How to avoid Burnout/Find Support

Hi,

Some of the motivational techniques that I use are:

1) Choose and stay on a reasonable path of progress, having a general goal in the long term and a daily path which keeps you moving forward. I worked on modding existing games before I learned anything directly about game development. My start was art asset oriented which is easy for me to remain motivated. I tried coding in Java, C#, and now C++. Courses and tutorials were a big help in keeping me motivated because I always felt as if what I was learning was helping me in the long term - step by step. You Need A Plan and Stay With It.

2) Surround yourself with a network of game development friends. It is particularly motivating to work in a team on projects.

3) Pick projects which have you seeing results on almost a daily basis as a reward for your hard work.

Sometimes I watch motivational videos on YouTube.

What I am looking for is the sort of support that one needs to push them to the finish line

Am I discouraging you if I say that there is no finish line?

Take it nice and easy.

Two things that work for me:

aim further than the goal you wanted to achieve. This helps a lot if you have a bad habit of not wanting to finish what you start.

Don't take brakes when you have a flow going, even a small break to check on emails can often lead to hours wasted on the net.

I tend to get burned out, and I've found only two ways of dealing with it - take days off, and get team members, preferably enthusiastic ones.

I get burnt out when I try to accomplish the large, extremely complicated tasks first.

I find it's better to I examine what I need, pick the easiest thing, finish it quickly, then repeat.

Usually what I discover is that the numerous smaller tasks tend to give me a better understanding of how to tackle the harder ones.

If it stops being fun, stop doing what you're doing.

Either your approach needs to change, or your fundamental activity of choice needs to change. One way or another, don't force yourself to endure if you don't really want to.

You alone can decide when you've had enough, and what your ultimate goals look like. Sometimes you need to do unpleasant work to get a job done; but if you want to avoid the work more than you want to get the job done, that's OK.

It is not failure to work on something and then decide to do something different.


Keep that in mind and you should be fine :-)

If this is a hobby then treat it like one. Do it because it is fun.

Be aware that games are more effort than most people expect.

Many people start into a large hobby project and run out of interest; it may be restoring a car, or building a boat, or landscaping a yard. At least with a game you won't have it cluttering your garage for the next 30 years, instead it will occupy only a small part of your hard drive.

There really is no secret to completing a game. There is a lot of work. People work until it is done. That work generally includes eliminating tasks or reviewing the scope of the project to something that can be finished in a reasonable time.

My recommendation is that you start really small. Think about what you can build in 30 days. Try to build it. At the end of 30 days call it done, learn what you can, and move on to the next project. (Don't try to work on that one any more, do something new for the next 30 days.)

I agree with Frob: if it's a hobby, then you should treat it as one. As such, the advice we give you will change if it's a hobby. In this case, treat it like something you do for fun. Are you having fun? That's the question you should answer.

However, if it's not a hobby, then it's a bit different. I'd say that you have to set small goals for yourself in order to feel like you are accomplishing something on a daily basis. I'd also say that there's a lot of things one can do, and it generally varies from person to person.

What suggestions and ideas do you guys have? What keeps you going through your projects?

My biggest problem usually is getting started on a given day, especially if I know there's a huge task to be done. So I tend to keep one or two small tasks around, like something simple to refactor, or any editor-comfort feature that is not working as needed. This encourages me to just pop up visual studio and get going, and once I'm at that point, its not hard to keep on.

Then, as others have said, if its a hobby project and you just don't feel like going on, just take a break, however long it will take. This has happened to me on multiple occasions for I'm really having passion for, sometimes I just need some time off regardless. Some people would take this as a breaking point and kill the project, but I just say to myself "I'll come back here at some point", and it always works out. (Ofc this can lead to huge downtimes in extreme cases like myself, so if you have a better method to continously keep going I would take that; this is just advice for the case where you are literally before burning out - just put the project on halt with the plan on continuing it soon, instead of stopping with it altogether).

Also regarding time to make: Don't think about all the tasks that lie ahead. If I think about the final result, this can surely feel nice and all, but if I think about it in terms of tasks to be done until I reach the final goal, this can quickly kill my motivation. So I tend to think in small portions, what has to be done next and what can be done with the smallest possible effort. Then gradually, step by step it will evolve to the final state, without getting overwhelmed by the amount of work to be done.This is especially important when you start something big - like at the beginning of a game/code project, or when implementing a huge feature.

I agree with the comments about the hobby thing. There's not much wrong in not finishing a project. Most of my projects are unfinished.
With that said, a method for me to avoid burnout is to jump regularly between the tasks, and whenever I get stuck with something, I pick another task instead (I'm not talking about debugging, one must fix a bug if it's jamming the project). This way I can keep the flow mental state.

Another thing that helps me if the program is actually being used (by me or someone else). This is encouraging and pressing at the same time. And in this case, you are forced to set shorter term goals, because of the timelines.

No matter if it's a hobby or professional work of any scale, my method is that I usually try to make the new major feature (or set of features) work in maximum 3 days even if that means a preliminary, not entirely fool-proof or even a placeholder solution (GUI, algorithm etc) which will be fixed/enhanced/completely changed later. This will produce a pretty bad architecture and some ugly hacks (actually the code looks like a prototype, since the my method is more like prototyping), but usually either I'm the only one who will ever gonna work with the code or I refractor the code from time to time. Also with more and more projects behind me, the better architectures I will begin with and less likely I will need architecture refractoring.

I can't imagine starting a project that won't have a usable/playable 0.0 version in a week's time...

Take a big big sheet of paper, painter style, on the left write start, on the right write your goal, and try to figure out the bare minimum to go from start to your goal (will likely branch and merge back), then follow that to the letter without constantly changing technologies on a whim, you're better of sticking with something subpar than switching to something better as long as the former "will do" for your goal even if it's not optimal, you'll learn more that way and what you've learnt will help you make other décisions for future projects.

Do try to solve EVERYTHING (to maximise your own potential) but also DO STOP trying to solve something after a reasonable amount of time was spentn reasonable time depending on the task, if you're stuck on a bug, look for a couple hours, if nothing comes up, ask for help, if instead we're talking about designing a large system, give it a few days alone before asking for help.

Release something, no matter how shitty it is, as early as possible, and once that's done keep a "my project must be releasable at a no worse state at any given time", sticking to this will help you avoid technical debt pretty naturally as you won't put down bugs for later while working on the next cool feature.

Physical exercise. Energy exertion. Take a sabbatical. Revitalize. Renew your mind. Make it feel new and exciting again.

For one of the crunches I found that thinking capabilities recede to zero. If you think that its not pushing any further, but your manager thinks its possible, then rather take a 10 -30 minutes break. If its overloading in the wee-hours then just sleep when if you need. If the burnout is causing a level of unfavorable pain which is mental or physical, just pause everything.

No manager is gonna stop you from taking a power-nap during a burnout. But if you take a complete day off and other don't then its not really appreciated and can go to the unofficial records.

Passions for games is the first thing that gets destroyed if there are too many crunches and burnout.

There are so many professions in the world that use the same skill as developing games but work life balance is perfect bliss. If there were such burnouts in software engineers who are working in the automotive industry or oil industry think about the mistakes developers would make, and how many accidents would have been caused.

Fact fully ,if anything relatively deviant is to be created or innovated its has to take its right amount of time. Time like 2-8 years is what it would take to make a perfect next gen game. Think about the solar powered aircraft, or the fastest Bugatti. Same is the case with games. they take their time.