A failed experiment in game development

I have too many things I want to do. I listen to a song and want to restart playing piano by covering it. I read a novel and want to start writing fiction. I watch anything about programming and thoughts about building the programming language I prototyped some time ago start to crop back up. Clips of Brennan Lee Mulligan are washed up in my YouTube feed, and I want to run a P&P group. My brother shows me his newest world in minecraft and I want to build an RPG with complicated systems simulating a complex world, ideally in an engine that I've written myself. Of course, I'm never doing anything of that. I lack the focus to do so. At least that's what I've been telling myself.

It's clear that I can't to everything I dream of doing. I've been trying to ignore this by saying to myself that if I just worked a bit more I would get closer to these dreams. And yet I never committed, never actually worked more. At some point in October I accepted that there's an upper limit to what I can do and that I might've reached it. So in November I decided to run an experiment.

The experiment was simple. For the rest of the year, I would work only four days a week and use each Friday to work on a game. My goal was to implement a Doodle Jump clone in a single file. Having a single file meant working without assets and skip writing fancy engine code. Instead of assets, I was going to use pixel graphics and model all entities using implicit surfaces I had started working on this game earlier this year but had abandoned it. This experiment seemed like the perfect opportunity to get back to this idea. I used my remaining vacation days to take of each remaining Friday got to work.

The project didn't get off to a good start. On the first Friday, instead of working on the game, I stayed in bed until 3pm, watching YouTube. I only got up when a friend of mine spontanously invited me for board games that evening, which meant that on this first day I had less than three hours to actually work on that game. Since I had decided to use the game for learning Zig, I spend this time solving a few Advent of Code problems to familiarise myself with the basics of Zig, before I jumped into the project, and set up the project with Raylib to render the first window.

At first I didn't make to much of it. Working full-time worked just fine for me, I just didn't get much done in my free time. Still, it wasn't unusual for me to sleep in on Saturdays, after working for the entire week. So on that Friday, I assumed that my subconsious self thought this was the new Saturday, and was seeking the lazy start I had become used to for Saturday. I thoght that it would take a few weeks to readjust at which point I would traet the Friday as a normal work day, and would work eight hours on personal projects. Unfortunately, it just got worse.

Before I started the experiment, most Saturdays and some Sundays started with YouTube in bed. Now, I also spent each Friday in bed. Sometimes until noon, sometimes the entire day. The weekend kept being as unproductive as it was before. Even if I removed all my devices from my bedroom, I got up in the morning, grabbed my tablet and went back to bed. From there, I spiraled down. Soon, this was true of every morning. I started most of my work days in December in bed, by grabbing my work notebook, getting back to bed, checking my mails and dreading the day. Often I only got up when the notebook's battery was empty. Focusing on anything was much harder. I was constanly tired. And when work was over, and I didn't have anything to do, I just went to bed again. Even though I had more free time than I had had in the last five years, I still didn't get anything done.

I never worked more than two hours per week on my game, usually even less. Through the entire time I continued to dream of writing a blog post about how working four days a week made me more productive, how I build a fun simple game because of it, and to explain how I used implicit surfaces to do so. With each day that I spend in bed, I got more frustrated with myself.

From what I just wrote, you might be tempted to assume that working less caused me to downward spiral. If you did that, you would be wrong.

My last year has been crazy. In 2023 I moved to Hamburg (Germany). In March 2024, I still felt like I didn't know anyone in this city. I definitely didn't have any friends. When I talked about this with on online friend (that I had never met in person until then), she connected me with two of her friends who also live in Hamburg. We met and had a nice evening, talking mostly about board games and other nerd stuff. I'm not super deep into board games, but also in 2023 I lived in Copenhagen for two months. During that time, I've been to the Bastard Café every week. This has been my favourite part of living there. When I told them about this, they recommended me to check out Würfel & Zucker, a board game Café in Hamburg, less than 30min by foot from where I live. I did. Over the next few months I've been there at least twice, sometimes four times a week. It's also where I learned about Blood on the Clocktower, the best social deduction game I know. I've been obsessed with it ever since. And I'm not the only one. This game has a growing community, and a lot of people in Hamburg that are equally obsessed (if not more so). Since then, I have started hosting this game at my place. Both the Würfel & Zucker and Blood on the Clocktower community have led to so much more. Before that, I would call a week full if I had planned two things. In the last quarter I had a time where I had social plans every day for two weeks in a row.

This has been an exceptional change that I'm not grateful enough for, and haven't taken the time to fully appreciate. It has had some dark sides, though. My sleep is fucked. For at least five years, I usually went to sleep at around 21:30-22:00 to get up at 6am every day. To be more socially compatible, I retrained myself to go to bed at around midnight. Too often I came home from hanging around with people after midnight, filled with adrenaline, and not falling asleep before 2am. I've been tired ever since. Getting up in the morning has been a struggle. Since going out more, I took less time to cook proper food and have stopped working out. I completely lost the foundation to work well. And this came crashing when the days grew shorter and Hamburg became the grey city it is for half of the year.

Working less didn't help. The time I've been working hasn't been the problem in the first place. When I took blogging seriously (i.e. the beginning of my 100 days challenge), I had no problems working fulltime, and spending 2-4h per day wrigint a blog post. But as this was during the height of the pandemic, I also had no social life at all. I just worked, and wrote, ate well worked out in the park that was directly in front of my door. It's not that I'm simply missing focus. My life circumstances have changed fundamentally since then. I need to reinvent myself from scratch.