How important do you guys think it is to have passion for the game your building when you are doing it in your spare time (meaning you have another job that is taking up 40+ hour of your week)? I mean the ultimate goal of the project I am on is to be able to build games full time and being paid for it, which would be fantastic, but I am just trying to find a way to get passionate about this game. I mean I already do programming (not game programming) 8 hours a day and while I like that programming I do, I have no passion for the underlying business so when I get home, that last thing I want to do is program on something I no passion for some more. I can remember on other projects I have done when I would be up till 1-2 am coding but it was the passion for that project that allowed me to do that and coding on my current game project I am part of is pretty much the last thing I want to do after work or on the weekend. What do you guys think on this subject?

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[Edited by - Awoken on September 15, 2009 7:28:33 PM]

Quote: Original post by Awoken
Sounds like your fighting yourself. People generally can only be interested in something for so long before they peater out. If you are programming at work and then expecting to program at home for fun, well.... I think you're up against a major wall.

Yea I don't think that is the major wall I am hitting, but diffidently 1 minor problem too. I mean I do web programming in PHP 8 hours a day but was able to also programming a PHP framework in my spare time without any motivation issues. The reason, I think, is that I really wanted to build the framework so it did not seem like a drag when coding it but with this project, it does seem like a drag. Some of the tasks are even similar to what I would want to try, but a lot of them are not really something I want to work on right now (I rather work on more interesting features and once I get those working right then work on the more mundane features that all games have).

It kinda weird too because there is not any specific thing about the game I don't like but something intangible is just not clicking with me and this game.

This may not be pertinent to your issue but then again it may. I've always found, and read time and time again, how important it is to have a working build of your game at all times.

Most of the time you'll see this advice as part of your production pipeline but for me it's always been a motivating factor. It helps to insulate your goals into discrete steps.

You have this functional mass of code and are adding a feature. You code the feature and integrate it. Then you clean up the issues integration caused. It really helps to compartmentalize the tasks at hand and keeps them from becoming this huge dragon you have to laboriously slay.

From a motivation standpoint you get a small bit of payoff at each integration. Objects that were poorly designed get iterated and refactored over time so you don't have to author the perfect system from the go.

^^^
Very good points, all.

If you started out passionate about a game and then later on the passion dies, it could be the game, not you. You may be forcing yourself to design/build a game you no longer like to play. Of course, if you don't have a build to play with, there's no way you can test this theory - hence why the above advice is so good.

Of course, if you still have no passion for building your game after trying some of the above - are you sure you really want to move towards doing this full time?

In my own experience I find that I have almost no immediate gratification from working on games but that does not matter to me, when I set a goal I always complete it no matter what.

I think to be successful you have to have a very high tolerance for the work, one thing which I have mainly learned from all the work I have been doing is that during the planing phase you should try to set your standards as low as possible.

A small feature which seems like it maybe easy to implement could end up taking 6+ months before you know it, it would be better to spend that time polishing a simple game.

Having a working copy is a good motivator however I don't think that would help me in this situation. I have been working with one guy from this new team for about 5 years now and we were working on a idea I really liked (a very simplified hack and slash/RPG) but the team then wanted to switch and make this new idea because they thought it would be better to work on. I agree because first of all I thought I would be fine working on it. I also was at the point where I was saying to myself, I just want to get something done (after trying to do it for 5 years). The more we designed the game, the more and more I don't want to build this game. While I don't believe the game is going to suck, I do believe it is going to be a game I don't care about. I also don't want to start the project and then leave midway through as I would rather have something leaving before any major coding start then midway through, wouldn't you?

Now sure, I could push through and just code for it but I don't think that would be fair to me or the team. For me, I don't want to just push through and code for the sack for creating any game when I am not going to enjoy it especially when a lot of my spare time is going to be put into it. For the team, they are not going to get the best work from me and I don't want to be the weak link in the team because I don't care about the game.

Something you need to have to do something like this is motivation. Since I am doing this in my spare time, money is not really a motivation or not at least a highly probably/realistic motivation. That is why self motivation is so important here and the biggest self motivation, I think, is wanting to get to the end goal of the project, which currently, I don't care about.

I know it is going to be a tough road not matter what the project is but when I get to those tough parts, if I don't care about the end project, why should I even continue?