Hello world,

I hope that you are making the most of your day! The drive between Seatle and Los Angeles is a long one. I am back in Washington for a few days, visiting family and attending a few scheduled meetings with my initial game development partner, Ryan Swarner. Ryan and I are working on a game to be published by Spaceboy Partners at a later date. I am contemplating bringing him on to assist with INK 2 content, but I have a personal problem with delegating when it comes to private projects. I highly recommend that you establish a list of people whom you trust to do your work for you. Hell, they might even be better than you are. Take a chance, delegate, but have a plan.

I moved to LA to work on a startup that I pitched to Robert Bowling back in January or so. For the most part, it is still a digital project, but it is not game development. That has been quite different for me, but also quite rewarding! It even involves a physical product that will give me the opportunity to work closely with a manufacturer and new forms of distribution for me. The physical portion of my workload has me learning a bunch of new tools, as well. I have been working extremely hard to cram Photoshop and Marmoset Toolbag 3 down my throat this past week or so. Be sure that you are never complacent! A developer should ALWAYS be expanding upon their knowledge and tool belt. Don’t stop growing just because something isn’t necessary today; the industry is incredibly volatile and ever-changing.

That’s all for today! The drive has kept me away from the computer, for the most part. Gameplay GIFs will becoming a larger part of my workflow again and I will begin to push Pepper Grinder marketing a lot harder, as well. Check out Pepper Grinder, the next game to be published by Spaceboy Games, if you haven’t heard of it prior. It is a very, VERY enjoyable action-platformer coming to Steam Q1 2018.

QUESTIONS: One other thing that I want to do with these daily entries is answer all of your questions. These can be anything from personal stuff, to dev questions, to things about current projects, to literally anything else. Ask me on Twitter, or email me, or any other way that you know of getting in contact with me.

Q: You seem to work a lot of hours. How do you manage a social life and prevent from getting burnt out?

A: I work from home, and for the most part, I work for myself more so than I do contract work. I want to mention that because the fact that I work very odd goes could skew the amount of time that you assume I am working. Just because I am tweeting GIFs at 3PM and 3AM does not mean that I had been working for twelve hours straight, but sometimes, that is totally the case!

I feel that having multiple projects helps me to prevent burn out. When morale begins to dip with one project, I switch gears and work on the other. Having to-do lists and using a pomodoro timer really, really helps me work longer and work more productively. To me, it is much easier to plan out four pomodoros than it is to just sit down and work haphazardly for two hours. They are essentially the same thing, but I personally get very, very different results.

Until tomorrow,
Z