Reflecting on the lessons learned while making an indie game part-time. Finding the time and motivation, despite overworking. A spotlight on mental health, neurodivergence, and what this all means.
Making games is difficult. And turns out, making a game part-time while keeping your full-time job can get even more difficult. It’s how a lot of people try to make their way into games -- hold on to some source of steady income while building up the experience. In fact, it’s exactly what I’ve been doing for the past few years, and I wanted to write an article to compile some of the lessons I’ve learned.
Though there’s a lot I wish I had known before I started, this article will focus on a very narrow subset of that. It’s a fairly personal article that looks at overworking, burning out, and productivity through the lens of mental illness; hopefully this will provide a few thoughts that you might resonate with.
So, should I start as a part-time indie?
idk, maybe… probably?
Whenever I meet indie veterans and explain my situation, I'm always told the same advice: “Keep your job and don't go full indie”. In a tumultuous year(s) filled with layoffs and funding drying up, it's a little bit scary to simply make the leap into indie games.
When thinking about this from a business perspective, part-time comes with one key advantage -- you're operating with zero development cost. Projects are often planned based on how much time it will take and how much money is available to keep team members fed until the game is complete (and can be sold to finance the next project). Working part-time might give you the opportunity to take on riskier projects, and focus on building key skills and exploring what you enjoy most in game dev.
That being said, “zero development cost” may be true from a business perspective, but there are still other costs to consider.
Okay then, how do you find the time?
hahaha (time for a big tonal shift that I simply lack a proper transition for)
This is an impossible question to answer. You either need to take time out of your life (i.e. leisure time, maintaining relationships, hobbies) or take time off from work. There’s practically no way to maintain work/life balance when you decide to pile on hours of part-time work, no matter how much you find fulfillment from the labor. Your body just simply needs the rest.
Still, there are some things you can do to help with that balance. For instance, I try to compartmentalize different types of tasks for the weekends vs after a day of work. During weekdays, I prioritize short-term tasks like gathering game design references or sketching UIs. The weekends are when I go through programming tasks or tackle more ambiguous design problems (which makes sense for me because I’m a software engineer in my full-time job).
It’s also important to remember that part-time pacing is both slow and non-linear. You just can’t do as much when you’re working 0-2 days a week. Deadlines have to be flexible to accommodate for when life just decides to throw you off-track. Every task and every milestone ends up with an uncomfortable amount of padding. Feature after feature gets cut to reduce the scope to something manageable. Priorities get streamlined, so you can reach a point at which you're happy with your work without tiring yourself out.
I won't lie, it’s not exactly encouraging to see so little progress from week-to-week, month-to-month. It also sucks to go back to work every Monday and feel tired (because you spent the entire weekend working). And that’s what makes this question so hard to answer. It’s easy to build resentment with the part-time project, as it’s hard to see progress with such a slow pace. It’s also easy to build resentment towards the full-time job, which is always eating at the time and energy that could’ve been spent on the indie game. It’s just… very hard to avoid some amount of burnout, either on the part-time project or on the full-time job.
Some people find ways to reduce work hours (going to 3 days a week, instead of 5, possibly becoming a contractor instead). Others either have visa obligations or economic constraints preventing them from taking the leap. It all feels like walking on a very, very long tightrope. At some point you'll get tired and you might fall, but you better hope there's a safety net there to catch you.
Okay then, how do I structure things better in the part-time work?
this sounds daunting… but it’s not that scary, right?
Congratulations, you’ve been promoted to producer! (and project manager, designer, artist, programmer, bizdev, etc.) There’s a lot to juggle, and a lot of the project will remain ambiguous for a very long time. It may feel overwhelming at times, but there’s also no direct pressure to get things complete by a certain date.
There are a lot of frameworks out there for planning projects, but instead of arguing for one in particular, I’d encourage you to choose whatever route is best for you. It’s your project after all.
One way to identify a comfortable workflow is by looking at how you work best. To give a very specific example, my brain works in a way where I have a ‘design’ mode and an ‘implementation’ mode. I’ll spend time on an outline of how my scripts roughly interact with one another, then come back the next day and just follow those ‘instructions’ I’ve written. It’s much easier for me to focus on programming when I’m not constantly debating my choices and questioning the validity of my design.
Another way I’ve learned to match part-time rhythm is by keeping my code more consistent. If you’ve programmed before, you’ve probably read a piece of code so esoteric and confusing, only to realize that you were the one who wrote it months ago. I often have a 5-day break between each coding session, and end up spending a lot of time figuring everything out again.
