How do you do it?

Someone asked me:

How do you find the time/energy to work on your game and be so active on GDSE AND hold down a ‘real’ job? I love coding, but when I come home from work, I’m beat.

It’s just a passion I have. I enjoy contributing to the game development community and making my game. I love to learn. I love to create. I hope that doing this will someday lead to game development being my ‘real’ job.

Energy is an attitude. If you give yourself the easy option of browsing the internet reddit or watching TV, you’re going to do that instead. Don’t let yourself be lazy. Sometimes the effective strategy is to remove the alternatives (unplug your network), sometimes it’s just pure willpower or even changing your desktop wallpaper. If you do this long enough, it’ll become habit. Let yourself feel bad for being lazy and feel good for being productive.

I’ve done it long enough that productivity is a requirement. If I’m not productive I feel it. That has it’s own pros and cons. It’s important to find a balance that you and the people in your life can be happy with. All of it is easily under your power to do, just make the decision and stick with it.

Exercise regularly. I cycle 8 miles a day, 5 days a week (rain or shine) and I play ultimate frisbee twice a week (read run around a lot for an hour). Cut out soda. Eat healthy food. Mind over body. It’s all about attitude. Healthy body, healthy mind.

Anyway, that’s enough preaching from me. How do I do it? I just decide to do it, then I do it. It’s really as simple as that. Once you learn to do that, you can apply it to many aspects of your life.

How to go from theory to practice?

I was recently posed a question:

I’ve seen your post on gamedevse about the entity component system, I had my share of trying to make one by myself, and though your description is beautiful, I fail to see how to code that. Can you give some example on how to go from theory to practice?

There’s an excellent example of an entity component framework with Artemis. Download and study the source code. It may be confusing at first, but stick with it. Artemis really helped me understand how EC systems worked and I’m sure it’ll help you as well.

By saying it is you first game. Do you mean that you have never programmed anything before? not even like a pong game?

I do plenty of programming. As for games, I’ve made simple little things before, but they were simple enough to be contained to one or a few files. This is the first real game I’ve made. I’ve never done anything in 3D or anything so complex. This is orders of magnitude larger than any programming project I’ve done, game or otherwise. Thanks for the question.