Don't Break the Chain: Maintaining Productivity on Your 19th Game

[Music] I'm assuming it's his mic been tested you guys can all hear me everything all right excellent so welcome we start with this I'll just sit down and watch this tea with you guys do it just do it don't let your dreams be dreams yesterday you said tomorrow so just do it make your dreams come true just do it some people dream of success while you're gonna wake up and work hard at nothing is impossible you should get to the point where anyone else would quit and you're not gonna stop there no what are you waiting for do it just do it yes you can just do it

your tire is starting over stop giving up [Laughter] all right so that might be inspiring to you it might be funny to you it's kind of both to me right but the reason I'm showing it to you is because that kind of stuff is important right that initial burst of motivation that call to instantaneous action but it's not a process right just doing it waking up tomorrow and changing your life or whatever there's a difference between this kind of momentary motivation and true long-haul productivity and part of being a dependent is that we're trying to escape from this this world right all those things that go along with business seem like maybe like hell to some people in this room rigid schedules deadlines

strict separation of work and non-work time you know one of my friends even said I'm making games because I enjoy it I want to enjoy the process right I don't want to be too hard on myself and we can do it however we want right we can have flexible schedules we can keep odd hours we can work only when we want to work we can then literally work and non-work time throughout the day and this might be enjoyable for a while but in the end the reality is any of you have shipped a game no shipping a game takes a lot of hard extended work and it is our job really at the end of the day if we want to keep doing this over the long haul if we want to make a career out of it a life of it and this is a rhetorical question I'm not asking for a show of hands here but think about how many people in this room at some point in their careers failed to ship their game and had to go back to work because they ran out of money I have several friends who have had this happen and there's nothing enjoyable about that right so these business guys they aren't idiots you know if they could squeeze extra productivity out of their teams by

letting them work out in bed they'd do it in a heartbeat install beds and every cubicle and this guy here he's looking at his watch in this picture that's this classic kind of over schedule business thing the kind of thing we want to avoid you know we hear business adages like time is money and all that kind of crap but even if we don't care about maximizing money per unit time we also need to consider this right you only have enough time in life to ship a limited number of games and so my central thesis they're making their job it's our business is what we busy ourselves with it's our life's work we're gonna take it that seriously and we should behave like we're working when we're making them and we should manage ourselves the way we'd manage an employee and like a business might do we can start by taking an inventory of past performance of employee number one which might be ourselves or our team or we've been working of our whole career I've done this for myself and I'm gonna walk through it now and I actually did this for all 19 of my games but it's a lot of data to put up on the screen so I'm just gonna give a

quick highlight picking three games out of the 19 we talked about she talked about passage before that came out in 2007 long ancient history only 47 hundred lines of code only took me 14 days to get it out and shown at the gamma event that it was made for and then another 2 months total to finally put music to it and get out to a wide release most popular game by far downloaded by 500,000 people and brought in pretty much no money um 13 games later in between passage and the Castle Doctrine which I'm showing is because my most commercially successful game a big success for me commercial success is relative right for a team of one came out in March 2013 a whole order of magnitude more lines of code here 47 thousand lines of code 13 months instead of 14 days to develop it and get it out to the public and then a a total of 25 months months was out to the public and I was updating and so on 20,000 downloads much smaller in terms of impact but much bigger in terms of

$247,000 which was a lot of money for an individual at the time for the development cycle that was now fast-forward a few more years one hour in life my project that actually just came out two weeks ago eighty-nine thousand lines of code 33 month development time to initial public release and who knows how many more years I'm going to be working on it doing weekly updates into the future so before I did this analysis I had this graph in my mind generally right like as someone who's supporting my family making video games like I'm making a little bit more money in each game and it's kind of going up and like wow the castle doctor made more than anything else that's a good trend except for courtship when you left there which is like this bad outlier where I lost money but that's not a common thing for me right game after game I'm making a little bit more money it's even curving it looks like it's curving doesn't it like parabolically that's good right and I also had a general stance and I intelligent analysis and wasn't quite sure that I'm the projects are getting more complicated as I go along the number of lines of code and it's true the number of lines of code per game are kind of going up on a similar curve working on bigger and bigger things you know with one hour of life

