From Pixels to Progress: Habits for Dev Success

And bundles, articles, tips, and more!

Aug 31, 2023

Hello from the new issue of GameDev’s Journey!

With all these great games coming back to back, it's getting harder to focus on game dev. However, compromising our pleasures is part of this journey. And researchers say people who are better at delaying gratification have better responses to stress, and better social skills. In that regard, we will be looking at how to focus more and get things done in this issue.

Habits for Dev Success
Recently released assets
Bundles, articles, tips, and more

LET’S GO.

Habits for Dev Success

How many times you started making a game with grand ideas storming through your mind, and then left it unfinished? Starting a game is easy. It only requires few clicks. Finishing a game, on the other hand, requires focus, consistency, and patience. It requires you to decide to sit down and work every single day in the midst of all these distractions and self-doubt.

It is hard to make this choice every day, and I feel like it’s getting harder and harder. But there are proven methods out there that actually helps you make the right choice over and over. Recently, I was reading James Clear's famous book "Atomic Habits," which delves into developing good habits and breaking bad ones. The book is concise, spanning just 200 content-packed pages, and it includes methods that can help you finish your game. Let’s look at some of those methods and how we can apply them to game dev.

A Part of Your Identity

According to James, the fundamental way to establish good habits is to integrate them into our identity. Turning it into an aspect that makes you, you. Saying to yourself, "I am a game developer" makes it a part of who you are, making it easier to sit down at your PC and work every day. After all, a game developer develops games.

Focus on the Process, Not the Goals

Setting goals and making plans might not be as helpful in achieving them as we think. Sometimes, planning can create a false sense of progress in our minds. The true focus should be on the systems that lead us to these goals. If our goal is to become a successful indie developer, then our systems would involve how we market, develop, test and release our games. It's crucial to prioritize our systems over our goals. Goals are just wish-lists unless we don’t create a system that would achieve them.

Outcomes are about what you get. Processes are about what you do. Identity is about what you believe.

Four Stages of Habits

Our habits go through four stages: Cue, craving, response and reward. A cue is something that triggers a certain behavior in our brains. The second stage, craving, provides motivation for the rewards we will gain by completing the action. The third stage is the response, the action itself. And the final stage is reward.

By understanding these four stages, which our brains go through for every habit, we can implement habits that will help us finish our game.

Make It Obvious: Cues trigger behaviors. The most common cues are time and location. Research suggests that making specific plans based on time and place increases the likelihood of following through. For example, saying "Tomorrow at 2:00 PM, I will be developing games in my room" enhances the chances of actually doing it. James also touches on our environment. The influence of our surroundings on our behavior is significant. If we place a water bottle in easily accessible places, we are more likely to drink more water. We can apply the same principle to game development. For instance, we could post our to-do lists on the wall to prompt us to open Unity whenever we see them.
Make It Attractive: Craving stage provides motivation for the rewards. Wanting to create a successful game drives us to open Unity. To make this even more enticing, we can pair the activity we need to do with an activity we want to do. For instance, playing a game right before (or after) opening Unity. That way, our brain will match the desired habit with positive feelings.
Make It Easy: The harder an activity is mentally and physically, the more challenging it is to start. The easier we make it to sit down and start developing our game, the easier it becomes to dedicate time to it consistently. Automatically opening Unity when the computer starts, having a comfortable workspace, and minimizing distractions can contribute to this ease.
Make It Satisfying: "We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying." This aspect might be challenging for game developers to adapt, as game development can take years, and the reward might only come after releasing the game. However, sharing progress with others, testing our game with others, and receiving feedback can provide small yet motivating rewards. Checking off tasks from your to-do list or rewarding yourself when you successfully implement a significant feature can also turn the progress itself into a rewarding experience.

TL;DR

Decide who you want to be.
Build systems that will help you become that person.
Schedule everything.
Pair the activity you need to do with an activity you want to do.
Build your environment in a way that it’s easy to game dev.
Reward yourself.

Making the right choice every day is difficult. But with correct approach and methods, you can trick your brain to turn it into something easy. It’s about deciding who you want to be, building systems toward that person, and going after it relentlessly.

For more, you can purchase the book or visit author's website.

Assets

Legs Animator

🎮Game Engine: Unity

💵Price: 39.99 USD

Multi Purpose Leg IK Animating Plugin for any type of 3D character. Features: Aligning legs on uneven terrain, handling leg attachment points (gluing), executing complex attachment transition animations (idle gluing) and more.

Text Animator for Unity

🎮Game Engine: Unity

💵Price: 50 USD

Text Animator for Unity is a powerful and flexible tool that brings your texts to life in very few simple steps. You can animate letters and stack effects together (from built-in to your custom ones), show text dynamically with different speeds (like characters, punctuations and words), trigger gameplay events when a specific letter is shown and much more! Works in any platform and rendering pipeline.

New Free Assets

Surreal-Skyboxes: Different skyboxes for your project: from the most realistic to the most surreal. There are variants for day, sunset, and night.

Free Demo Of Low Poly Space Alien Worlds 3D Asset Pack: Space Forest — 1 of 9 beautiful biomes are available for free to show you the great power of the full version of the Low Poly Space Alien Worlds 3D Asset Pack!

Interactive Calculators: Interactive calculators (script + 3D models + 2D UI)

Other

Fantasy and SCI FI Essentials for Unity: Great bundle including sci-fi and fantasy creatures, animation sets, environment packs, and much more. Don’t miss it!

A TOON SHADER That Does It ALL (Free URP OToon Shader)

Game Trailer Database (Work-in-progress)

50+ Ideas for Game Dev Twitter

TOP 10 FREE NEW Assets AUGUST 2023! | Unity Asset Store

RPGs Were Never About Roleplaying

Me

Reading: The Sword of Kaigen: A Theonite War Story by M. L. Wang.

Watching: Better Call Saul (Season 6).

Playing: Back to Pathfinder: WotR!

Listening:

Thanks for reading!

And that’s it from today’s issue of GameDev’s Journey. I hope you enjoyed it and find it useful. If you did, please like and leave a comment. Reach out for suggestions, objections, questions, or just say hi!

But regardless, thank you so much for reading, and have a great game dev journey!