I think it’s time to face facts; I am a(n almost) full-time indie.  For nearly five years, I have been making games, so going indie was always more likely than going into banking or quantum-physics.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not something I am ashamed of, but it is something I wasn’t really expecting.  Life is not quite the same as salaried employment (the wages suck for a start - Freya’s Aett earns me about 10% of my old job), but I am actually happier than I have been in a long time.

On the whole, my working week starts at 9:30 on Monday morning after dropping off my daughter at school.  That’s actually when I used to start work as a salaried employee, so there’s still some sense of continuity there.  I check my Scrum board, picking out a feature from the next sprint, and get my development tools up and running; right now, that means XAMPP, Gedit and Firefox, sometimes loading GIMP and Inkscape when the art needs doing.

Armed only with a cup of tea and a task-list, I dive head-first into the game.  Lunch-breaks are extra-long, starting at 12 and finishing about 2, because they involve bringing my daughter home first, feeding her lunch if necessary, then grabbing my wife from her job.

If I am in the middle of a task, I tend to work afternoons.  If not, I sometimes leave it to the evening.  Being my own boss gives me a certain amount of flexibility.  Sometimes I work both, trying to get something big finished or just full of sheer excitement at the prospect of having the new feature implemented.  Just like normal AAA roles, 12-hour days are a fact of life.  At least I chose them this time; I am either pulling a long shift because I believe in what I am doing or because I messed up, not because I was told to.

Evenings are sometimes given over to one-off projects, such as screenplays or other writing projects with deadlines, but days are for games.

The process repeats until Thursday afternoon, when the task list is locked down, untouched tasks get shunted to the next week’s sprint and I work to finish by the end of Friday.

Friday is finishing day, testing day, upload day.  I finish the tasks, I test as best I can for bugs and then I upload.  Quite often I am free in the afternoon, or at least theoretically so. It is not unknown for me to start work on some minor task from the next sprint…

Friday evening brings the bug-reports from the test-team, a selection of friends and family who suffer through Legacy of Heroes for the sake of the future.  As bugs come in, they get fixed.  I try not to work weekends unless it is an urgent bug, but I do slip up from time to time.

Bugs fixed, I try to relax over the weekend and then start again, refreshed, on Monday morning.