being really complicated right multi sharded server multiplayer simultaneous world with real-time interactions and all this kind of stuff so I'm getting better and better as an engineer right I'm working a bigger and bigger and crazier and crazier things but I'm also spending more time so this graph is also kind of going up we're the same rate and that allows us to talk about productivity so how many lines of code did I produce each week that I worked on the game development productivity not monetary productivity but you know hey look and peeked at sleep is death it's pretty been pretty sad ever since then you know only producing like the castle doctor I only produced 500 lines of code per week that's pretty pretty sad and then he can look at financial productivity how many dollars did I make per week that I spent on the game and that also peaked to sleep as death it's been going slowly down even though I made more money on the Castle Doctrine I spent so much longer on it that I really only made $2,000 a week working on it which isn't so great ok so we can go

deeper than this and a lot more detailed because of the magic of version control so I've been using version control throughout my whole career even before I started making games back passage and and those early games were done in CBS if anyone here in the rumor CBS and then I eventually moved to mercurial and now I'm using it for one hour one life and so I have detailed logs of the entire production history of every single project going back through my entire career and you could see the logs that come out of version control tell exactly how many lines were added at what hour minute and second of the day so that allows us to do a more detailed analysis with something like this this is my entire career in a graph lines of code lines of code per week and it's kind of noisy right so we're not gonna get that much out of that but let's break it down by month instead bin it by month lines of code per month and then we can annotate it with the different games that I've worked on right and so you can see you know there's some game so it's super productive on other games less so some games are really spiky a lot of it's ancient history so I don't have details why like look at sleep as death in the middle there there's a drop in the

middle I don't remember exactly what happened there well I had two big productivity spikes and a drop in the middle because I don't have my calendars anymore from that era so for the rest of the talk I'm going to focus on one hour one life the most recent project because I remember what happened over the past three years so these are lines of code per week from the entire one our own life three year long development process now first of all when you look at this graph there's a little bit of a problem you know like see these troughs right where they're zero lines of code several weeks in a row and at first I saw this looks like oh no did I really go through some weeks where like I didn't get anything done I didn't think it was that bad but then I realized when I looked at my calendar that these were my family vacations it's like okay well that's good that's app I didn't work during family vacation go away to visit relative to New York or whatever and see family for three weeks or two weeks and that's fine I saw some other zeros on the graph like oh no well what about that week that wasn't a family vacation well those were some conferences I went to so that's cool too right that doesn't explain all the zeros on the graph I'll get you a couple more of the zeroes in a minute but at least most of them were were accounted for

okay so let's annotate the rest of this graph so in the beginning I mean you know game honeymoon new project giving a lot done client-server everything's going well and then I come back from vacation it looks like actually and kind of get into this slump right where productivity I'm kind of like feeling burnout it's game number 19 you know and you know I've been I know I've got a long way to go I know this is the biggest project I've ever tackled and sort of stuck in the thick of it and then I have a zero week there that you see at the end of the slump and that's that's also justified because my lifelong friend of 25 years moved to Davis to join the project with me I said you know dude this is a big project you can make the artwork and the music for this and we could work out together as sort of this dream come true for the two of us to work on a big project together so I spent a week you know getting him set up and so on and then we had this kind of adjustment period right we're like it fits and starts we were moving into a new office we were trying to develop an art style we showed the game at GDC and then twirl the artwork out and we did it and tried to figure out all the way the editor needed to be changed to work with the kind of art you

wanted to make and everything but then we finally kind of hit our stride like halfway through the first year we had this period that was like I call on fire right big solid productivity week after week after week after week what happens at the end right you can meet you can even hear the music at that little part of the graph go like and that's one of the roughest periods of my life because that was a couple of weeks before I took my best friend of 25 years off the project because things just it was clear after a year and the fighting and stuff that was going on toward the end especially that like are we really going to do two more years of this we really struggle through two more years and working together you know working together as hard I mean a lot of people have had similar things happen but for me I was a friend of 25 years I mean people say don't work with your friends and it's good advice so huge like emotional blow huge project blow and then I'm left sort of picking up the pieces by myself turning me back and do a one-person project redoing all the art redoing the music myself and everything kind of a regrouping phase but I do it I get through it going away on a family vacation I think the game is pretty ready to release the alpha testers come

