Let me be blunt from the outset: I despise overtime. Being required to work longer hours over many months is one of the practices I dislike the most in the games industry. It always sapped my enthusiasm no matter how cool the current project was.
The benefits of overtime are short-lived; productivity starts to dip rapidly after the first couple weeks. If you’re going to require overtime at all, it should be for no more than a few weeks at the time. Any longer and you’re just shooting yourself in the foot by decreasing morale, dropping productivity and inducing more mistakes.
The hardest part for me was justifying to myself that I had something to gain by doing longer hours. Losing sleep and sacrificing your personal life were annoying, but it was having nothing vested in the projects (other than components I had produced) which pissed me off. I was working on someone else’s ideas, on someone else’s property, and they would reap all the benefits.
Now I face a deadline (November 1st), and a mountain of work ahead of me. It’s my own little crunch period, and for once, I am not having any difficulty finding the motivation. And no, it’s not because I need money, or because I have to finish this demo. For the first time, I am truly enjoying what I am working on, and that’s because I am vested in it. So my advice to companies out there: if you want to get the most out of your employees, give them a share in the properties they develop for you.
Work Done Last Week
I made really good progress last week, but I fell well short of my goals. The problem was that I easily scheduled two weeks’ worth of work for a single week. I am repeatedly falling prey to one of the biggest shortcomings in the industry: over ambitious planning.
On the plus side, I accomplished all the tasks towards my physics goal for the week. I was productive doing so, and didn’t allow myself to get side-tracked. However, I did not touch any of the tasks for the sandbox framework, which nicely leads me to the next section.
Work Planned This Week
My focus now is solely on the sandbox framework. All the work I did last week will come in handy for this task. This week is an important one for me. Done right, this framework should open up many possibilities and more importantly, be fun to play with. I won’t have an entire sandbox environment completed in five short days, but I want the key tools working. The challenge will be finding the right way to not over-engineer the editor. I don’t want to spend all my time working on the architecture, and have nothing visual to show for it. I want a sandbox environment this week.
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