No Zero Days

There's no one easy trick to being successful in a creative endeavor like game dev. But one thing I strongly believe is that doing work and having finished projects is incalculably better than not doing work and not finishing anything. Even if all your work is terrible, you're still light-years ahead of all the people who say they're going to make things and never do.

So the first step to success is to just sit down and make something. This is much easier said than done, though; believe me, I have more abandoned projects sitting in forgotten folders than I could count. I'm sure the same is true for everyone who makes art (or anything, really). Starting things is easy, of course; you're enthusiastic and motivated for your project in the beginning. But after a while things get hard -- or you just get to the boring parts -- and you slow down. How, then, do you stay motivated and power through when the creative process feels more like a slog?

My personal solution to this problem is a principle that I think of as "No Zero Days." All it means is that, every day, I have to do at least one thing on my game. It doesn't have to be at a specific time or on a certain topic. It doesn't even have to be a big thing. I've had my share of personal struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic, as I'm sure you have as well, and some days I couldn't muster the will to do more than draw a box on a tilemap. Some days I resolve to fix only one bug; animate one frame of a sprite; or hook up the components to one GameObject. On better days I do much more, of course; on average I spend probably an hour or two on my game per day. But when I'm busy with other things, or stressed out, or depressed, I push myself to sit down, open the project, and do just one thing, no matter how small.

The reason why this matters is that it preserves your momentum on the project and it keeps the project fresh in your mind. If you let yourself slack off and miss a day it becomes exponentially easier to skip each subsequent day. Cruelly, falling off the wagon tends to be easier than getting on it in the first place; so stay on as long as you can. Plus, once you look back on the small, incremental progress you've made over the last, say, month you can really feel good about what you've done. It all adds up surprisingly fast, even if you only do a bit at a time.

You can apply this to any medium. I'm beginning to apply this principle to writing this blog: right now I have a personal goal of writing 100 words per day (about a paragraph). This is deliberately a nice, low bar so that when writing feels like squeezing blood from a stone I can still accomplish a little bit, but when I feel inspired I can crank out many times that in a single sitting and feel extra good about it.

Of course, there are some limitations to this approach. It works best for hobbies that one does by themself. If you have deadlines, for instance at a job or for a contract, this strategy falls apart somewhat. Likewise, if you're collaborating with other people who might rely upon your work being done before they can do theirs properly, you may run into problems with some people outpacing others and getting frustrated.

I should emphasize that I did not invent this; I learned it from other creators and adapted it to my own situation. Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame writes novels on the side and has a personal rule of writing 1 page a day. In his case, he also limits himself to 1 page a day so as to avoid burnout. He describes this in his Dev Diary series here. I've also watched dev logs on YouTube and read advice from artists and game devs on reddit and elsewhere that describe a similar strategy.

So if you, reader, are putting off making a game, writing that novel, learning to draw, or whatever, I urge you to simply start. Write a single line. Make a rough sketch. Code a box to move across the screen when you press keys. Take your first baby steps, then tomorrow take a few more baby steps. Don't worry if you look at what you've made and hate it; if it completely sucks, you can always remake it later. And don't sell yourself short; art is hard, and finishing things is hard. Don't call yourself an "aspiring game dev" or an "aspiring writer" or whatever; if you write, you are a writer. You might not be a professional writer, but that's nothing shameful. The more you make, the easier it gets to keep at it and stay on the wagon.