How hard do you work? Do you work on your game daily? 5 days a week? all 7 days? How many hours per day? Any hours that you like/ not like to work? How many times do you check your e-mail in a day? Is your PC connected to the net when you work? Do you browse/IM/chat sporadically or have set times for it? Does browsing during your work affect its quality? Do you listen to music when you work? Why? Why not? Do you plan before you write your code? Do you plan mentally? Jot them down on paper?

Let me answer the above questions myself. Only the past few days I have been working pretty much all hours. I am trying to notch a prototype I'm taking home (to India) to get a few artist friends interested in contributing to my game. Not a day goes by when I dont think about my game but I dont necessarily code. I dont write much code on paper although I roam thru my house incessantly mentally writing the code. I'm on a dial-up un-metred connection and I've noticed when I keep it connected, I am IMming, checking e-mail, checking new posts on this forum! :) or browsing sporadically - these affect my work. When I'm not working on something intricate, I turn on the music, else its off.

There you go. Will be nice to know your work style and learn from it.

Well I'm not going to say I have the best practices, but I normally work on the game every weekday evening between the hours of 9pm and 2am. I usually do all my websites during the day or right when I get home from work so I’m usually bored with them by the time I start coding. It takes me a while to change gears, but once I’m in coding mode it takes something major to get me off track.

I always plan before I code, making Visio diagrams of my class structure or sketching it out on a yellow legal pad. I also try and write out some of the interface definitions so that I can take a stab and having useful names for my functions as well as being able to use it as a tool to walk through the code mentally.

In the wee hours of the morning I usually call it quits, but before I quit I write down everything I was working on, and the things I would be doing next if I wasn't going to sleep. Then the next day when it's time to start coding again I know exactly where I left off and what to do next.

Sometimes I get burnt out on coding, especially after a big push to get a major feature in. I'll usually take a few evenings after that to do art related things, like pixelart or concept art for the game. This week has been an exception to that as well as Morgan and I are presenting our project at the university colloquium and we want to have a really good presentation.

I'm someone who seems able to either dedicate almost all my time to something, or almost none of it. I find it very difficult to balance a daily schedule and I have trouble remembering everything I was working on after taking any sort of prolonged 'break.' So, for best effectiveness, I pretty much spend on avgerage about 12+ hrs a day at my computer working on games; either doing programming or various other game-related tasks. On off days it'll be 2-4 hours but I rarely ever take a full day off, else I feel totally lost and frustrated trying to pick up where I left off. For the record, I do like to have one or two games handy that I can start up and play for 20-40 minutes at a time if something is stumping me or frustrating me.

For a little background story: Game development is the only thing I've ever seemed to have a knack at being able to do decently, and so it's the only thing I feel even remotely comportable with. I suffer from narcolepsy (http://www.websciences.org/narnet/) and panic attack (http://www.anxietypanic.com/whatispd.html) disorders. I've worked really hard over the years to deal wth these things as best as possible. Still, I usually can't make it a whole day without taking a two hour nap... and usually the nap comes pretty early in the day... and usually I can't put it off very long. Just ask evilbob-- he's seen me fall asleep under my desk beside my computer while casually working on some simple hardware upgrade. :)

But yeah, my narcolepsy coupled with my social disorder pretty much renders it impossible for me to hold almost any regular job (to top it off, medications for one tend to make the other worse, heh). But here in indie gamedev, I'm in my element and my inherent confidence allows me to effectively deal with panic attacks [what were once daily attacks happen less than once a month now], and my at-home office setting lets me roll out of the chair and take a nap as needed. So I code away, hoping, praying, that I can finally make ends meet and create some semblance of an indepenent life-style for myself. :)

- Air
- Hour 13 Studios (http://www.hour13.com)
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Not that you needed or wanted to know all that.

I have no set schedule, but when I'm involved in a release or a particular problem (code problem) then I can work as much as 16-20 hrs a day for a long stretch. There's no difference between weekends and weekdays for me. I work whenever. I rest whenever. When I'm too tired to code I spend my time composing music, or working on art or other related tasks.

I'm quite a sporadic worker myself. This isn't really surprising since I'm a little bit bipolar. It is one of the reasons why I'm working for myself. I am practicly unemployable. Sometimes I get huge amounts done in little time, sometimes I go large amounts while getting practuicly nothing done. Couple that with the fact that I'm also prone to panic attacks and I have psoriasis (with psoriatic arthritis), a bad day for me can be quite bad indeed. I get work done but in my on time.

I find that I can almost always plan my programming even if I am not actually up to doin it. For a lot of what I write I can do large sections of code just by sitting down and typing because I have planned it in my mind. I only make planning notes for checklists, complex algorithms and (rarely) for Data structures. I actually use a huge pile of a4 sheets of paper wit lots of little notes stored on them as temporary storage. coordinate locations, Values used while debugging etc.
I find a lot of my project deciciions come when I generate a to-do checklist. I usually Create an entirely new one and toss away the old. This means that I actually reconsider the necessity for each thing on the list and sometimes I realise that the game has progressed to a point where one of the items on the old list is now unnecessary.

My work hours vary hugely. I have found myself to be a 9am to 5pm worker some months and a 11pm to 7am in others. Quite often I like to start work only afer everyone in the house has gone to bed, far fewer distractions.

If I'm working at night I will have BBC World News on TV. It makes for nice quiet backing. Sometimes I do lose an hour or two to some documentry on this or that.

I find that Instant messaging doesn't take away too much time. Email is a different story. Usually this is a work thing though. Quite a lot of my time can be spent on business stuff and not development stuff. It still has to be done though.

