How do you manage your time? How much time do you normally spend working as an independent game developer? Have you adopted a fixed schedule for your game development work? How do you balance work, learning, socialization and recreation?

I work random hours and as I see fit. This has the effect of me doing no work for one week and working like a machine the next. I call this my high and low work periods. I am the lead artist for my team so at the moment I am waiting for the programmers to rap up a lot of stuff for the first beta test. I am now working on the manual for the game.

The most hours I worked dead straight was 3 weeks solid 10 hours a day. That was when I was creating the 54 game units.

So at the moment there is no fixed hours.

For the next project I plan to plan it out a lot better. I am going to have a time table for each area (maps, game units, interface gfx, etc). I will be working faster on the next project and more time is going to be spent on Gfx. Which is ok with me. A lot of graphics had to be toned down for the 10 to 12 meg full game size limit on this first game. The second game uses the first games engine with hopefully a 4 month production cycle (most of the work will be a graphics overhaul :) plus oil change).

I go for a 1 hour bike ride at 6:00 PM every day as my relaxation. I don't socialize much and most of my time is at home in the bunker. I am a artist so I have 6 projects going at once. But I still provide the goods for the game so the programmers are cool with it. I go for walks in the local bush lands around my city as well

I've adopted a relatively fixed schedule. I am a freelance game artist and do my "real" work for clients (ie. what I get paid to do) along with working on my game between 8 and 6 (8 sounds early, but bear in mind I work at home so I don't have to get up until 7:30.) I guess my learning happens during that time too because, as is obvious from this post, I read forums online a little during that time period. I also work on my game quite a bit on weekends.

Basically everything other than that is socializing. I tend not to do much weekdays (maybe go to a restaurant.) Weekends are generally the only times I get out of the house. Damn, I'm a mole person.

Oh and sleeping; paradoxically, you get more done by sleeping a full night's sleep every night than by staying up late to keep working on your game. If you are rested the time you are awake is considerably more productive than if you are dragging yourself around.

Here (http://www.dexterity.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=212) are some more replies from a similar thread a few months ago.

Dang kretchen, I was just about to post that ;) You beat me to the punch.

Thanks Metatron and jhocking for sharing your work habits with me (and kerchen for the link). As for myself, I find that I'm spending too much time watching TV and surfing the web and too little time working on my games. I'd like to fix that.

One reason why I spend so little time on my games is that I still have a lot to learn about 3D graphics programming. Another reason is that so far I've lacked the modeling tools that I need to create the 3D models for my game, which has limited my progress (I can't work without placeholder art and I don't want to build an engine around somebody else's model format). Now that I've purchased a copy of Lightwave 3D I feel motivated to work a lot harder (I hope the feeling persists). Yet, whatever other reasons exist for my idleness, the biggest reason why I work so little on my games is simply lack of discipline.

I've started work on a little program to keep track of my working hours, like a virtual time card. It should allow me to obtain some useful statistics about my work habits. Furthermore, getting into the habit of checking in and out of work should help motivate me into becoming a more disciplined worker. (I hope I can push myself to finish the program :D - I really hate Win32 programming! :rolleyes: ).

So that's my story. I hope it ends well.

No problem Chronos.

I lack commitment and discipline to finish a long project. But I now work with two programmers in a team. By working in a team we keep each other in a working mode. When I work by myself my projects get nowere. Doing a project just by yourself requires a big chunk of self discipline and I respect people who can do this.

I like short projects. So at the moment I am going to do a short comic book which should take me 3 to 4 weeks part time to complete. Its my own person project and I want to see if I can complete it :).

Interestingly I had the opposite experience. While working as part of a team I could almost feel my motivation bleeding away. Every time we met we invariably ended up playing multiplayer games until the wee hours. Since parting ways with them in September (as working partners anyway; we're still friends) I've completed two freeware games and am putting the finishing touches on my first commercial game.

I think a large part of the problem was distributed accountability. If one person starts slacking they don't think it will matter much because there is a whole team. But if every person on the team does that soon nobody is doing anything.

I've had both experiences and I'll explain why:

I'm an excitable fellow in that I get motivated really easily. We would have get-togethers and I would get so pumped for them that while everyone else was playing their multiplayer games, just their presence in the room motivated me to work harder than ever before. However! When meetings became more frequent and their gamer-habits continued unchanged, even I became less productive.

Later on I learned something new during a second venture: 'teamwork' is something that doesn't happen overnight. Our problem before was that we only met like twice a month (if that) and so the meetings were simply a distraction.. a novelty act while everyone tried to cram everything they could think of doing into a couple hours of time. Most of the time, it takes several weeks of people meeting together on a daily basis for them to finally get over that hump of novelty and more into a daily routine of productivity.

And this goes along with something else I've read about on occasion: If you're going to start a company/project (especially one based on creative output), you're going to have to assume that the first three months are going to be marked by low productivity as the members of the team adjust to a new working environment, teammates, project, etc (especially if they had to relocate to a new area entirely for the job).

- Air

Some info and stuff about the teams I am working with.

January to april 2002 we had random meetings (4 months of very low production). Most of these meetings were just us talking about what game we wanted to develop. We looked at one of my strategy board games I had made. The team wanted a more complex game so we added some more stuff. If we stuck to a simpler product we would of finished a lot quicker. I suggested a nice simple game but the team wanted something with more "content". I still want to make the simple game idea and believe I can make some good sales with it.

Game porduction started May 13th in my books when I hammered out the 60 page design document plus very basic place holder art. We then commenced having "one meeting per week" on a set date and set time. So we have had regular meetings durring the project.

We are now in feburay getting close to the first beta test of the game. Its shaping up to be a good little strategy game. The next game is based on the first games engine with a 6 month production cycle hopefully. A lot of experience has been gained from the first project and I know how to develop the next strategy game clearly.

The comic books I plan to sell at about $1 as a online downloaded book. A experiment of mine.

I have another group of friends that want to set up another business. But they are young like me and we end up playing mulitplayer games. I am helping out by making some art for them, but the motivation is very low in that team. We are 3 months into this team. I only want to help out part time with this group because game development is more fun.

So start up on the teams are very slow.
I measeure my commitment in years as well. I started with the dream of game development 1998. I then started to develop my skills as best I could for the next 5 years. I developed the strategy board game back in 1999 which is collecting dust on the back burner.