Village Monsters

Well, it’s officially official now – you know, the whole terrifying thing of quitting my job to work on games full time. I’m scared. I’m excited. I’ll have more to say pretty soon.

For today, I want to talk a bit about how I’m going to manage my time now that it’s truly mine to spend.

I know myself: I don’t necessarily respond all that well to rigid structures, but I do respond well to gimmicks and patterns. Weird, right?

So, in order to succeed at this being-my-own-boss thing I plan to assign each day of the week a theme or focus. This way my days are always different, yet (hopefully!) are always focused on the right thing.

Here’s the plan, one day at a time:

Start it on Sunday

Sunday is pretty straightforward – it’s time to plan for the upcoming week.

I’m guessing that planning is going to be pretty important for solo work, so on Sundays I’m going to go through my Kanban board and plan out exactly how I want the week to go.

What features should I focus on? What bugs need fixing? Is there a release or other special event going on this week? I don’t want to wait for Monday to think about these things, so instead I’ll start it all on Sunday.

(I will try to avoid working too much, though!)

Motivational Mondays

Here’s an obvious statement for you: I don’t like Mondays. Who does? Now that I’m on my own I’m trying to twist it around, because Mondays don’t need to be bad. In fact, I’m going to attempt to use Monday to get motivated

How? Well, a whole bunch of ways! I’m going to do fun things, like play video games, or inspirational things, like play video games, or something related to my work, like….well, you get it. It won’t always be video games but it’ll definitely be something I want to do.

I’m going to let the work – and the motivation to do it – find me on Monday instead of the other way around. That way I always start the week on the right foot: happy, motivated, and inspired.

Technical Tuesdays

Video games are a lot of things – bits and bytes of code, art, music, writing, and a whole bunch else. While it’s important to strike a balance between them all, the technical side – the actual code, the source control, the libraries and tools and all that other stuff – that all needs to be focused on and polished on a regular basis.

In a lot of ways the technical side is the most important one: “Technical Debt” isn’t just a business buzzword – it’s a very real project killer, and I could drown in it now that I’m on my own.

This’ll be the day to learn good practices – or correct the bad. Cleanup unused branches. Pay off technical debt. Comment and refactor code. Kill bugs. That sorta thing!

Wildcard Wednesdays?

Ok, I actually don’t know what to do on Wednesday yet. I’m thinking Wednesday will be a true wildcard and be a hodgepodge of a lot of things.

Thinkin’ Thursdays

Remember all stuff about how the technical side is the most important one for games? Forget that. On Thursdays I’m going to minimize the amount of techy stuff I work on and instead focus on the thinking side: the analytics, process and product maps, game design and theory, reading books, other creative works, etc.

If most my week is spent programming and fixing things then I’m hoping Thursdays will be a good break and a refreshing change of pace. Plus, it’ll serve as a fantastic springboard into…

Feature Fridays

Yeah! This’ll be my favorite day of them all. Each Friday will have one major goal: pick at least one big feature – maybe it’s already in progress, or maybe it’s brand new – and work like crazy on it.

Implement it, refine it, make it awesome, share it, get feedback, then do it all over again.

Feature Fridays are meant to be the ultimate culmination of the week. I get motivated on Monday, lay a technical foundation on Tuesday, do whatever on Wednesday, think a lot on Thursday, and by Friday I’m ready to see something major to completion and share it with the world.

(Or at least with the subset of the world that cares to see it.)

Saturdays are for Looking Back & Cleaning Up

Finally we reach the weekend again.

Weekends are going to be weird; I need them, much in the same way that any human needs a break from work. But I also want to maximize my time and make sure I’m making the best use that I can – that includes working on weekends.

I won’t do a ton of work on Saturday, but I do want to accomplish at least two things:

• Do a retrospective on the previous week, figuring out what went right and what went wrong
• Clean up the inevitable mess I made the previous week
  • This includes cleaning my desk and work area, but also files on  my computer, my email, and everything else

In this way I can feel productive and ready to go on Sunday – where it starts all over again!

My life is a cliche.

Each day, I get up and commute to my job. I don’t hate it, but I feel immensely unsatisfied. I’m smart enough, and have done well for myself. But is this really it? Is this my life?

Am I really just on autopilot until I retire or die?

I accepted this. I figured these are thoughts that everyone struggles with, and that accepting them is just something that adults must do.

But I’ve had doubts I can live my life like this. I’ve dreamed of early retirement, and as I got older and those thoughts became less realistic, I instead contemplated escape. I thought about suicide. I thought about ‘running away’ from home, abandoning my wife and dog and house and living in my car. These are crazy, escapist fantasias, so clearly something was wrong.

Over the summer an incredibly dumb thing happened to me. So dumb, in fact, I can’t even bring it up – not out of shame, but more because it wouldn’t make any sense.

It sent my life to rock bottom. I’ve since learned to be thankful for this dumb thing, because it forced me to realize that my mind was real fucked and that I needed to a) go to therapy, b) get on some medication, and c) figure my life out

I did all that, and it has all worked. Better than I ever could have expected, in fact.

