独立开发者该如何有效平衡工作与生活

作者：Alex Wawro

工作与生活的平衡仍然是游戏产业中一个永恒的话题。许多开发者觉得有必要在晚上和周末继续工作，而研究显示加班有可能带给游戏结果不利影响。

即使如此，许多游戏制作人仍然会按照自己的意志而加班，围绕着带有薪酬的工作和自己的个人项目进行安排，同时也尽可能地享受着自己的生活。

Luis Antonio便是一个典型的例子；当我在2013年的GDC大会上见到他时，他告诉我自己正作为《见证人》的美术师，之后我发现他也开始致力于自己的游戏《十二分钟》，这是一个与其白天工作有点相似且充满激情的项目。

并不是只有他一个人在这样做。就像我在Gamasutra上所接触到的一些人也是如此；他们中的大多数人都曾为高预算的工作室工作过，但之后都选择了独立开发，并且都觉得有必要同时致力于2个（或以上）全职项目。于是我便好奇他们到底是如何做到的，并且这么做对他们有何影响？

负面影响

Antonio告诉我：“我并不想成为一个隐士。”我想很少有开发者会愿意这么做。

同时，他也不想停止创造自己的游戏。《十二分钟》的游戏概念已经在他的脑子里转了好几年，但他却不相信开发者同仁能够与自己一起完成这款游戏（游戏邦注：Antonio曾经是Rockstar London的美术师，之后又称为了育碧的首席美术指导）。

在他开始致力于《见证人》时，他受到了启发并开始学习Unity编程去创造《十二分钟》，但首先他必须放弃所有对家人，工作或这一充满激情的项目不重要的事。

twelve_minutes(from gamasutra)

Antonio告诉我：“我决定利用所有空闲时间去开发这一项目；这意味着与家人和朋友相处的时间不会受到影响，而玩游戏或偷懒便需要被移除。我与妻子一起制定了计划并决定每天更早起床并在前往办公室前先工作1个小时，在午休时间再工作一个小时，并在晚饭后工作到自己觉得已经超负荷时便停止。”

他已经这么生活长达2年了。他希望能够继续保持这样的生活，并建议其他面对同样情况的开发者能够始终保持理智，即专注于完成自己的最终目标而避免陷入功能蔓延中，同时也不要放弃享受整个过程。

他说道：“如果我感到精疲力尽并且不能再工作，那么我便不会强迫自己。我将好好放松并享受自由时间。过去我一直坚信友谊始终都不该出现在生活工作的前面。直到有一天，当我需要别人的支持时，我才意识到朋友的远去。”

现在他懂得花时间与朋友和家人相处，同时也会参与像徒步旅行和冲浪等活动。但这些都不会占据太多时间；Antonio和其他具有同样生活方式的开发者都能够正视这对于他们个人生活的负面影响。

设计师Teddy Diefenbach说道：“我仍然会为个人生活挪出空间，但这通常是与游戏制作结合在一起的。”白天他是作为Heart Machine团队一份子致力于《Hyper Light Drifter》，但在空闲时间他也致力于自己的项目：即受到《武士刀》启发的多人游戏《Kyoto Wild》。他说道：“我的心态通常都是‘工作到真正需要休息的时候，’然后我便会停下来休息。这让我必须保持高度的警惕感，因为我并未设置固定的休息时间。”

KyotoWild_Dojo(from gamasutra)

Antonio也表示认同，并强调负面影响“太累人，太伤感情和身体，”所以不可能持续较长时间。他的白天工作是排在自己的项目之前，他计划继续参与Jonathan Blow以及《见证人》的工作人员所决定的下一件作品，他也希望能够通过发行《十二分钟》而赚到足够的钱让自己能够全职创造属于自己的游戏项目—-就像《Cult & Daggers》的开发者Rod Humble在去年卸下Linden Lab的首席执行官职位后所做的那样。

与Antonio一样，Humble也是一个在过去一边利用空闲时间创造着自己的项目，一边在白天为大型游戏公司工作的独立开发者。在作为艺电的制作总监时，他主要负责监管像《模拟人生3》等游戏的开发过程，他也曾在2007年和2010年分别创造了《Marriage》和《Last Thoughts of the Aurochs》。对于他来说，在晚上工作是件幸福的事。

Humble告诉我：“奇怪的是，在完成一天的大型AAA级游戏工作后，我会想要在晚上创造自己的游戏以放松自己，并且这种方法通常都是有效的。不过我认为自己在白天工作时的表现更好。”因为致力于自己的项目会让他在制作循环过程的休息期间也处于兴奋状态。