back from vacation and and have a test release I get out to my alpha testers they like it it's cool they're having fun and it's interesting and you know I'm excited to keep keep the momentum going and and they're kind of getting bored with what's there and they have bugs that need fixed and so on so I go into kind of it's the big the most insane crunch of my life right I'm like I don't want to release the end of the public soon the alpha testers have it I want to keep momentum with them so there's a pool of them still playing when I release into the public and they end up doing these like 16-hour days like all week long coming out only to eat meals with my family and you know not sleeping very well and just but really pretty productive right then there's a there's a there's a kind of a little ledge there at the end of the insane crunch I'm gonna put a red line there so that that's the first time in my life where I've ever had like a full-blown mental and physical breakdown right I've been pretty mentally healthy my whole life and I didn't really know what it was when it hit me but there was a time where I was like shaking with a sense of existential doom laying in bed quivering thinking I was having a heart attack or a stroke it didn't really even feel connected to the game finally went

to the doctor and had my heart examined it turns out there's nothing wrong with me other than stress and of course you could see this this graphics are pretty stressful crack so it's not a surprise but to me it just felt like I was gonna die you know I didn't I didn't connect it to anything I went I actually went to the doctor he measured my heart rate at resting heart rate in the office it's 116 he's like I think you know what's going on here dude but it was just stress right so that was a wake-up call right you know having this big productivity spike that you know literally maybe almost killed me or at least felt like it did so then I kind of regrouped and the rest of this talk is about this regrouping process and exactly what it took to get back on track and have a more sane work-life balance and everything and and be able to get through this giant game eventually right so let's look at some of the other figures that are available to see exactly what happened during this insane crunch because it's an interesting period to analyze so here's a lifetime graph for me from out all the

way back to 2004 of lines of code per hour of the day taking that version control and processed with a script and this is actually it's kind of a cool graph to look at but it's kind of a sad graph for me because I'm supposed to be working in the morning that's the agreement I have with my spouse right so we have three kids and you know I'm supposed to spend the afternoons with them and kind of be done at lunchtime essentially but you can see my productivity I mean I get up early in the morning and start working at 7 8 9 so on and you can see my productivity in the morning that's really pretty poor we're like at 9:00 a.m. it's worse than like 6:00 p.m. like how is that I'm not working at 6:00 p.m. and and you know you can also see me scrambling around noon or 1:00 p.m. when I'm like oh my gosh my workdays supposed to be over I'm supposed to help my kids like trying to actually get something done right now during crunch during the insane crunch at the end of one hour in life this gets even worse right I'm still working in the morning doing the 16-hour days giving up is starting at 8:00 but my productivity at 10:00 a.m. is worse than my productivity at 9:00 p.m. during that crunch right and you can also see me scrambling at noon freaking out because the workday is half over working giving most of my work done

toward the end of the day really inefficient use of time I'm in the office 16 hours but I'm definitely not getting 16 hours work done what about days of the week so throughout my career these are the days of the week lines of code per day the day of the week that I worked a little sad because Friday is the most productive day when I'm like I didn't get enough done this week I got a scramble to make up for it during crunch look what happens so this is really bad right look at Wednesday I'm working 16 hours on a Wednesday but I'm probably spending most of it messing around on Reddit I guess I don't know but you know and Friday becomes far and away the most productive day and it's even leaking into Saturday when I'm phreak at the end of the week so how did I how did I fix this so let's let's get back to basics here right like how do you ship a game right how do you eventually ship a game guaranteed like what's a guaranteed method the shipping game is hard we all know that and so assuming you have these prerequisites right like you have the required skills to do whatever is necessary to make the game and you know how to get through the process of making

