Chasing Indie: The Troubles of Student Game Development

First things first; my name is James Grey, and I study Games Technology at the Manchester Metropolitan University. I am also making games as part of Industrial Gameworks, a small indie company comprised of students and enthusiasts.

I have decided to blog about my experiences of learning and developing games while also trying to earn a degree, hold down a part time job and maintain my social life (mainly my student levels of alcohol consumption).

It's a lot to balance, and I spent the last year completely doing it wrong, averaging 4 days off a month and focussed on earning money working part time as a doorman. I would get home at 3am, boot up my computer and code into the early hours of the morning. Throw in assignment deadlines and drinking, and needless to say, this lifestyle was not sustainable. Ultimately I burnt out hard and ended up in hospital with exhaustion. Not surprisingly, no fun was had and I strongly advise against this.

As the wise Gabe Newell once said; "Time is our most valuable resource". For most of us, our lives will get in the way of our projects. We dont get paid for this, we do it for the love. And there are only 24 hours in a day. It's just not enough! But making games is like a drug, so the dedicated among us will sacrifice parts of our general day to day existence in order to make time for this addiction. It is usually sleep that takes the hit, and the repeated sleepless nights take their toll.

So what can we do about it? I mean, we can't exactly make more hours in the day. For me, after my ending up in hospital (genuinely concerned I was dying), I realised I had to make concessions. I quit my part time job that ate up my days off. I mean I don't exactly enjoy drunk people trying to punch me in the face, so was quite glad to see the back of it. I am poorer for sure, but now I actually have time to focus on prototyping. Another realization was that it's incredibly hard to do everything by yourself. At some point you are going to have to work with other people.

And that's probably what I will talk about the next time I feel compelled to write things! 

What do you guys think? How do you juggle everything and find that balance?