独立游戏设计师Lisa Brown也是这么想的；她是在Insomniac待了6年后于今年3月变成独立开发者，而在之前的工作中她发现“自己的项目成为了纯粹的休闲方式，这让我能够探索在全职工作中所触及不到的游戏领域。”

在夜晚和周末工作让她觉得自己就像沉溺于某种嗜好的人，即那些愿意探索一些奇怪的理念或尝试具有创造性的解决方法的人。她非常欣赏game jam中的开发者们，并努力成为他们中的一员以维持自己创造游戏的热情。

她补充道：“因为我拥有一份可以轻松获得收益的工作。在完成一整天的全职游戏创造工作后回到家继续花一整夜去创造游戏可能会让人觉得不利于身体健康，但是因为我是带着一种业余爱好者的态度去创造自己的项目，所以我并未屈服于这种强迫观念。”

你是否将游戏开发整合到生活中，或者是围绕着游戏开发去创建生活？

Humble似乎在自己的项目中找到了一种类似的安慰感。他说道：“对于一款AAA级游戏，我们可能需要花费2年以上的时间才能完成游戏，而我自己的游戏只需要1周至几个月的晚上便能完成。”但现在当他全职致力于自己的游戏时，情况也发生了改变。

Humble解释道：“我一整个早上都在编写代码然后去接孩子，并在下午时间又花1，2个小时编写代码。晚上的时候我会进行一些游戏的美术工作或创造游戏音乐或进行市场营销活动。”

Diefenbach拥有类似的安排，在花了一天时间为《Drifter》设计工具和系统后，他会在晚上专注于创造游戏图像和音乐。

这引出了一个非常现实的问题：如果你同时致力于多个项目中，那么你该如何有效安排时间呢？在某种意义上，拥有一份在大型工作室中的全职工作能让事情轻松点，因为这能够让你分清主次：专注于创造能够带给自己薪资的工作，然后在有时间的情况下再做其它事。但是当你同时致力于自己的多个项目时，就像Humble和Brown那样，事情就会棘手很多。

Brown说道：“现在我是一名独立开发者，我一直在努力适应我过去在空闲时间所做的事突然成为真正的工作这种变化。并不是因为它们变得不再让人兴奋，而是因为全职致力于自己的项目非常具有风险性。”

所以你该如何抵御风险并避免毁于自己的项目中？每位开发者都有自己的解决方法，而我所交谈的开发者都提供了一些宝贵的建议。

很多人建议你应该学会避免时间浪费。Antonio便拥有自己的时间表，这让他既能够每天花费至少一个小时于自己的项目中，同时也拥有足够的喘息空间。

Humble说道：“我同意Luis的每日安排，这能够推动事情的向前发展。习惯是个关键点。就像在日常生活中我们很容易放弃看电视，并将时间花费在游戏制作中。”

但你必须避免伤害自己或身边的人。Brown便坚持进行适当的休息，Antonio的时间表也表示他并未一直专注于工作中，这也会推动着他停下来休息。

他告诉我：“一开始我总是不会停下来休息。我会在所拥有的每一秒空闲时间工作，根本不会关心其它事。”他需要找到一种能够平衡工作与和妻子，刚出生的女儿在一起的生活，所以对于他来说与妻子一起制定一份日程表是非常有效的方法。

Antonio说道：“基于这种方式每当我不得不工作的时候我也不会再感到内疚了，我不会超过设定；如果我这么做，妻子也有有权利要求我停下来休息。这能够避免我过度工作而累倒。”

在晚上和周末工作同样也意味着你必须擅长于在游戏开发的多个不同阶段进行切换。我所交谈过的任何人都表示不知道如何轻松做到这点；你只需要做到在短时间内发挥工作效率便可。

“清楚何时停止工作”

为了处理这一问题，Antonio表示自己已经学会做记录并将其保存在Dropbox文件夹中，同时将其同步到自己的每一台设备上。所有的想法都会先进入Dropbox然后再呈现出来。Humble也采取了类似的做法，并且更具有策略性。

Humble说道：“我会在车上或床边准备一本小小的笔记本。在开车后或睡觉前/醒来后你都可以记下一些设计理念，以防忘记。”他还说道，写下这些理念还能够帮助你更深刻地记住它们并推动着你落实行动。