it and your game is appropriately scoped you're not having scope creep and adding features and changing the game forever and ever all you have to do to ship a game is work on the game and work on the game and work on the game and we're gonna get and the thing will eventually get done sort of by definition right of course the hard part is doing this and keep doing it and and and keeping your button the chair over the long haul that's required to ship the game and not getting distracted along the way and dragging the process out wait longer then needs to be but where do we go to get advice about you know how to keep our button the chair that long you know independent video game developments this rather new thing like what can we even compare it to whatever creative process even requires like three years of sitting at the same desk doing the same project right it's a pretty crazy thing that doesn't have many parallels the closest thing that I could find to it was writing like writing novels or something right like the writer just actually coming back and writing the next bit of the novel over and over so I took a look at a novelist who had an interesting technique Roald Dahl 19 novels very prolific guy wrote a bunch of other stuff too you guys are probably

familiar mostly with his children's stories like Charlie Charlie in the chocolate factory which is a Matilda and all that but a really good writer and and this is what he has to say in his own words about and this is him sitting in his writing shed in his backyard well my work routine is is very simple and it's always been the same the last 45 years the great thing of course is never to work for too long at the stretch because after about two hours you are not at your highest peak of concentration so you have to stop the some writers choose certain times to work others other times it suits me to start rather late I started 10 o'clock in the morning and I stopped at 12 always however well I'm going but I always stay there till 12 even if I'm a bit stuck you have to keep

going bottom on the chair and stick it out otherwise if you start getting the habit of walking away when you're stuck you'll never get it done so Roald Dahl famously worked only two hours in the morning from 10:00 to 12:00 like he says it also turns out that he worked in the evening for two hours from 4:00 to 6:00 and that's all he'd ever let himself to and he'd force himself to only write during that time for grand total four hours a day even though he was a very prolific writer and it's also sounds like he was very very strict with himself about stopping when he told himself to stop so that's that's tool number one and this sort of productivity Renaissance suite of things right and it's pretty simple one limited focus work hours right don't work all day don't do these 12-hour things don't even work eight hours a day no one can be productive for all eight hours most people are wasting most of that time pick a focus limited doable work hours in my case I picked five hours I think you know four hours maybe for a writer because it's pure creativity you know we there's there's some kind of rote engineering tasks and other things that need to be done when

you're making a game so five hours is pretty good and you can pick your own amount mine is from eight to one Monday through Friday only never on the weekends and some more details about what this means right we say I'm going to start working at 8:00 you start working at 8:00 you don't sit down and warm up for an hour and a half by like checking the New York Times or or checking reddit or whatever looking at Twitter you actually start working and you decide what counts as work upfront right you say like oh you know today I'm programming or today I'm working on art or today I'm working on the website or today I'm trying to get in touch with journalists whatever it is and you only do that task you don't get in the middle of your level design task and then you know go off and and and email some fans or something in response to them or whatever you want else you want to do and during this time when you're working on the task you don't check email look at the news forums discord read it interacting with players shopping looking up random things wandering away calling your mother or whatever right you just don't do that stuff then at all you just forbid yourself and you stop at the appointed time which I'm calling the truly hard part so a couple of tips

you know how do you avoid you know reddit or Twitter or whatever it is that is your main distraction of choice some people literally need to like disconnect the Wi-Fi router in the house while they're working of course you know we want to look up stuff about what we're working on sometimes and so that's not that convenient but I think if you're working limited hours it's much easier because you can say I'm gonna stop at one I can go look up it I can spend as much time on reddit as I can find out who won the Oscars after one right like I'm free I don't I it can be guilt free and spend several hours on reddit if I want I get the whole rest of the day right and that helps us like get over this like I need to look this up now the other thing is to keep an on work list next to your desk these are the things that is tickling my brain right now that I feel like I want to go look up and I forgot to look up or forgot to do or I need to go check this or I need to email that person or whatever it is that's not work stuff you write that down on this list and then once you're free after your big solid chunk of work you're like ah now I'm free to go do these fun

