Its not BS. You might not have a great, or even a very good game, but arguably you should have figured that out in early prototyping before putting in a year of 20 hour weeks. You will have something though.

Also when I say “anything” I mean “anything within the scope of a single programmer.” I don’t expect any single coder to make WoW in a year working part time, but most indie and casual games out there are doable. Slip is expected, but if you put that much time into the project you’ll have something finished. If you don’t you picked a large scale project or your project has no direction or both.

I would be curious to know the scope of your friend’s project. You said he was one of the smartest and most talented guys you know? It seems like a lot of very good programmers get caught up in implementing “perfect” tech and never really get around to making a game.

This might be true for many things, but it is BS when it comes to game development.

One of my game industry friends started working on his own project full-time awhile back. This guy is pretty much one of smartest and talented guys around and his game is running almost A YEAR LATE right now.

Game development is just a fucking hard thing to do.

If you consistently work 10-20 hours a week over the course of a year towards some goal, averaging 12-15 hours a week, you will be able to complete anything. There was a thread on indie gamer about how many lines of code your project is and it seems like your average indie game is about 20k-40k LOC. Even at a low 50 LOC per hour and assuming you write everything from scratch, you can easily make the highend of this target within a year. The problem is making a game is not just coding. Design requires a lot of iteration and experimentation. Creating content will take up a large portion of your time also. Unless you want to learn how to draw and use various art tools (and even then your art will probably suck) you’ll also have to find someplace to get artwork from.

Btw, don’t worry about it too much, we all have the same problems. The only reason I can tell you this stuff is because I’ve been there multiple times (and am still there sometimes ).

Tim: If I kept track of the work I do at my day job, it could easily be 35-60 hours a week, so you’re right about that. 170 hours would be nothing if I was doing it full time. I suppose I shouldn’t feel so guilty about not having over 600 hours for the Thousander Club, although I was able to work for over 10 hours in a week a few times. A few more of those, and I would have been at 250 easily, I think.

Doh, there’s that guilt again.

So part of facing reality is recognizing that so long as I have a full-time day job, I don’t control a huge chunk of my time. I can’t just decide not to work at my day job one day like I do for my business.

Becoming financially independent of a day job is a good goal to focus on. For a couple of weeks I had that idea in my mind and was able to wake up at 5:30AM so I could work for two hours before leaving for my day job, then work some more when I came home. My motivation: by working on my business for that hour, I’m one hour closer to success. Even though I worked a lot more than I usually do for those weeks, I didn’t feel as tired as when I work overtime at my day job. I think it is just the fatigue of working on something for hours and hours and not knowing if you are any closer to finishing it. B-)

170 hours — THAT sounds like somebody who works as a programmer full time and is working on their game on the side. I’m doing the saaaame thing, and I feel your pain. Just think, as a full-time “dedication to growing your new business” type of job, that number could have easily fallen out of THREE WEEKS of last year. It hurts my brain when I think about it. Obviously we can’t just go full time whenever we’d like, but I think it’s important to consider just how little time you really have to contribute to coding on the side (along with how much energy you have for the idea when you get home each day), and plot a course for full-time status that is as short as possible. I wish I knew the best way to go about this instead of just knowing how important it is… : (

At any rate… good luck to ye! Keep us posted on strategies and thoughts you come up with!