Paul. Looking at this, to be honest, this feels very liberating because it defines the priorities so clearly. It's not so much just about what's on the pyramid. It's more so about what's not on the pyramid. If you are a creative person, you will always have more ideas for projects than what you have time for. So, you need to grab a pair of scissors and cut them out. Otherwise, you're going to go insane. Now, if I feel like writing, I'm going to write. It's not like I'm going to disallow myself from doing that, but having your priorities sorted and knowing that writing is not on that list helps. It just helps your peace of mind immensely. There's yet another thing that gives you a lot of peace of mind that I learned way too late in life. Have an exit plan for every

project. Nothing is worse than a project that you can't get out of anymore. For instance, my exit plan for Kubako is to just release it on it.io in whatever state it's in. I can quit this project at any moment. And that freedom is wonderful. If you have a bigger project, then being able to quit at any time is not realistic. But at the very least what you can do is you can build in multiple exit points. So multiple checkpoints, multiple points in time where you have a good opportunity to quit even if you don't plan to exit. Just having those exit points. Thank me later. Thank me later. And that's all I'm going to say about that. Final conclusion. Was the self therapy session successful? Uh I think so. I feel much better now. I think what helped most is just getting my priorities ordered again. But I would also be very curious to hear all of your thoughts on my mess. That's one of the main points of this video. Give me your input. YouTube channel. How does the

YouTube channel continue? I don't know. Uh I'm probably not going to upload super frequently. I'm figuring things out. I'm I'm in a figuring things out phase, but also I'm going to take it a bit chill. Uh, I'm going to chill on YouTube a little bit till I know what I want to do with it. All righty.