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.
It’s kind of weird bc im like the opposite when it comes to this kind of stuff. I found myself operate most when I actively tell people about what I’m working on and how far it has been going, and I found myself stuck many times where I’m done with all the possible programming things I could do and making assets is all there is left.
This discussion was also had in witscord : panic told me that this difference in “tell others” vs “not tell others” probably has something to do with whether your problem is doing too much or too little. I’m curious- is your problem doing “Too little”? like, do you find yourself slipping into chilling rather than working type deal? my problem is doing “Too much”, where i replace an old project with a new project and it endlessly continues until certain projects that are perhaps more important never gets done.
That being said, I do agree with @exodrifter above where she was like “make a regular time where you do nothing but this project”. streaming started off as this for me when I was at my peak unemployment - like doing Actually nothing type deal. I was like, “lets do nothing but program and make something useful on the internet or learn for this 4 hours” and then i gained so much motivation DISCIPLINE from it that the “4 hours” became distracting even (i wanted to focus on making and not being under duress)
motivation doesnt last long - its good when you have it but what you really need is like fortitude and discipline. eat regularly, sleep regularly, exercise to build up stamina, it sounds like it has nothing to do with sitting on the computer and developing but it like really does (i should go to the gym i ahvent done this in months). once some base things are set up you should be able to like , shake off the “uguu i want to lie down more” with "ifi dont do this now i will never do this " and defy back pain
Hey, I’m sorry to hear you’re having a hard time staying motivated. It can be really tough, can’t it? Especially when you’re sacrificing your own time. Here are some tips I have.
Make big things as well as small things. But start with small things. Basically, I’ve been doing more game jams recently and it’s been very rewarding because you can put stuff out there for the world to see, quickly. Like a few days to a week quickly. Most of the fun of what we do, in my opinion, is interfacing with another people, so working on tiny projects with a small turnaround time is great. You get feedback (criticism, praise, all sorts of emotions) as well as engagement with something you made.
Work with other people. This is a game changer. It’s hard to do, but if you can meet some cool people to do jams with for instance, it sets up a level of accountability, but also spiritual buy-in with the other person(s) that will make you a lot more motivated. I finally found someone to work on my major project with and it feels so much more awesome to work on now, knowing I’m not alone. But you can work with people on small stuff, too.
So generally, for me, projects are a lot of fun where people are involved at all stages- ideation, creation, and presentation to a larger audience. So optimizing for that has made things so much easier and more enjoyable.
I really like Prod’s response and I think it covers anything else I could possibly say. I am the “doing too much” person, or at least I have been for my last few projects. Once a problem sinks its teeth in me, and the problem feels surmountable, I need to tell people about it or else I won’t stop working. Frankly, I could use a little more discipline, because I can be hitting the sauce in Godot for upwards of 7 or 8 hours depending on the day, and as much as I love game dev, that is not a healthy balance of time for a hobby, even for an aspiring professional endeavor.
And I’ll state this again- having consistent sleep, relative stability, a little exercise or movement (I like doing yoga a few times a week recently), don’t have people or rituals in your lives that you feel draining. Hey, easier said than done, right? My current 5-day-a-week commute sucks eggs. But we do what we can.
