Creative Mornings With Ben Chesnut

The most important lesson you will ever learn

Week 2: a brief update and a view to planning

This past week was not very different from the last. It consisted mostly of:

• More organising, cleaning up and de-cluttering of the office. Donated a fair bit of our unnecessary items to St. Vincent de Paul this evening. It'll get rid of the clutter and maybe help in a small way.
• I have a plant spectra experiment I'm working on (more details to come) and have put it in it's own little room away from my work area.
• Organise bookmarks, folders & files and did a general clean-up of computer related stuff.
• Added a lot of tech events to my Google Calendar. I have little intention of attending them all, but I think in the coming year I should really be more present in local tech meetups.
• Did some preliminary research on advertising opportunities, mobile development platforms etc.
• Working on the last reminents of an app that has overflowed into this year, but I hope to finish soon. I know I keep saying it, but I mean it!
• Unsuccessful attempts to get my sleep habbit back on track. Its currently fixated at 6am-2pm, which is taking it's toll. This is becoming a priority for me as I honestly think its starting to wear me a bit thin, sleeping during the day and being awake during the night is no way to live.

Although I'm coming around to the fact that daily updates aren't necessary and are perhaps more of a distraction than warranted, I feel guilty for not updating this blog with something a little more substantial so I have pasted below a reply I gave on Reddit to a post to /r/gamedev asking about how other independant game developers plan themselves. I believe it gives an accurate account of my current approach to life as a one man startup.

Q. Every indie developer's dream: making it big and securing your position as an indie dev. What's your plan?

A. I am working on building up a business myself, starting from the 1st of this year I've been blogging about the process of getting started being an "one man startup".

Game development for me is just one of many possible roads which may bear fruit, I will also be working on a Web App and some more utilitarian mobile apps.

I suppose my "road plan" is exclusively not to tie myself down by notions of there being one best way. Experimenting with what works and what does not will be a crucial element of how I do business. I will be designing all the games I work on in Unity specifically because it broadens the potential customer base enormously (no platform dependance) and spreads the risk dramatically. When you are the sole person working on this kind of thing, reducing risk is an incredibly important factor.

One thing I have started doing that I could not recommend more highly is to accept that you never stop needing to learn. As much as possible, read all the advice you can, buy or loan books on entrepreneurism and business management (I am currently reading "The Lean Startup" by Eric Reiss). Never for once think to yourself that you know everything and take every opportunity as a potential to learn.

Arrogance is something that I've found is apparent throughout the software industry, it's an easy trap to fall into, thinking that because you know one thing that you know more than anyone else. I must admit I fall into it a fair bit, but I remind myself that humility is a much more important requirement to success than the drive one gets from thinking they know it all. because when you start thinking like that, you start blocking out the possibility of learning something vitally important.

My final little bit of advice is that if you really want to do this, if you want to see success, you must work hard and treat it like a serious occupation. I wasted a year by not taking it too seriously, I took on odd jobs and contracts that distracted me from what I really wanted to do. If what you really want to do with your life is be your own boss, don't do as I did and go for job interviews when you know deep down you'll never be satisfied until you are your own boss.

It's still early days for me too, but these are the things I try to keep in mind, always:

• Don't tie yourself down to one idea, process, or technology, it's all a means to an end. There is no one best way.

• Experiment with what works and what does not. Try to analyze and understand your successes and failures.

• Reduce risk wherever you can.

• Learn all you can, all the time. Never stop learning.

• Arrogance can be a driver and a motivator but humility is a much more important attribute.

• Make time for fun. It can be a hard slog working for yourself, so it's more important than ever to make time for you to chill out, relax. Try not to get too stressed out.

Week 1: A brief overview

I just want to spell out a couple of things that happened in the first week of this year long journey both for posterity and perhaps for suggestions for improvement.

The first few days went along just as I had expected it, I got a decent amount done and began to read like I had intended. Come day 4 or so, that pretty much ended to varying degrees. 

I had to replace my bed, which for the longest time has had it's springs digging into me as I sleep. I had learned in the past year or so to become somewhat accustomed to the idea that I had to sleep in the exact center of the bed and not move a bit, or else I'll get something poking me or I'd dislodge a spring and I'd hear that lovely sound... SPERUNGGGGGUNGUNGGG. 

So that ate up an entire day just purchasing the bed and then another day waiting for it to be delivered and then constructing it.

I could have or I should have rather been able to make a little more productive use of my time but I've also been feeling extraordinarily lethargic and tired lately. One of the personal goals I had set myself was to try if at all possible to completely cut out certain kinds of food, namely a small addiction I call Coca Cola and sugar.

There has always been something in Coke that was extra addictive for me, I don't know what it is. What's worse is I know the more I drink of it, the worse I feel. So I decided to give it up, once and for all. Unfortunately as time has shown over and over again in the past, every time I do so, I have to go through a withdrawal process which ranges from severe headaches/migranes and sinus blockage to lethargy and muscle aches. 

I know that it's definitely a combination of things at work: caffeine, sugar and whatever special ingredient in Coke that makes me yearn for it specifically. Whatever the case though, it plays a certain toll on the body and mind for about two weeks all in all on average if past experience is anything to go by. So I've been suffering, if you can even call it that, from sugar and Coke withdrawl symptoms for the past week.

I haven't made as much progress on setting up the home office, but I have managed to take away almost all of the toys and distractions. There is now no TV, Playstation 3 or cable tv. I will be keeping an Xbox 360 there however on the off-chance that I decide that Xbox development is a worthwhile pursuit.

I'm honestly not sure if I will though, everything I know of Xbox development says that the indie store is utterly pointless from a business perspective and that the Xbox Live Arcade application process is incredibly long, requiring fairly high production values.

I also haven't kept up my promise to stay off Reddit or other time sinks quite as much as I had hoped. I had blocked them all by router without realising that other people may in fact want to use them while I'm working, so I am going to have to find some sort of middle ground approach which literally bars myself (and only myself) from these sites until I'm used to it.

I am still working on an app with someone else from last year, which I had sincerely hoped to have been wrapped up as early as mid to late December but in any case, I hope to have that completed and sorted very soon so I can begin to focus on other projects.

On the positive side however, I have started planning for advertising for future apps. I will be purchasing a block of advertising from a very well known podcaster for approximately 2 weeks worth of sponsorship. It's early days of course, so I could see why some would consider this a premature action. However I feel pretty confident that if I haven't built something worth advertising within the next few months, the failure will be greater than the cost of a few hundred Euros worth of advertising budget. Besides which, I'm of the type that prefers to plan things well in advance, so I will be working on an online advertising plan to get the word out.

Overall I'd say last week was neither a success nor entirely a failure but definitely a damp squib.

Book 1: The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

Kicking off this book tour of sorts is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. A book, I expect, about and codifying the growing trend of leaner, smarter and perhaps more importantly, agile startups.

I recall waiting patiently for this book to finally be available on Amazon's UK website, even going so far as watching (or at least beginning to) a live stream event at The NDRC while Barack Obama was visiting Ireland. The live streamed event turned out (to my estimation at least) to be little more than a thinly veneered advertisement for this book, at no fault of The NDRC, but leaving early I felt tricked and certainly not inspired.

In any case, the book ended up unceremoniously on my to-do pile along with the rest, so time to find out if it was worth the wait.

I hope to keep this blog somewhat regularly updated on how I feel about these books as I go through them, perhaps one or two updates per book would suffice, maybe a summary of my opinion at the end also, I'm not sure just yet. I do plan on taking notes while reading so perhaps I can share some of those.