things that I wrote down on my list so why is quitting the hard part once you get going it's really hard to stop and Roald Dahl says he forces himself to stop it's hard because of flow right and we often this game designers we love flow we seek it right and our designs and and it's this great thing where you kind of fall into the work and you lose yourself and so on one of the hallmarks of flow is losing track of time so I think flow is a benefit for a creative process it's a bit of a fallacy because losing track of time is enjoyable like it's great right but enjoyable isn't the same thing as productive and I think a lot of people use flow myself included as a crutch to keep going to avoid procrastinating like if I only can get started on this thing and get going I don't want to stop because actually have momentum right now and I'm not looking at reddit or whatever it is but if you don't maybe don't need that if you have other ways to stay on track because you want to consciously choose how you spend your time or you don't want to go down the rabbit hole on someone weird problem or polishing one sprite and then realise two hours have gone by and like be like was it even worth that much time you

want to pay attention to where where your time is going how much time your current task is consuming and make choices about whether to keep going and that's where this comes in I've got one up here timing my talk it may go off a little bit before the but a kitchen timer a physical kitchen timer not a digital timer and you use this to periodically wake yourself up out of flow in a very tactile and auditory way and the idea of a kitchen timer for productivity comes from the Pomodoro method which I'm sure some people in the room are familiar with but the Pomodoro method is about breaking your workday up into these little chunks and deciding what to do for each chunk individually and taking breaks between the chunks but this really helps you pay attention to where your time is going pay attention how much time you spend on the current thing you're working on the comb oh my gosh I was cleaning up the edge of that sprite and it took a whole half-hour I thought I was only gonna take five minutes like I bear like you know quickly finish that and get on to the next thing come up for air right break out of flow get a chance to get a better perspective and get out of the climb boat out of the rabbit hole for a little bit and even more important

taking regular breaks and getting up out of chair is because sitting is killing you right I don't know if a lot of probably lot of people in this room have read the recent research on the health effects of long-term sitting I definitely have personal problems with my legs and circulation after sitting for so many years and and then you know it's taking years off your life and this is a sitting industry a sitting endeavor right sitting at a computer making stuff on computers it's really bad for you so getting up regularly out of that chair away from the screen also giving your eyes a rest and other things right and so that's the second tool right get up every 30 minutes set this timer to go off and every 30 minutes you do a stretch you go get some water you walk just down the hall whatever it's not a long break and then every hour what I do is I go out literally out of the house and go for a walk around the block for a little bit more of an extended break it's circulation going clear my head be outside for a little bit instead of inside all day which is actually really amazing like outside is amazing and and and it helps week it also helps me with

the things I'm working on because I get a fresh perspective on this hard problem I've been working on for a whole hour I may be stuck on something I don't know how to fix this thing or I don't know what how I'm going to get this art work working or whatever it is and going out walking for like a few minutes like how all of a sudden sometimes the solution will come to me right the quiet of being out there in a different environment a couple words about stopping right like it's hard to stop I said that before and you kind of feel like you shouldn't stop if you're on a roll I'm giving stuff time today actually but if you've been super productive for five solid hours like you can stop you deserve to stop you should stop you definitely not at your highest peak anymore you're making more mistakes and all that stuff like what role doll is talking about but you should also be doing other things with your life every day right like having hobbies spending time with friends and family sleeping and eating well having time to dream you know doing other things right you know this is a creative endeavor right and we need to kind of you know let the dog off the chain and feed it to meet everyone so alright so if you haven't tried drone racing you really should but okay so

that's this process right but we still have this deal thing we have to deal with which is the complexity of what we're doing right so games are some of the most complicated engineering projects in existence with all the working parts that take it takes to make something and how do we like cut our way through this ticket right like one hour where life is a perfect example of this I mean so many moving parts I can't even remember all of them now I'm like there's all these different servers and scripts to keep the server's update and all this kind of stuff like how do I even figure out what to do next how do I figure out what to start working on at 8:00 a.m. and I use this tool and I think it's the best tool in existence for this which is paper notes so first of all why not digital a lot of people want to use some kind of digital tool to track their process paper is actually way faster than digital you can draw diagrams you can cross stuff out you can jot down something really quickly and note that this is not a notebook right these are loose three-hole punch sheets and you can flip through them quickly you can reorder pages at will you can make a stack and put things that aren't so important on the bottom of the stack bring the most

