Whenever I am working on any project, game development or other, I find it hard to stay motivated to continue or even start projects. And at times where I do have motivation, I no-longer have the time to work on them. What are your tips for motivation and time management?
I’ll start with two motivational tips:
Do not tell anybody about the project - It is much easier to stay motivated when you aren’t hyping yourself up and are actually working on the project.
Work on implementing features before polish and art - It helps a lot in the early stages of a project to get the dopamine of adding all the features until you have an almost complete project, and by then you have the motivation of having an almost complete project.
In another related topic, I said for motivation I usually focus on the why. You can see a longer form of my response in the original thread:
As for time management, I find it easiest to reserve or schedule a regular time to do something, ideally every day but at least more frequently than once a week. Explicitly setting aside a time that I always use for working on the game allows me to enjoy the other important parts of my life with less conflict. I would like to say that it entirely eliminates the feeling that I should always be working, but unfortunately as an indie who doesn’t make very much money it is sometimes very hard to not have this feeling.
I did prefer this arrangement when I had a full-time job too. Working a little bit more often (ie. most weekday nights) instead of a lot less often (ie. every Saturday) makes it easier to remember the context of what I was working on and makes it more likely that I just do the thing automatically as a habit – instead of having to spend willpower motivating myself into starting it back up again.
That’s what works for me anyway, your mileage may vary.