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A day in the life of a double developer
Continuing where I left off in the first post, this one describes a typical day working full-time in the games industry (programming for Luigi's Mansion 2) while also making my own indie game.
8 Min Read
Welcome back to reading about my life as a double developer - one part Game Industry, one part Indie. As requested by the commenters of the previous post, today I'll illustrate exactly what it's like on a day to day basis trying to work on two games at once. *SPOILER ALERT* It's pretty hectic. But nevertheless, here we go!
The majority of the work I do for my indie game is programming. I can't do art or music, so those are out. Thankfully I'm able to switch gears a bit to do the game design, which is great for a bit of a break from programming. But when it comes down to it, programming is the meat and potatoes of my work. But to be honest that's alright, because I like programming! I like working my magic with code and having games come to life!
Of course, here's the kicker: I already do 8 hours a day of programming at my day job (gameplay programming at Next Level Games). Now I don't have the exact stats for what I'm about to say so take this one with a grain of salt, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that when most people come home from work they don't tend to jump right back into doing what they were just doing all day!
So the real question is: on average, how many hours per week do I spend programming? Including the 40 hours per week at NLG, I'd estimate it's somewhere around 80. Now that number probably seems a bit incredulous. After all, that means I'm working the equivalent hours of 2 full-time jobs. However, if you're thinking that, you're forgetting one thing: that's only the programming I do. My actual responsibilities for my indie game extend even beyond that.
Now in actuality, I just jumped past 2 and a half years of developments that led to the slightly out of control situation that I'm in now. When I started, it wasn't nearly as hectic as it is now. In fact the history of how it started as some tinkering and prototyping on evenings and weekends and became what it is now could probably be the subject of another blog post (perhaps my next one), since it's pretty informative.
But the topic today is how do I manage a full-time job with NLG with what is essentially a full-time job of my own on the side. First off, NLG is really due some of the credit here since unlike a lot of developers they don't encourage working overtime. Obviously sometimes it's unavoidable, but the vast majority of the time I'm able to get home at the same time each day and get down to work on my indie game. In contrast, the standard working conditions at many other developers would immediately make what I'm doing impossible from the hours I'd have to work alone, not to mention the fact that they probably wouldn't allow it anyway.
Now to explain how I manage my time between these two jobs, let me illustrate how an average weekday goes for me:
4 am - Wake up. If you thought I was going to ease you into my schedule, think again. It's brutal from the get-go. And if waking up at 4 am wasn't bad enough, I've had to explore inventive ways of waking up without waking my wife, who obviously isn't so keen on waking up to the alarm at 4 in the morning. So far, setting up an alarm in the next room seems to work well, since I'm a lighter sleeper than she is.
4:05 am - Try to remember why I'm even awake, let alone what I have to work on. A cup of tea and some bright lighting in my study room tend to jolt me back into coherence.
4:05 - 4:30 - Catch up on e-mails/messages. Here's one of the insidious, non-programming tasks I mentioned that has snuck in over the years. Since I can't do art, I had to contract an artist. She e-mails me questions, comments, assets, etc. and I have to respond in a timely manner if I hope to keep the asset generation rolling. Same thing for audio. And ditto for all of the other contributors on the project. Now it's not that I don't like taking on the role of a producer; it's actually not a bad change of pace. But when I have programming tasks looming in the background, it can be a bit stressful
4:30 - 5:00 - Play the game. Another addition to my workload courtesy of a game in production involving numerous contributors is new things get added to the game that I need to test. Whether we're talking about new animations, new audio assets, or new levels created, I need to make sure it fits the game and it's fun. I also need to make sure they didn't expose any crashes in the code due to false assumptions I may have made.
5:00 - 6:00 - Often this hour block is spent trying to fix obscure crashes or memory leaks detected by my automatic tester. I have 3 machines running the game overnight to catch weird crashes, and they're pretty good at it. Too good for my liking, actually, since I'm constantly bombarded by some pretty bizarre crashes!
6:00 - 9:00 - Here we finally get a nice block of programming. Some time is lost trying to remember what I was in the middle of the night before, but by and large this is a very productive block. However, generally this time can only be spent on bug fixes, small changes to functionality, or light experimentation. If I get involved in anything too deep or complex, by the time I come home from work I'll have lost my groove and have to remember all of the complexities that I worked on. I'm not saying I never work on large systems at this time, but historically it hasn't proven the most fruitful for me.
9:00 - 9:30 - Bike to work. Although this seems like an irrelevant part of my schedule, it's actually often very crucial and underscores a very important lesson I've learned: squeeze the most value out of your time that you can. Since I obviously can't do programming, testing, or really much else during this time, I use it instead to sort out design issues that I'm contemplating. Or if I've run up against a tricky programming problem and need some time to think out a solution, this is a great time to let it stew instead of diving into the code before I'm ready. Plus it also helps break up the day, which is why I like doing a bit programming before work, and a bit after. The exercise is a nice change of pace.
9:30 - 5:30 - This is the time I'm at my day job at NLG. Aside from resuming a bit of pondering over my lunch break that I didn't get done on my bike ride, there's not too much of interest here since it's the same experience everyone has with their day job.
5:30 - 6:00 - Bike home. Same as above.
6:00 - 7:00 - I'm able to squeeze an hour of programming in here while my wife graciously cooks dinner for me! Usually this is spent finishing off what I was working on in the morning or getting started on what I was thinking on my bike ride.
7:00 - 8:00 - Dinner and a bit of quality time with my wife.
8:00 - 10:00 - And we're back at programming again. The goal here is to get far enough along on what I'm currently working on so that I'll be able to finish it up the next morning.
10:00 - 4:00 am - Try to get enough sleep to not be too out of it the next morning!
So there's an average weekday for me. Obviously a lot of those times are ballpark and subject to the exact demands of the individual day, but it should give you a general idea of how I balance my time between the two jobs. Now I was used to getting only 4 hours of sleep a night while in university, so the 6 hours of sleep I get now actually seem pretty good.
After reading all this, you might think that I'm either a masochist or have a crazy love of programming. But the truth of the matter is, I just love making games! The rest, as they say, is just details.
Oh, and just in case you were thinking, "well what about the weekend schedule?" that one is simpler: programming. That's my main focus on the weekends, since weekends are generally the best time for me to set aside large blocks of un-interrupted time to implement the more complex and time-consuming systems in the game.
So there we have it, a typical day in the life of a double developer. Now although I explained how the schedule is broken down, I obviously didn't go into the ramifications of doing this, such as:
Do I experience any conflicts of interest dividing my time in this way?
Where does free time fit into the schedule? Especially since playing games is valuable research for game developers?
Does the work I do at my day job suffer as a result of lack of sleep, energy, etc.?
Well expect the answers to those questions and more in the upcoming posts! And be sure to leave a comment, I'd love to hear what you have to say and answer any questions you may have!
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