但如果你深陷一个特殊问题，那么花些时间忘却游戏事宜便能够帮助你解决这些问题。当Antonio因为一个游戏开发问题而思考了几天后，他便会选择让自己去冲浪休息下。

Antonio说道：“当我待在水里等待着下一股浪潮冲来，并感受着徐徐微风时，所有的一切都将被忘却。而当我再次回到工作中，我便能够清楚地判断自己该做什么。这让我能够以一种全新的视角去看待问题并更快速地解决问题。”

Brown也提供了相似的建议。她说到：“清楚何时停止工作。我认为确保你知道自己想要从项目中获得什么是非常重要的。你可以将其记录下来。”与Antonio一样，她也非常支持确定一个明确的目标并只专注于这些目标。“这能够帮助你明确一个框架，如此你便能够有效判断自己何时偏离了这一框架。”

（ 本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转发，如需转载请联系：游戏邦 ）

Work / Life / Work Balance: Making two games at once, and surviving

By Alex Wawro

Work/life balance is still a rocky topic in the game industry. Too many developers feel compelled to put in extra hours on nights and weekends, even as studies suggest crunching can actually hurt a game’s outcome.

Even so, many game makers still work overtime of their own volition, designing their days around both paying work and personal projects while enjoying as much of a personal life as they can jam into the cracks.

Luis Antonio is a striking example; when I met him at GDC in 2013 he told me he was working as an artist on The Witness, and later I found out he’d started working on his own game on the side: Twelve Minutes, a passion project that bears little resemblance to his day job.

He’s not alone. There are others like him, some of whom I’ve corresponded with while at Gamasutra; most of them have experience working for big-budget studios, but they’ve all gone indie and now feel compelled to work on two (or more) full-time projects simultaneously. How do they do it, I wonder — and what does it do to them?

It takes a toll

“I don’t want to be a hermit,” Antonio tells me. Few developers do, I think, despite some popular preconceptions to the contrary.

At the same time, he can’t stop thinking about his game. The concept for Twelve Minutes has been kicking around in his head for years, but he could never convince fellow developers (Antonio put in time as an artist at Rockstar London and, later, an art lead at Ubisoft) to tackle the game with him.

After he started working on The Witness he was inspired to teach himself enough programming in Unity to make Twelve Minutes, but first he had to effectively give up everything that wasn’t important to his family, his job, or his passion project.

“I decided to use all my free time towards the project; this means that time with family and friends would not be affected too much, but playing games or being lazy would,” Antonio tells me. “I went over the plan with my wife and I set out to wake up early every day and work an hour before going to the office, another hour during lunchtime and, every second day, after dinner, work until I was too tired to be productive.”

He’s been living like this for over two years. He expects to keep it going for at least a bit longer, and advises fellow developers in similar situations to stay sane by focusing on accomplishing their end goal and not getting mired in feature creep (“I only learned the tools I would need to get the gameplay I had designed”) while still trying to enjoy the process.

“If I’m exhausted and just can’t work, then I won’t. I’ll relax and enjoy my free time,” he says. “I used to have a strong stance where I should not let friendships get in front of my life’s work. Until one day, when I needed support, I realized I didn’t have anyone left.”

Now he makes time for friends and family, as well as meditative activities like hiking and surfing. But not too much time; Antonio and other devs living similar lifestyles are very honest about the toll it takes on your personal life.

“I still carve out space for a personal life, but often that has to meld with making games,” notes designer Teddy Diefenbach. He works on Hyper Light Drifter by day as part of team Heart Machine, but in his spare time he’s building his own pet project: the Bushido Blade-inspired multiplayer brawler Kyoto Wild. “My general mindset is typically ‘work until I need a break,’ and then I take that break. This puts great responsibility on me to be vigilant, because I don’t have default times set aside to relax.”

Antonio concurs, noting that toll is “too exhausting, emotionally and physically” to be sustainable long-term. His day job will probably be the first of his projects to ship, and while his plan is to stick with Jonathan Blow and The Witness crew on whatever they do next, he dreams of releasing Twelve Minutes and making enough money to be free to work on his own personal grojects full-time — much like Cult & Daggers developer Rod Humble now does after stepping down as CEO of Linden Lab last year.

Like Antonio, Humble is an indie dev who used to think up side projects while working day jobs at big game companies. As a production executive at EA he was responsible for overseeing development of games like The Sims 3, even as he was producing his own games like The Marriage in 2007 and Last Thoughts of the Aurochs in 2010. For him, working at night was comforting.

“I think the odd thing is after working on big triple-A games all day, I would work on games at night to relax, and it worked,” Humble tells me. “I think I was better at my day job as a result,” because working on passion projects kept him excited about game development during lulls in a big production cycle.