important task to the top of the stack and and you can pull a page out and put it on your desk or pull three pages out and spread them out on your desk you're not sitting there fighting with some notebook that's trying to close on you all the time and the finish notes can get out of your way you don't have to flip through them every time you look through the notebook they are going down I have this little section up here which is like finish the page that kind of sticks out it's all torn up because I've used it so much but the finish notes I do I've decided I'm done with this page I don't need to look at any more go under there and eventually if that stack gets thick enough down there you can move it into the recycle bin or you can put it in a three-ring binder if you want to save it or a filing cabinet so that's tool number three loose sheets keep him out of clipboard to keep it from getting to mess and file way unfinished sheets and have a pen handy to write down what you want to do and you know like at the end of the day your toward the end of your five hours you write down several things that you want to work on tomorrow to get yourself started and that's at the top of the stack right and then once you're done with that it just disappears so so those are these these three tools that I think are really important and really

helped me to consistently ship games and I think if you use them you'll be able to ship as many games as you want throughout your life while maintaining of course mental and physical health and not ending up shaking in bed thinking you're dying the but there's a problem right like I'm giving you this method I hand it to you today maybe you walk away feeling inspired maybe more or less inspire than you felt by the video to just do it video at the beginning but we don't stick with methods that we start right here our Google searches for the term nutrition by week of the year and if you look closely you can see there's a big spike around New Year's resolution time and then interesting nutrition trails off until it drastically tanks around the next holiday some people don't care about nutrition at all and then they wake up on New Year's Day and try to search for nutrition again some people we just generally don't stick with new things right and you kind of know you want to you've decided to there's this temporary Renaissance but then these old habits creep in and then you start feeling guilty right like I knew I wanted to keep up with that thing and I I didn't I'm not doing it anymore or I went two days without doing it and

that guilt makes you feel negative towards the method and you kind of ditch the method ice not wasn't for me it didn't work for me you know and so how do you do it long enough to make it habitual right and the spinal trick comes again from the writer this time from Jerry Seinfeld so he calls this method don't break the chain where he got a big wall calendar with the entire year on one page with all the months and they have small ones now that you can download if you look up don't break the chain calendar online you find all these PDF files for different years and it has an entire year on one sheet you hang it in a visible place and you give yourself a red X for every day that you keep whatever habit it is that you want I mean this can work for exercise there eating healthy or whatever too but like in my case it's like if I get up at 8 a.m. and I start working at 8 a.m. without looking at reddit or whatever other distraction and I take my regular breaks and I work through the entire five hours without doing anything else I get myself a red X I've also given myself green circles here for things like days I'm taking off for real like I decided I'm taking a family trip or you know taking a day off for Thanksgiving and you know knowing that you're going

to show the calendar to GDC in public really helps you can see though there's one little embarrassment there on December 13th that's that's the the day I decided I should spend just a few minutes researching cryptocurrency and two days later I actually owned a bit part of a Bitcoin or something right so I mean once you get a chant Abraxas you try to keep them going as long as possible in it and it's just one day at a time right just one more red X it's just like you know he's taking one step at a time so that's the method right stupid simple strict regular limited work hours regular scheduled breaks that use a timer to wake up and remember the break stack of paper notes to keep track of this complicated process and don't keep it all going by not breaking the chain okay so finally results from this method for me so before when I was crunching this crazy crunch line of code per hour of day and this I said was a very depressing graph look at my morning productivity it's awful look at my even 9:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m.

productivity after I implemented these methods my lines of code per hour day looks like this right so that's a much healthier looking morning work routine I'm still kind of scrambling at 1:00 p.m. as my day comes to an end to get a lot done or whatever I do work into the afternoon sometimes what I shouldn't I know I'm still working on on that stopping is the hard part like I said days of the week so during crunch it was this awful graph look at Wednesday you know half less than half productivity on that day after Oh half hour is over time to take a break after the productivity Renaissance kind of methods were installed you can see it's a much healthier looking all week long productivity with Tuesday being Mike the best day so don't break the chain stop when you said you're going to stop so I don't know I mean I'm kind of at the end of the lot of time here but we

