Thread by @PandamanderG

In 2022 I set a New Year's resolution to ship 12 small indie games. With a full time job and kids this was tough.

I've now shipped my 12th game! One was even picked up by a festival. If you want to do something similar for games/writing/coding/art/etc,here's what I learned: 🧵👇

1/ NEVER HAVE A ZERO DAY: My ability to be prolific this year is from this. I set a low bar of 15 minutes every day. If I missed, I made sure I didn't miss two in a row. Even if I was unmotivated and not starting until 11:45pm, I could still get in 15 minutes and call it a win.

2/ A BAD SESSION IS STILL A WIN: Within a coding session if I didn't finish as much as anticipated, I felt like a failure. "My only time today was wasted on this stupid bug I didn't even fix!" But I learned it's still a win because I put the time in.Tomorrow progress will be made

3/ HAVE FUN NOW, TODAY: Don't think "Now I'm suffering, but one day I'll ship and be a success and happy". Don't delay happiness to the future. The victory and reward is not the end - the reward is working on your game today. That's worth celebrating! "I am living my dream now!"

4/ GET STARTED QUICKLY WITH MICROTASKS: This is my phrase for a tiny next step, no more than a few minutes of work. Example: "Make it detect mouse clicks", "Make it create a GameObject" Each night I would leave myself several MicroTasks of where to pick up the next day

5/ BIAS TOWARDS SHIPPING: I waste lots of time around designing, social media, gamedev courses etc. I can waste many hours, but the most important thing is writing the code and getting the game out the door. Focusing on that and less on everything else helped me be prolific

6/ BE SPECIFIC ABOUT GOALS: There are many goals creatives have: money, views, make art you love, win awards, develop skills. What do you truly want if you stack rank? Decide, optimize and then forget everything else, rather than ambiguous "success"

7/ FOCUS ON THE VERY NEXT STEP, NOT THE FAR FUTURE: I get demoralized seeing other huge indie games. "...I'll never be this good". This is a demotivating distraction. Instead focus on your next step:what is the next modest goal? Example:I did 2D games so next was a simple 3D game

8/ COLLABORATE WITH OTHERS TO GO FARTHER:
Creative work is a game of hours. More hours into the game means a higher quality game. And the easiest way to boost the number of hours is to team up with other people. I did several collabs this year and each was a ton of fun!

That's it - I hope this helps someone with their creative pursuits in 2023! If you want to follow my stuff next year, I'll be posting on pandamander.itch.io. Happy New Year and good luck! #indiegames #gamedev #lowpoly #indiedev