Making video games while making memories

6-month productivity report

I quite enjoy the practice of writing my work hours down. It keeps me accountable/grounded to how much I’m actually getting done. Previously I often had the feeling that I’m working a lot, but without the numbers to back it up, it felt more like satisfying some sort of a workaholism ego than actionable information I could use to improve my life. I’ve been diligently tracking my working time this year and I now have data to do some self reflection on the various styles of living I’ve tried.

A view of my calendar where I track my work hours (annotated with things that happen in-between).

Note that I only write down pure productive hours, so if something distracts me for more than 5–10 minutes (conversations, email, social media), that gets subtracted. If my total is 40 hours, that’s 40 hours behind a computer actively coding/drawing/writing/accounting/whatever, and not the typical 40 hours that an average worker spends in the office doing god knows what. For this reason, I consider 30 hours of actual work per week to be a decent amount for a creative profession. 35–40 is the ideal that I’m striving for, but I don’t feel bad if I don’t make it there.

At the end of each week I round up the numbers for a weekly total. When stacked next to each other, the first 6 months ended looking like this:

Retronator includes working on Pixel Art Academy, occasional blog posts, and other business-related activities. Drawing/learning is creating artworks and other practice not done directly for Pixel Art Academy. Extra was a weekend dedicated to a 48h game jam (Ludum Dare).

Here’s a short breakdown of different living situations I’ve had in these 6 months:

• USA: Sleeping on my friends’ couches, with plenty of time spent in the gym and catching up with old friends. Great for my heart, but hard to focus just on work.
• Slovenia: Visiting my dad and grandparents in my hometown. This is the place where it’s easy to sustain 35–40h/week. We live in the middle of nowhere with no social life in sight (besides family visits), so there are practically no distractions in way of work. My life there is super structured, but it also means the days and weeks and months become a blur of sameness that gets lost in the memory of time.
• Eurotrip: This was my big adventure this year, a month spent on the road visiting indie developers as I slowly made my way from Slovenia to Sweden. It was the complete opposite of Slovenia: little to no stability of work hours, but many memories made on every step of the way.
• Spelkollektivet: My new home in the countryside of Sweden, Spelkollektivet is the biggest coworking and coliving space for game developers. It’s a mix of high inspiration from all the creativity around you, but also full of social opportunities that don’t necessarily translate to pure productivity. With good discipline, 35–40 hours is achievable. Without it it’s easy to spend more time with people than planned. It’s OK though. People are why I decided to come here in the first place, so relaxing my ambitions — at least temporarily — feels right. It’s one of those things that I probably won’t say on my death bed (that I wished I worked more and spent less time with people here).

Some of the moments shared on my Instagram account.

In the end it’s all about figuring out what makes me happy and setting priorities to match that. The reason why I want to work so much is that I’m happy when I made something exist at the end of the day that didn’t when I woke up. It’s very important for me that it’s realizing my own ideas though. Working on other people’s dreams in the past always led to burnout. That’s why I strongly believe in life/work balance when it comes to having a job, but I let it slip towards the work extreme as a full-time solo dev. If I end up spending the whole day on my game, I am grateful for the energy to do so.

On the other hand, I have many checks in place that make such stints of high productivity healthy. I exercise/do sports literally every day. Healthy mind in a healthy body and all that. I do gratitude practice at the end of the day, recognizing how insanely lucky I am to be able to work on my game. I don’t take things for granted. I also listen to my wishes and go ahead and realize them. If I wish I played more video games, I will open up my evenings to do that. Trying to bottle up such cravings was always a good recipe for procrastination, essentially wasting time I could have just spent playing.

Finally, it’s important for me to make memorable experiences and will occasionally prioritize that over work. US visits and my Eurotrip are great examples. Ideally I mix the social and adventurous components with work (pure vacation longer than a week or two make me itchy), but I am happy to leave the computer behind for a while and put people in first place. That’s why Spelkollektivet (and previously Hacker Paradise) work so well for me. They are places where high productivity and a rich social life full of diverse experiences are simultaneously available. It doesn’t mean you can have both at the same time and often you will feel conflicted choosing between the two (FOMO is real). But they are both there and with good discipline you just need to dial your priorities to the level that makes you happy.

Thank you for reading Practical Pixels, my very occasional ramblings from a life of developing Pixel Art Academy. This article was brought to you by my patrons, including Reuben Thiessen, qinapses, Jeff Chang, … (dot dot dot), Robert ‘Pande’ Kapfenberger, Lou Bagel, and Cassian. I am so grateful to have you come along on my journey!