{"id":1069,"date":"2013-05-29T13:56:43","date_gmt":"2013-05-29T20:56:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/?p=1069"},"modified":"2013-05-29T13:57:55","modified_gmt":"2013-05-29T20:57:55","slug":"making-the-most-of-your-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/?p=1069","title":{"rendered":"Making the Most of Your Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just finished reading a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.polygon.com\/features\/2013\/5\/29\/4362838\/the-birth-and-re-birth-of-klei\">fantastic article over at Polygon<\/a> that features the guys (Jeff Agala and Jamie Cheng) over at <a href=\"http:\/\/kleientertainment.com\/\">Klei Entertainment<\/a> discussing their stance on the work\/life balance. This is a subject that I wish more CEO&#8217;s, producers, directors, or&#8230; I don&#8217;t know&#8230; whoever is responsible for bidding time on film and games would take the time to consider more seriously.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>We applied to be part of the Indie Megabooth, and I&#8217;m actually nervous to hear back our judgment as to whether or not we&#8217;re going to make it happen. They get back to people this week about it, and I can&#8217;t help but just sit here refreshing my email and constantly changing my mind between confidence and the solemn acknowledgement that we just didn&#8217;t have enough of a demo ready to the the thumbs up.<em>\u00a0<\/em>I stress out quite easily about this sort of thing. Not knowing, really does a number on me, and yet I know that when I get our answer, I&#8217;ll be able to easily continue in whatever direction the cards are played.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I love life. I love hiking, and singing, and playing guitar, and playing video games, and reading, and martial arts, and photography, and watching movies, and&#8230; well, I like life. Shortly after I got into the film industry, I began to realize that I needed to do more with my life than go to work, stay there for 60+ hours a week, then come home, eat, and sleep. I loved my time in Sydney, Australia and Vancouver, Canada&#8230; but I wish I&#8217;d had more spare time to really get out and see what was around me. I&#8217;m at a point in my life now where I&#8217;m an adult, and have to worry about adult things like the potential for having a kid and saving for retirement, and how little time there is in a day to do everything I want to do. Honestly I&#8217;m at such a weird phase in my life\/career right now where I&#8217;m doing what I love to do (making a game that is not a product I&#8217;m doing for someone else) but am just not seeing a financial return for it. And the reason for that is pretty simple, in that we&#8217;re not done our game yet, but there&#8217;s also a lot of stress knowing that there\u00a0<em>might<\/em> not be a financial return for it even\u00a0<em>after<\/em> it&#8217;s done. But it&#8217;s awkward knowing that I have the <em>potential<\/em> to be making money right now elsewhere.\u00a0It would be so much\u00a0<em>easier<\/em>\u00a0to start looking for work again, and get to start padding the bank account for all those adult-y things to come in the future, but part of what&#8217;s horrifying in that decision is knowing that the type of work I&#8217;m cut out for involves long\u00a0<del>hours<\/del>\u00a0 months of crunch. If we are granted the opportunity to go to PAX as presenters, I think we may experience some self-initiated crunch&#8230; but at least it will be on our own project right?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m glad to see that there are people out there that recognize the importance of having a life outside of work.\u00a0I&#8217;ve listened to Jamie talk before about\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.meetup.com\/Vancouver-Social-Games\/events\/83810982\/\">the trials of starting up a new company<\/a>. It&#8217;s great to see him talking about the lessons he&#8217;s learned starting out making a game on his couch to 10 years later having a successful company with employees. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=J56_OVPJfZY\">Origin Stories<\/a> are always great. These are always the types of stories that I&#8217;m most interested in hearing, and I loved hearing\u00a0\u00a0Kris Piotrowski, the Creative Director of\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.capybaragames.com\/\">Capybara Games<\/a>&#8216; take at GDC on how CAPY got started too. It&#8217;s always a blend of horror and inspiration to see how these people managed to make something out of nothing, but I&#8217;m glad that once they&#8217;re up and running, they seem to make a good focus on having positive work\/life experience. It&#8217;s certainly something that <em>we<\/em> value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just finished reading a fantastic article over at Polygon that features the guys (Jeff Agala and Jamie Cheng) over at Klei Entertainment discussing their stance on the work\/life balance. This is a subject that I wish more CEO&#8217;s, producers, directors, or&#8230; I don&#8217;t know&#8230; whoever is responsible for bidding time on film and games would take the time to consider more seriously. &nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1070,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-1069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-industry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1076,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions\/1076"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}