One specific example is how scripts in Unity reference other scripts -- a simple problem that can be solved in many different ways. I started adopting an event-based design pattern, using ScriptableObjects (similar to this), where most interactions will either fire an event or listen to the event. I end up with a lot of ScriptableObjects and a lot of specific subclasses, but it structures my code in a pattern that I can quickly pick back up again.
Whichever workflow you pick will have its own pitfalls, and it’s important to build processes that catch common mistakes and automate repetitive tasks. For example, I will often have a script that listens to all instances of a certain type of an event. That means that whenever I created a new event, I had to go into that script and make sure it references my newly created object. After debugging enough of these issues, I wrote a C# attribute that makes sure the script will automatically include every object of that type as a reference. At other times, it might be as simple as using a renaming tool to quickly duplicate batches of events or installing NaughtyAttributes to make it easier to reference animation parameters.
One last thing to point out is that it’s also important to work on something you enjoy. It sounds very obvious to say, but the project has to mean something to you. When I’m working on Building Relationships, I’m not exactly passionate about puns and sentient structures, but I get so much excitement from developing a world that just feels absurd. It’s easier for me when I can roughly imagine a finished product and work towards that. On the contrary, I struggle with projects that focus on fast-paced action or deep strategy. It’s harder for me to evaluate ‘where’ the project is -- it either feels ‘fun’ or ‘not fun’. And when I’m overworked and tired, everything just feels ‘not fun’.
How do you find the ‘motivation’?
speaking of “overworked and tired”...
There are people out there with unimaginable willpower who will tell you that you just gotta do it. That might work for them, but personally, I happen to be just a little bit too mentally ill to apply that advice. So here’s what I learned about myself and my relationship to labor; hopefully you can find something practical to apply for yourself.
First, I don’t think you need to find motivation. If you’re reading this, you’re probably already motivated enough. That’s different from actually getting yourself to start on the project. A friend of mine told me that writer’s blocks happen only because you’re not equipping yourself with the tools and environment to succeed. I spent a better part of a year trying to understand what was missing, why I couldn’t even get started. Despite having completed weekend projects like game jams, all momentum just dissipates when faced with a more long-term goal.
Along the way, I found myself getting frustrated with this low productivity. It’s hard to feel proud of your craft when you can’t even get anything done. It didn’t help that I happen to have self deprecating tendencies, causing me to spiral further. As progress stagnates, it’s very easy to misattribute this towards a lack of capability. It’s very easy for my self-worth to be affected, and it all takes a while to unlearn.
Frustrated, I thought back to lockdown. How everyone was struggling to get anything done. Back then, some friends and I started Discord co-working using a pomodoro timer to help schedule working and social time (it worked to some extent, then we started disrespecting the clock very quickly). I also started doing some game dev streams on Twitch, silently working while an empty audience listened to my weird song choices.
So I found myself recreating a co-working environment at home: I started streaming with a pomodoro timer on screen to make sure I’m getting up and staying hydrated at each break. It was an artificial pressure, some kind of ambient stress, but I was suddenly able to get something done. Some people find it easy to get into this flow, others (like me) need to build an environment that’s conducive for the flow. Over time, getting into the flow became easier and easier as a habit started to form. Now, it’s just a matter of putting my headphones on and getting a cup of coffee and I find myself making games in no time.
As some readers may have gathered, I suffer from depression and mild ADHD. It took a lot of time to figure out just how much of my productivity and my mood is affected by my mental ailments. I took rough notes: how easily distracted I was, how long I’d been working for, what I ‘felt’ like doing, what I’d already done in the day or week, how differently I worked on a whiteboard compared to on the computer, if I’d taken a walk outside that day, if I was working from home or from a cafe, what my diet was like, if I felt overwhelmed with the workload, what affected my ability to preserve that flow. Over time, a rough pattern started to form -- things didn’t magically become clear, it just got easier to navigate and stay ‘motivated’.
Wow that was a lot…
some closing thoughts
I’ve often felt that these points can seem very obvious in hindsight, yet totally indiscernible to someone starting out. One formative moment for me was a conversation with a mentor through Limit Break about work trauma and processing burnout. I had yet to realize or accept my burnout, but I knew something was wrong. He recounted his moments of burnout -- how he only later realized the role his neurodivergence had played in burning out. It was a moment of vulnerability that I’m still grateful for today. It was a feeling of validation I didn’t know I needed until I felt it.
The indie scene is filled with some of the most creative, generous and kind folks out there. It’s so inspiring to see the passion for the craft and to hear deeply personal stories about what influences their practice. I’ve met and learned from so many people across different categories of “indie”, despite sometimes feeling like an outsider (as I work in tech, ew). Throw a question out there in the void (i.e. Twitter, LinkedIn, Discord), connect with other people on this journey, and suddenly you might find your safety net in this tightrope walk.
