{"id":358,"date":"2010-01-15T12:29:23","date_gmt":"2010-01-15T17:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/?p=358"},"modified":"2010-01-15T12:29:23","modified_gmt":"2010-01-15T17:29:23","slug":"working-harder-not-smarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/2010\/01\/15\/working-harder-not-smarter\/","title":{"rendered":"Working harder, not smarter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Self-improvement goal #1: Working harder on a consistent basis<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To the surprise of exactly no one, games don’t make themselves. Games are the result of a lot of blood, sweat, tears, teeth-gnashing, and overall agonizing labor. To start, build, and finish game is a task that isn’t easily done with half-hearted dedication.<\/p>\n

One of the biggest hurdles I’ve yet to fully overcome as an independent supposedly needing-to-be self-sufficient game developer is the skill to consistently be working hard on a game. Even now after six months on focusing on game development as my primary employment the rollercoaster that is my work ethic is still quite volatile. There are days were I easily can work 12 hours straight and there are other days where I’m lucky to achieve 1 hour of good work. The inconsistency hurts because it prevents accurate scheduling, its disruptive to people I collaborate with, and overall it just sucks to go through a day accomplishing little.<\/p>\n

So my biggest goal this year is to develop this skill of hard work over consistent periods. So far over the past week and a half of 2010 I’ve tried to follow the advice I heard from Matthew and Steve from Flashbang<\/a> and their development practices as discussed at last year’s GDC Austin<\/a>. Regularly scheduled work periods and actually maintaining a commitment towards those scheduled periods. Single-tasking. And trying to respect the separation between work and play.<\/p>\n

Additionally I’m attempting to utilize tools to enforce work through peer pressure. Greg Wohlwend of Intuition<\/a> and Mikengreg<\/a> has set up a Ventrilo chatroom (Tigvent<\/a>) that goes a long way towards recreating the collaborative office environment for people working alone. My renewed focus on blogging here is partially to force me to remain relevant and engaged in game-making and the community. And I have a few other projects up my sleeve that I want to reveal that will also ensure such focus going forward in 2010.<\/p>\n

So there’s my self-improvement goal numero uno for 2010. Now all I need to do… is actually do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Self-improvement goal #1: Working harder on a consistent basis To the surprise of exactly no one, games don’t make themselves. Games are the result of a lot of blood, sweat, tears, teeth-gnashing, and overall agonizing labor. To start, build, and finish game is a task that isn’t easily done with half-hearted dedication. One of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[249,109,248,247],"class_list":["post-358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-believe-in-me-who-believes-in-you","tag-game-development","tag-self-improvement-2010","tag-work-practices"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":360,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions\/360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamedrinkcode.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}