Indie game designer Lisa Brown feels much the same way; she went indie in March after six years at Insomniac, and during her tenure there she found that “side projects became a pure source of leisure, and an ability to explore things about the games space that I wasn’t necessarily going to do in my work.”

Working on nights and weekends made her feel like a hobbyist, someone who could explore weird ideas or try creative solutions without risk. She admires developers who game jam, and getting to be one of them helped sustain her passion for making games.

“Because I had a job there was no pressure to do something that would generate revenue, or press,” she adds. “In hindsight, making games full-time all day only to go home and continue making games all night maaaaay have been perceived as slightly unhealthy… but because I approached side projects with a hobbyist attitude, it did not feel like I was succumbing to an obsession.”

Are you fitting game dev into your life, or building a life around game dev?

Humble seems to have found similar solace in his side projects. “For triple-A games it could take two-plus years to get a game done, whereas my art games could take a week or up to a couple of months in the evenings,” he says; but things have changed now that he’s working for himself full-time.

“I code all morning and then go pick up the kids and code for an hour or two in the afternoon,” Humble explains. “In the evenings I tend to do the game art or make the game music or marketing campaigns.”

Diefenbach has a similar split, focusing on making art or music for his games in the evening after spending his days designing tools and systems for Drifter.

Which brings up a really practical concern: If you’re juggling multiple projects, how do you most effectively budget your time? In a sense, having a day job at a big studio actually makes things easier because it affords you clear priorities: focus on making the game that pays the bills, and make everything else when you can. But when you’re juggling multiple projects on your own, as Humble and now Brown are, things get tricky.

“Now that I’m an indie, it’s been a struggle to resolve how suddenly all the things I used to do for leisure are now ‘work,’” says Brown. “Not because it makes them less exciting to work on or anything, but because it is now very dangerous to work all the time.”

So how do you safeguard yourself against that danger and avoid burning out in your own work? Every developer has to find their own solution, but those I spoke to have some hard-won advice to offer.

One common recommendation is that you pretty much have to train yourself to never waste time. Antonio has his aforementioned schedule, which allows for some breathing room while also mandating that he do at least one hour of work on his passion project every day.

“I agree with Luis about the daily part, just to keep things moving forward,” says Humble. “The key bit is the habit… It is very easy to give up TV as a daily routine, for example, and replace it with game work.”

But you have to be careful not to hurt yourself or those around you. Brown is adamant about taking breaks, and Antonio’s schedule isn’t really meant to keep him focused on work; it’s to force him to stop.

“At the start I was unable to stop. I was literally working every single free second I had, not paying attention to anything else,” he tells me. He had to find a way to balance his work with his need to be present in the lives of his wife and newborn daughter, and making a schedule with his partner was the best way for him to do so.

“This way I don’t feel guilty when I have to work… and I don’t abuse it by working outside of it; if I do, she has the right to ask me to stop,” says Antonio. “This also assures that I don’t exhaust myself.”

Working on nights and weekends also means you’ve got to get real good at seamlessly stopping and starting multiple different aspects of game development. Nobody I spoke to seems to have figured out how to do this easily; you’ve just got to get used to being productive in short bursts.

“The biggest issue in only having a few minutes here and there is to be able to continue where I left off… having to return to a thought process that took me half an hour to get into is sometimes very frustrating,” says Antonio.

“Know when not to overdo it”

To tackle this problem, he says he’s trained himself to be really good at taking notes (“like, ridiculously good”) and keeps a single text file in a Dropbox folder synced to every device he owns. All thoughts go in the Dropbox, to be acted on later. Humble does something similar, though a bit more tactile.

“Just keep a little notebook in the car or by the side of the bed,” says Humble. “After a drive or before you go to sleep/wake up you can scribble down your design thoughts before you forget.” Even just the act of writing them down will help them stick in your head, he says, and push you to act on them.

But if you get stuck on a specific problem, time not thinking about games can help you solve it. When Antonio’s beaten his head against a game dev problem for a few days without success, he’ll sometimes just take a break to go surfing.

“While I’m in the water, waiting for the next wave, enjoying the breeze, it all goes away… and when I return back to work I know what my priorities are,” says Antonio. “This allows me to see the problem with fresh eyes, and solve it much faster.”

Brown offers similar advice. “Know when not to overdo it. I guess one important thing is being sure you’re clear with what you want out of your side project. Like, write it down.” Like Antonio, she’s a strong supporter of setting clear goals and holding yourself accountable for them — and only them. “It helps to frame things,” she says, “so you can know if you’re getting out of hand.” ( source:gamasutra )