Burnout and stuff

After a couple of years of intense work on game dev while simultaneously handling the wrath of the little gremlin, I think I burned out a little. It's very difficult to even think of coding outside of my day job. Fortunately, I'm not burned out on games as a whole, as my newly rediscovered love of shoot'em ups is flourishing. However, I need to rethink my approach to my hobbies a little.

I'm a very intense person when it comes to my interests. When I'm interested in something, I go in wholesale. So when I started making games on a semi-regular basis, I delved in deeply, I thought about game dev all day every day and I spent every bit of free time coding, watching tutorials, making graphics or sounds or doing any number of other related activities. In hindsight, it's amazing that the 'high' lasted as long as it did, but it might be actually because being a parent makes your free time a bit sparse, so while you can think about game dev all the time, you can't DO game dev all the time.

The key seems to be taking regular breaks, not only from actually doing, but also thinking about related things. So from now on I'll attempt to take it easy on my hobbies. I'll take one-two runs per day in Danmaku Unlimited 3, and otherwise I'll make every effort not to binge on shmup-related youtube videos. And also, during the weekend I might sit down and make a Bitsy vignette, but nothing too taxing. I need some time off, so that when I'm not in a coding frenzy I won't beat myself up about the fact that I'm not in a coding frenzy.

Alright, that's it for today. I'll post my progress regularly as a form of documentation, so that I can review it later in the future.

Rethinking the challenge - a game a month?

Alright, this week shows that making a game every week is not sustainable for me. During the weekend we’ve been doing some family things, and my free time for dev work has shrunk down to almost zero. I’ve been also a bit stressed about having to churn out “something” every week, to the point that I really don’t want to do this anymore. It was a valuable experience but it’s time to move to something more realistic, like “a game a month”. It will still be tiny projects, but stretched to a longer period, so that I don’t have to work fast and stress out about things. I also don’t want to spend the entirety of my available time developing or thinking about developing, I want time to actually play some games and do other stuff, like finally watch episode two of the second season of Picard with my wife. And finish the book I’ve been reading sluggishly for the past two months.

A completely unrelated side note: I’m typing this blog post on my iPad placed slightly tilted on my desk, a bit like a keyboard, and somehow it works well, I’m bizarrely not making more mistakes than typing on an actual keyboard. Who would have thought?