As the fog that surrounded me all my life began to lift away, I was left with a surprising realization…

Maybe I do hate my job?

Not the job itself, mind you. Certainly not my coworkers or my boss. I love all of them.

What I hated was the idea of my job. The idea of giving up on my dreams immediately out of college and working at an office. An office! God, hadn’t I read enough Dilbert comics and watched enough Office Space to know that I would be unhappy there? “Nah, that won’t be me”, I thought once upon a time. But it was. It was exactly me.

I gave up on my dreams for this? 

From one cliche to another, right? But I can at least keep a straight face saying this one. It feels true.

So what exactly are my dreams?

My entire life has orbited around video games. My earliest memories? Playing Secret of Mana co-op with my dad. Having my family wake me up when they finally beat the Vanilla Dome castle in Super Mario World. Playing Fire & Ice with an ear infection.

I know game companies better than I know most people. I own every console, every game I feel worth it. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars over the course of my life on games, books about games, art about games, games about games.

I went to school for Computer Science – why? To make games!

I moved to Seattle – why? Because that’s where games are made! 

I worked at Nintendo in the crappiest position imaginable – why? Because it was my foot in the door to – you guessed it – games!

Then, I got laid off. I got scared. I went down to $35 in my checking account and began looking at Craigslist for something, anything. I settled for an office job – my current job.

I figured dreams were unrealistic, that I should just grow up.

Well. No more. I mean, I’ll still probably continue growing up, but that other thing? The giving-up-on-dreams thing? That’s over with.

Starting today.

Today’s the day I put in my 2 weeks notice.

Today, I begin my life anew – before it’s too late. Today I officially ‘launch’ WARP DOGS, whatever that means. Today I begin my new life creating video games, analyzing video games, writing about video games. Today is terrifying. Today is exciting. Today marks a change.

My last day will be Friday the 13th – a pretty fitting day to start making my own luck.

I’ll need it.

It takes some real skill and precision to quit a good job making lots of money to pursue a career in which you’ll make very little. It requires strategy. Foresight. A willful ignorance of consequence.  I’m here to talk about my own process so that you, too, can self-destruct your finances

Today, I want to talk about my burn chart, which you’ve may have seen after reading one of my WARP DOGS CORP LOGS posts.

There may be other, more accurate names for this style of chart, so let me show you what I mean:

So, what exactly is this thing?

In short, the burn chart is the primary method to measure when exactly I’ll be out of money and broke as all hell.

It performs this tremendous service by looking at my current cash reserves each week and compares that to both a fixed and moving estimate of where I predict my cash reserves should be each week.

It then plots this all on a nifty graph so I can visualize how fast I’m spending and when exactly I can expect to run out.

Make sense? Well, let’s dig in some more…

FIXED ESTIMATE

This is the grey line.

The fixed estimate is simple. I took a look at our average monthly expenses and compared it to our average monthly income after I quit my job. I then simply looked at the difference between the expenses and income, and called this difference the expense delta. 

Said a different way, the expense delta is what’s needed to break even each month – for example, if average expenses were $5,000, and average income was $3,000, then the expense delta would be $2,000.

The Fixed Estimate is simply this delta subtracted from my cash reserves on a weekly basis. It’s a steady, consistent march to $0, and it’s also the line I want to continuously “beat” each week if I want to elongate this project.

CASH ON HAND

This is the blue line with stars.

At the start of each week I’ll record how much cash on hand I have left. The difference week to week will be reflected by the steepness of the line.

They key here is to beat the estimate. It’s sort of like racing where you want to beat your best lap times – only it’s exactly the opposite because you want to go slower, not faster.

But what happens if I do go slower? Or faster? I mean, it’s extremely unlikely I’ll spend exactly $500 a week over the course of many months, and the move I deviate from the average the less useful the fixed expense line will be.

To solve this problem, I added the moving estimate line.

MOVING ESTIMATE

This is the yellow line with the circles

Like the fixed estimate, the moving estimate steadily marches to 0 by subtracting an expense delta each week.

Unlike the fixed estimate, the speed it marches is not forever constant, but rather is based on a moving average of my actual expenses each week

Let’s use an example.

Week 1: $400 spent

Week 2: $300 spent

Week 3: $500 spent

Over these 3 weeks the moving estimate would come out to $400, and it’d look like so:

Now, let’s say week 4 and 5 look like this:

Week 4: $900 spent

Week 5: $900 spent

Now, obviously I know that spending more per week means I’ll run out of money faster, and vice versa, but it’s one thing to know something and quite another to visualize it

You can see how it shaves off 2 weeks from the fixed estimate – that’s a lot of to give up!

In conclusion, this graph does two things main things:

• It gamifies the otherwise dull task of tracking weekly expenses, encouraging me to stay under spending goals and beat my previous expectations, plus,
• It allows me to apply principals of Agile to my financial situation, adjusting my strategies and focus on a weekly basis

So, hopefully this has all made sense. If you’re looking to quit your job to pursue some passion then I strongly encourage you to make something similar – never discount the power of visualizing the speed in which your money is running out