1 hour ago, _Silence_ said:

Now, say you have a wife and a child. You must spend at least 1 hour with your wife, and 1 hour with your son. So it remains 2 hours per work day. During the weekend, your wife and your kid expect more from you. So 8 hours remain for each. So 26 hours remain in total instead of 47

But from these 26 hours, you'll have to buy food, to put your kid to school, to sport, you'll have to deal about papers, you lost a bit time in the transport. And except if you have a robotic life, you would have spent the remaining time with work overtime, talking with colleagues, talking with friends, on the phone, roaming on the internet, resting a bit, reading a book, trying to touch your guitar again, going to the doctor, having a walk in the park nearby, or simply sitting on the sofa, watching something on TV, listening to music....

To be honest, I was not thinking about a wife or kids. Still, you can't say, you have no time. The only thing you can say is, that you have no time for THAT. If you really want to do THAT, you may have to get your priorities right.

But you have to admit, there is always a little bit of time left. Just like deltaKshatriya mentioned: "try to find small amounts of time daily".

I think, if you really want to make a game, you will find the time.

Make smaller games.  Virtually everyone will start out making a game too big for them to complete. You have to be very realistic about what you can achieve in your time.  Spend a week/month noting down how exactly you spend your time.  Start something you feel you could finished in a couple of weeks, really small project.   See how it goes, then step up to something a little bit bigger.  If you need to earn money in order to live then I seriously do not recommend just relying on some future game to make you money, have a job, even if it's part-time.  

9 hours ago, masskonfuzion said:

Just make sure to balance it out (personal project, job, other hobbies, family/friends, whatever fits you). And DO NOT SACRIFICE YOUR HEALTH. Grind hard, but also get good sleep. If you're a gym type, then keep going to the gym

Very important advice.  

Desiado offers good advice, as do others here.

My day job is laughable to most, but its an income all the same, and by combining that income with other kinds - may it be through interest in savings, shares, bonds, selling items, whatever - I've found I was wasting my time in that job.  However, each year I have reduced my hours where possible and now only work three days a week - and I use the rest to get things done. Funnily enough, the day job dont seem so bad now as I'm no longer trying to fit in that extra bit of programming before and after my shifts on the days I do "work for the man".  It also provides a welcome break from the games development.  Sometimes its nice to just wake up, have a shave, make some sandwiches and then listen to music in my car on the drive to work...

I don't know what others think of them, but I found good advice from Richard Branson, Steve Pavlina, and "Infinite Waters" on youtube.  They have their failings; quiting your day job without a safety net is plain reckless, and "making the tea" to get your foot in the door is b*****ks in this modern age.  But on the other hand, valuing your time, thinking outside the box and not blindly following the other sheep is great advice.

Anyway, I can bang on about this all night, so I shall leave it there...

3 hours ago, LukasIrzl said:

To be honest, I was not thinking about a wife or kids. Still, you can't say, you have no time. The only thing you can say is, that you have no time for THAT. If you really want to do THAT, you may have to get your priorities right.

But you have to admit, there is always a little bit of time left. Just like deltaKshatriya mentioned: "try to find small amounts of time daily".

I think, if you really want to make a game, you will find the time.

Admittedly, you're completely right. We all have the same amount of time. And despite of the fact that we're not equal regarding sleeping, work-time and other scheduled routine, we should all have time for doing what we like/love to do. I personally work on my project every working day in the train. Plus I try to spend a bit of time in the evening. Plus some other during the week-end... 

14 hours ago, RetroBilly said:

Has anyone been able to build a successful game while working a full-time job? If so, how did you do it?

I went mobile, that allows me extra time.

yesterday day I did a 32 hour work shift so we can meet a deadline. I still had time here and there, five minutes or so, to work on my own game.

Mobiles have amazing apps that allow you to do a lot, there is also a lot of work that doesn't need hours worth of attention. A lot of times I will scratch down some design ideas.

Since we are talking about shuffling things around to make time, do keep in mind that little things add up.  These days I have to play Super Smash Bros. for Wii U at home at night, but previously I was able to get my daily injection by playing coworkers during lunch at the office, plus playing on Nintendo 3DS on the train to and from work.

You can always switch things around as your interests change.  Before I needed a daily injection of Super Smash Bros. *, I used train rides to play Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!, or to practice Rubik's Cubes.

Waste absolutely no time in your life.  Since I will move back to Japan, I have to find daily time to practice Japanese and make sure I retain my level or improve, so I take Duolingo to the bathroom.

I live near my office specifically to avoid long commutes.  Driving to the office serves no purpose but to waste time.  I live only 3.3 miles away, and I take Uber so I can spend the 10-minute drive (far too many red lights along the way) doing something besides wasting life looking at roads and signals.  Let someone else handle that chore; I can make good use of those 10 minutes (although I am a bit restricted as some things, such as reading, give me migraines while riding in cars).

Going somewhere on foot?  If I tell you to run, it will only be the 55th time I give this advice.  Going somewhere on foot means being unable to really focus on any other tasks, as you have to watch where you are going and avoid obstacles pod people.  Being unable to focus on other tasks is Latin for "wasting time."  There is no value in wasting time walking slowly to a destination.  Always run.  Gives more time to your day and keeps you more fit.

