Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Spare time development?

Project TB revision history for the past two months
(don't mind the broken Finnish)
My game development projects can be characterized as a spare time endeavour. But what does that mean in practice when there are two small kids (0 and 2 years) and a regular job as regular responsibilities? Well, the revision history on the right says a lot (don't mind the broken Finnish, those words just stand for January, December and November). The dates and times show moments when I've done at least some changes to the project.

Not that I'm assuming this to be particularly interesting for a random reader here's a breakdown of the listing that contains the 50 revisions committed in 31 sessions divided into four categories according to the time of day in which they occurred:


Early MorningDay time napEveningOther
Sessions18544
Revisions219911

As the 0 year old came into the picture I took a new habit of going sleeping very early, and accordingly I've sometimes waken up very early. If I've then had the energy I've done something with my project. This is evident in the big number of early morning sessions, although as can be seen from the table too, the sessions have usually been a rather short ones with only one revision committed per session if even that.

The second most common session time is the day time nap. What better time to work on a project when it's weekend and the bigger kid is having a nap?

The third type are the evenings, which are slowly getting back and possibly replacing the mornings again.

The fourth time category is "other" times. There have been two occasions when I've had the possibility to do stuff with the project while the 2 year old has been in the kindergarten for a 2,5 hour visit, and two other special situations when I've had some free time to spend on the project.

So what was the point of this? I dunno, I guess I'm a geek who likes statistics. And the listing also goes to show what a hobbyist game programmer's time schedule may look like: even though I currently have quite a good flow and motivation for working on the project(*), the time that's possible to spend on it is still pretty limited.

(* Can't help but admit that a couple of weeks ago I also got yet another idea I'm starting to feel an urge to build a proto for. This in practice would mean a pause for this current project, which could be justifiable due to the simplicity and assumed ease of developing and finalizing the other project, but still the prospect of having multiple projects on-going is... uff... pretty daunting 😯)