What are the stress factors in your life that slows down your game development?

Stress disturbes my concentration and kills my creativity and motivation. Here are some of the stress factors in my life:

* Fulltime daily job, 10-11 hours of work
* Master degree I am trying to finish, thesis writing
* Too many game ideas, not knowing which one to start with
* Thinking of the criteria to go fulltime indie, minimum capital to survive, min number of games sold per month to make a life living etc.
* Bills to pay, going to bank etc. (time loosing)
* Military service (haven't done yet, 6 months is obligatory in Turkey)
* Being too busy and not calling friends due to that
* Not playing sports, loosing fitness
* Drinking too much coffee

Those are mine, what about yours?

ergas

* 8 hour job (interesting but a stress factor nonetheless)
* Degree thesis
* Stupid 5th year university classes (waste of time)
* Bad economic situation (affecting all the region)
* Family discussions

normal stress:

- being in doubt of what i'm doing is the right thing (that's causing stress but i'm working on it so it's no problem)


baaaad stress:

- searching for a decent day job but don't find any, job situation is going straight to hell, and the worst thing is i'm not interested in boring IT jobs at all!

- seeing other people smoking everywhere and smelling the damn cigarettes! (it's only a week without smoking now :D)

Why focus on the negative? it's only going to kill your motivation.

Self pity is never the source of productivity ;)

Ok now we can have a pity party and let everything go straight to Hell in our lives, or we can stand up and be counted.

Always remember the when you do fall, to fall on your back, because if you can look up you can get up.

I don't know what kinds of music you listen to but when I get down I listen to "Of Wolf and Man" or "Through The Never" by Metallica. They usually do the trick.

I don't know your religious beliefs are but mine are Christian.
As I am and so are you a child of God. And He has given us Dreams to fullfill because he knows that we can be great contributors of society.

Always remember the Dream has been placed within you, and you have been called to do more that to just exist in a 9-5.

"Every day that you wake up, and there is not a white calk line around your body is a Great Day!."

Some things to think about:

Walt Disney went benkrupt 7 times before creating the Disney Corporation. Do you think he might have had some problems along the way.

What makes a person Great is not that he had some major advantage over other people, but that when faced with challenges, thay over came them.

So I ask you againg will you site there and cry, or will you stand up and be counted.

I choose to be counted!

Today is the First Day of the rest of your life, how will you choose to spend it?

Well I am being quite sad lately.
Recently my brother graduated: this is a good thing for him, but it had a bad reflection on my life, because now my parents-relatives think that I should graduate too.
I of course don't care about what they say: they know nothing about my life and my interests. They don't even know what is the feeling of releasing a new game... they just want me to be a anonymous employee in some big corporation who earn 100.000$ year but is always frustrated and unhappy ;)

The most difficult thing I am facing is: starting.

Sales aren't enough to let me go fulltime yet, my current part-time job sucks and I can't really wait to quit.

But I can't quit yet, and that is really frustrating me. In addition now I have that stupid degree thing... sometimes I understand why ppl go away, far away, just to be distant from stupid parents-relatives...!!!

Jack:
Right after I graduated from college, I was going after a game job. I was frantically working on some demos to show off my work (including improving some work I'd done for classes), lining up interviews with a couple of local game companies, and so forth. I had one interview where I showed off my demo, and my interviewer (the head of the company) told me he wanted to see me again in a week, but I should work on my demo and make it "fun." I asked specifically what he wanted, and he said he wanted to see what *I* thought was fun.

So I spent a LOT of time working on my demo, and playing lots of games, thinking about the nature of "fun." I played the most fun, addictive games I had, asking myself, "What makes this game FUN?" I wasn't trying to duplicate those features found in other games, just trying to distill what sort of raw ingredients gave these games their addictive features - and make sure my demo had that. It was a great exercise, spending a whole week trying to understand the nature of "fun," even though I turned down the job offer in the end.

During this time, we had my wife's grandparents visiting. I get along pretty well with her grandpa, but her grandmother is a really weird bird. Very traditional and old-school, barely knows how to read. Kept talking about how the husband of one of her OTHER granddaughters worked in a warehouse and went hunting and brought home a deer the other day to feed the family. Real provider, that one. While I was, apparently, an unemployed slacker. I couldn't spend much time in the same room with her, and kept retreating to the back room to work on my game demo.

One afternoon, my wife was showing how we were prepping my "office" room to be a bedroom for our first child who was on the way, and grandma watched me testing my demo, and asked disdainfully, "Is that all you do, is play games?" I don't remember my retort, but I was pretty torqued off, and said something to the effect of, "That's right, that's all I ever do!"

My wife tried to explain I was working on a game demo for a job, but her grandmother wasn't the least interested. Fortunately, my wife was (and remains) extremely supportive of me.

It was very frustrating for me at that time. But in the end, I was offered TWO gaming jobs, chose the best of the two, and kept "playing games for a living" (well, programming them) for six more years. Provided for my family just fine, thankyouverymuch.

It doesn't hurt to listen to advice, and to listen to warnings from others. But don't let the naysayers drag you down - even within family.

truly a great story!! :)
Luckily I can't be depressed for long :p
After about 2-3 hours, I naturally became happy. Don't know why, maybe because I finish my daily job and can go back home making games? :p

I've talked about it to lot of my friend,and they all agree to one point: it was better if they didn't take that stupid degree... :)

Of course I am talking about ppl that take a degree just because they "don't know what to do in life". The one who take an engineering degree and so on because they want to do that particular job are respectable persons :D

NEVER EVER give up. Four years ago, I barely knew any C/C++ and I started learning both C++ and how to make games. I had to go through total hell with DirectX to get an image on the screen, but boy was I happy when that happened. I remember running around the house in delight. :) Right now I'm finishing up my first commercial quality game, after getting through a hundred more roadblocks that were thrown in my way.

I went from a complete zero in game development to a competent C++ programmer with a personally developed 2D engine. And the only reason this happened is because I never gave up no matter how hard things got. And believe me, I've had some of the worst and hardest to track pointer related bugs and memory errors. Things I thought I'd never figure out. And I wanted to give up on many occasions. I think everyone at one time or another feels that they can't take it anymore. And it's those who don't give up despite this who achieve the most in life. That's all you need to do to be one of those people. Don't give up no matter what.

I'd still put in my plug for finishing school - like I said in another thread, it won't make you successful by itself, but it'll help hold some doors open for you that might be shut otherwise.

But perseverance is king.

Originally posted by aspiral
normal stress:

b>
- searching for a decent day job but don't find any, job situation is going straight to hell, and the worst thing is i'm not interested in boring IT jobs at all!

a>
- seeing other people smoking everywhere and smelling the damn cigarettes! (it's only a week without smoking now :D)

a> try the book Endlich Nichtraucher from Allen Carr it works. after reading it you will smile when you see somebody else smoking.

b> tip from my life: who cares if you do IT if you are going to at your own biz anyway? get a job which is fun! I do guideing for tourists to strengthen my english. One of my other goals. I am happy at work, all the time.