can kind of go over a tiny bit for some questions just one quick one yes why don't you work Saturdays and Sundays I love that time as before the rest of the family gets up you know three or four hours I'm up at 4:30 every day so I love the 4:30 to 9 before they get up on weekends so yeah it's a good question I guess you know I do sleep on Saturday and Sundays pretty much as long as my kids do and so yeah I get up and do stuff with them usually so that I mean is kind of like yeah Saturday setting is the time they spend with me really so in my family that's just the way it works I can see how sometimes if you if your sleep schedule is different than theirs then your kids are probably younger so that's yeah I mean my oldest was 14 my youngest is 7 yeah you know I got you up and play League of Legends with them right so thanks great talk yeah thank you so oh your data is based on lines of code right did you count the sprite work like yeah so yes this is all based on lines of code and it's very you know

it's very sort of biased and kind of unbalanced because of that right like there's all sorts of other things I'm doing like you know I'm working on the website or I'm making you know being interviewed you know to promote the game or whatever there's those things counters work right and this doesn't cover any of that it doesn't cover the artwork either so I'm not there's not a good way to analyze what like number of megabytes of images created or something I guess I could do that too and there's also music that was created like how do I analyze that number a minute you know it's like weird a separate graph and those things usually like I mean coding is sort of the the thing that serve carries throughout the whole project and sometimes maybe I'll spend a week making music but then I've spent like you know a month or two writing the music engine right so you know it's I think I don't I picked one I pick the easiest one and the I I'm not sure about the other stuff yeah hi my name is Jeremiah this is dope thank you so much so I have a day job and then I have my creative awesomeness rum how would you change up this model for that type of thing where you have to

balance one in the end yeah that's really tough I mean I haven't done that for a long time myself I mean I guess the last time was back when I was in grad school or something where I had these school responsibilities and still was trying to keep creative projects going so I know it's really tough I have other friends who are working and trying to ship games at the same time and it's a real struggle I mean you basically the reality is you can only get so much productivity out of yourself in a given week and really I think probably lowering your expectations about how much you're gonna get done your own projects on the weekend which is really when you should be I mean you come home if you come home from work after eight hours spent and exhausted you should be relaxing you should be kicking back hanging out with friends eating dinner going to bed early and that kind of stuff not trying to crunch on your own cape in the middle at like late at night and going to work tired the next day so weekend's probably it and be real realistic about making sure you have plenty of leisure time in the weekend maybe Sunday afternoon only you know it's really tough I don't know but you know don't beat yourself up right

about like that's that's the trap right I think is that you get into this like some of my friends I definitely see this happening with them like you get into this like I didn't work on my game for like a whole month I feel terrible and every time I think about it it makes me feel terrible and I just don't want to think about it for a while and then you just kind of get away from it and then it becomes even harder to get back to it so picking a sane and doable amount of work and sticking with it so you feel good after each time and then you reinforce this I felt good after Sunday afternoon next Sunday afternoon I'll feel good again and you get this positive reinforcement as opposed to like beating yourself up and feeling like a failure right so that's the only advice I can give there okay that graph was amazing the one that you showed the timeline of the whole project our nikaya after you had that breakdown why did you come back to the project what brought you back as well yeah so I have I have financial

realities you know I'm a career independent game developer supporting a spouse and three children and you know we're trying to buy a house in Davis California which is not cheap at all and so we've been saving up for it for like seven years and still renting seven years later when we thought we'd be in our own house by now and so you know my family's really depending on the project right that's that's another reason why it's so stressful is because my friend came on board I was paying him a stipend or salary during that time and so all this money kind of went out the window - my wife's chagrin and once I finally decided we were gonna work together anymore it's like a year not only of time but of money wasted right like those are our savings from previous games that we're almost like we can't even pay another year's rent now what are we gonna do like so all those pressures were on me not only that I forgot to mention I was turning 40 right around that time so like and my child had just gone through puberty he's like 6 foot 3 now you know all these things were like you know things were changing things were happening my friend of 25 years you know and so but still I couldn't stop right like this game I worked on almost three years now I had to ship it right it was a good game I

think it was a good game as we're shipping you you haven't lost faith in the game no I hadn't know right but I realized that for such a big project I needed a new sort of a breath of fresh air in terms of the way I was gonna be managing it from here on out thanks yeah all right it looks like that's it excellent thank you folks