Multitask when possible.  I play piano while watching (or listening to) the daily news.  I let YouTube run through the playlist of new uploads, and if a story is not interesting I play difficult songs that need my concentration, and when I am more interested in a story I play simpler songs such as Für Elise and mainly focus on the news.  At the end, I've just spent 1 hour watching the news and playing piano, and my skill at piano increases more quickly because I train with mental weights.

As I mentioned, I need to get lots of chess into a day, so I am mainly playing 1-day-per-move.  I can take 5 minutes here-and-there through the day to make a move whenever I just have a moment.  When I switched from 30-minute and 20-minute games to daily games, it served as an example of making an adjustment to suit your schedule.  I don't have 20 minutes to sit and only play chess.

Adjust your schedule in these ways, find ways to make small progress on many different things through the day, and then at night you will have much more time not doing all those things that you did here-and-there through the day and instead be able to focus on your project.  It is extremely trivial to create time for things.


L. Spiro

Without having read every single reply (just the first 7-8), the answer is simple. You have to MAKE time to work on your game. I am in the same boat as many people here. I work a full time job, I have a spouse, and I try to exercise at least once a week. That still leaves me with about 13-14 hours a week to work on my indie game.

With all that said, what I have found works for me well is to set a schedule and follow it. For example, pick some days that work best for you, let's say 3-4 days a week, and on those days set aside 2-4 hours (with specific start and stop times) and commit yourself to working on your game in those specific times. No excuses and no exceptions. When those days and times come, you get on your computer and work on the game. If it helps you, put it on a calendar or some kind of a scheduler, or something along those lines.

It all comes down to the answer to one simple question, how bad do you want it? If you want it bad enough, you'll find a way.

23 minutes ago, L. Spiro said:

I live near my office specifically to avoid long commutes... Multitask when possible.

These are fun life hacks, though I'd caution not to lose sight of the little things in life while re-engineering your time. It's surprisingly easy to hack your life to the point that all your leisure looks like work, and none of your friends want to hang out anymore 

Driving to work is definitely one of the least effective uses of your time. Live close enough to work that you don't have a commute, or bike/jog to work so that you double-count your commute as cardio. If those aren't possible, maybe carpool with someone smarter* than you are, or listen to audiobooks/podcasts to make the most of the time.

As for game development itself, that doesn't have to take up as much time as folks think. Start with a pre-built engine, Unity is a great choice for rapidly building out a game. Block out your gameplay with placeholder art, there is plenty available for cheap/free on the internet. By far the most time consuming part is the art - if you aren't an artist yourself subcontract that out, or find a style of game that doesn't require much. Same for music/sound. Focus initially on what really matters, i.e. the main gameplay loop. Prototype just that for a while, iterate on that until it is fun before you invest any further in development...

If you can make the time for a weekend here and there, I highly recommend joining a couple of 48-hour Game Jams. It's a great way to get familiar with rapid prototyping, and meet local game devs who you might want to work with later.

*If you don't know anyone smarter than yourself, you aren't looking hard enough. Elitism is something of a disease in tech circles. If you want to learn/grow, you need to fight it.

Ooh! This is my world you're venturing in, The World That Has No Time.

Dig this: I have all of January off from work because I hadn't taken any vacation days for four years and they were gonna just make them disappear otherwise. All I pretty much had planned for the whole month was a five day trip to London with my girlfriend. Just got back, London's lovely, too bad my girlfriend is into musicals. Anyway, before she slapped some sense into me, this was me: "I STILL DON'T HAVE TIME FOR ANYTHING!"

I work in TV and usually I actually don't have much time for anything, but in The Curious Case Of January it turned out to be specifically because I had so much free time: All I kept thinking was "Now I have free time, I need to use it as effectively as possible." And that caused me to get anxious even just checking my messages here on the forum. Even though I've managed to, if you will, reprogram myself, I still do a little. It's bloody 2:30 am now and I haven't written a single word for my game yet. Ugh.

Right now I just take the time where I can get it if I feel like it. I'm enjoying "making" the game and not thinking about releasing the game anymore. Ofcourse, I'll still do that if that time comes, but for now it's unrealistic to work with that in mind.

On the more practical side: I don't know what your body can handle, but I manage on six hours of sleep. Five, if I'm on a roll and wanna work some extra, but then you'll have to factor in a collapse-day you can't really plan for. Anyway, that should up your time-game a bit.

Marathon coding at work and marathon coding at home is not healthy for your well being. Life will be too monotonous and something clogs up in your brain.  This is not about not being able to manage your time, laziness or whut not. You need a complete break from coding intermittently for huge blocks of time. You have to do something very different, something that takes your mind off coding completely. When you get back to coding from your non-coding activities, your mind/brain is completely fresh

If your day job is coding, your marathon hobby should not be coding. Otherwise it leads to depression, you may not notice it immediately or in the short term but over a long period the clog builds up  

If you must code at work and code at home, like most people do, then slip in a 3rd hobby which is completely different from coding. Such as L Spiro is into music, chess and acting which has nothing in common with coding

It must be a real activity, i e sleeping, eating, driving don't count