I've just had one of my longer down/unproductive periods(extended by illness) I feel like I might get my first significant coding in a fortnight done tomorrow (Yay).

I've gotten very little done in the last two months, unfortunately. Currently I've got this fairly lucrative contract gig that will go for another six weeks or so, then I expect to get deep into my game again. Right now, my creative energy's being drained at work pretty regularly.

(edit) Oh, and I've been hip-deep in Splinter Cell after work too :)

Since I have a lot of different projects going, my works seems to be dicated by what I'm working on. If I'm starting a new game, I'll work relentlessly for hours on it, barely able to get off the computer long enough to be a "mom."

After the basics of a program is done and I'm down to doing the little polishing, finding strange bugs, and all those other tedious tasks, I tend to slack off a bit. Working for a few hours here and there. Mainly just putzing around until I get it all worked out. Of course, at any given time I'm putzing around with 3 or 4 different games so it's not like I'm totally worthless.

I tend to do some sort of coding everyday. But there are days when I just don't even want to see a computer. These days are the hardest for me to deal with since I feel guilty if I'm not doing something productive. Ussually I can make myself feel a bit better by doing the housework that has piled up. :)

I listen to music when I'm home alone or everyone else is in bed. Otherwise I'm listening to cartoons or my husbands sony game. (My computer is in the living room..)

Ussually around noon and then again around 4pm I get a bit bored so I either chat on ICQ or browse the web for awhile.

I don't spend a large amount of time chatting on ICQ. And ussually something productive comes out of it.

I have a few sites I like to visit on the web. Ussually they are either message boards where I can see how my players are feeling about my games, or websites such as this that allow me to learn a bit about other developers. And Of course I have to visit nascar.com!

Emails are checked automatically every 10 minutes and can interupt my coding time, since it's ussually a player requesting something, having a problem, or something else I have to actually deal with as soon as possible. I think emails are my biggest distraction.

And such is my life. ;)

I tend to be a night owl, but I'm trying to establish regular day hours. The same struggle I had when I had a job (alternating insomnia and oversleep) I still have now that on my own. It's a little better, actually. I also don't chide myself for "coming to work late" if make sufficient progress during the day. I work about 10 hours a day, but it's broken up between late morning, afternoon, and evening, and certainly not all of it is productive. I find its very easy to realize I've been "twiddling" for the last 90 minutes working on something not crucial to my goals. For breaks I play a game, watch TV, talk with friends, or go to the gym. When I started I was very good about tracking my time on paper, I've slipped a bit since I moved into a new apartment last month and interrupted all of my patterns. This apartment sprung a leak last night thanks to a tenant two flights up trying to hang a picture on the wall by nailing it into the sprinkler pipe. So I got a water view now, you might say. I cut myself slack on the weekends. Some I get in 20 hours, some I get in none, especially if I remember to socialize. I really wasn't fond of my last job, but I think I miss working with people in general. Well, no, that's not correct. I miss goofing around with people by the water cooler. Since I don't bump into coworkers on my way to my bedroom, I gotta force myself out there. I'm even more isolated than before because I'm eating in more often to save money. Anyhow I'm doing my best to discover and implement new habits; it's easy to get trapped in a cycle. I generally listen to music while working. I've recorded half of my CD collection as MP3s, so I have 4 gigs to play through. Right now I'm going through a Tom Petty block and singing along. Probably another good reason I work alone. :) If I'm working on graphics or some easy coding, I occasionally pick something from TiVo that doesn't require any mental energy. Maybe I just do it to have noise in the place. I check email in the morning, and sometimes once or twice later in the day if I'm procrastinating about something else. I get a lot of AIM chats hammered at me during the day, which is good and bad. Good because it keeps me in touch with people, bad because sometimes my friends don't realize that the boss (me) is looking over MY shoulder. When that happens I'll put on my Away flag and get back to work. ;)

Latest game being played: Hitman 2. Looking forward to Splinter Cell when it hits the PC.

My basic pattern revolves around a regular working day starting approximately 0830 ending 1630. If I am groggy I start at 0900 or a bit later. The end of the day is usually fixed, I seldom work after 1700. I have been working by myself like this for a year now. After experimenting with different styles of work (get in at noon out at midnight) this has proven the most effective. Reason leaves work at about 1600 and it is good to make it company. Weekends are off.

During the work hours I have no distractions. In the morning I read e-mail, browse news and take care of immediate bussiness needs. This takes on the average 30min. Sometimes I do a fast e-mail check immediately after eating lunch at noon. No-music, no ICQ, no e-mail programs running while working.

To keep from getting heavy with myself I do regular visits to other developers in the area. These are mostly social calls to check out how their latest project is going. They take roughly half a day every two weeks.

I use extreme programming as a philosphy while programming. Each week I decide the most important things to fix for the week based on my own assumptions and the feedback I receive from the playtesters. I have an overall vision of the project written down, but it is quite short. I used to believe in planning a lot of things ahead, but my confidence as a fortuneteller has dimished. I do have goals, both for the product and the company as whole. I try to review them weekly and start each day by reading them aloud. Keeps reminding me why I am doing this

I use most of the other XP cornerstones: automatic testing, constant refactoring, never doing things ahead of time. The thing I miss is pair programming but I substitute code review instead. I use almost no comments (which again is a change from earlier days) but try to refactor until the code is readable without them. The only exception is markers used in a long refactoring and markers for future improvements. The second kind usually means that I don't feel good about something but don't know how to do it right yet. All magic numbers are marked with symbolic constants with a commong prefix. Even if they are used once (to make it easier to find them).

I work out minimum three times a week and try to make most trips walking for the rest of the time. I think regular excercise is a cornerstone for a productive work habit.