A Day in the Life

I’m currently on holiday for a week, touring the UK, in car with a baby and a five year old. For reference, no we not ‘nearly there yet’. This blog post was written before we left and then scheduled to go live on Monday morning as usual. Hopefully it worked.

I thought people might be interested in a day in the life of a games designer, self publisher and parent in full time employment, so that the subject of this week’s blog.

My days usually start between 5 and 5:30 when The Baby finally ‘wakes up’. I say this in quotes because, like her sister before her, she’s a terrible sleeper and wakes hourly from about 11pm. I help out with a few of those, but The Wife bears the brunt of it, so come 5am it is definitely my turn. My day doesn’t start with meditation, a quick workout and then blitzing emails and a brainstorming session like most internet business gurus, instead it starts with 30-60 minutes of passing a series of soft toys to a baby who is far more conscious than I am while I stagger blearily into wakefulness.

At 6 the day begins as we shower, have a family breakfast and get the girls ready before I head off to work around 8. I walk to work (it’s just over 2.5 miles each way which I do at a breakneck pace as it’s my only exercise). The walks in and home are a great opportunity to think about the games I’m designing, graphic design and art ideas and company stuff in general.

Most days I spend my 30 minute lunch break on something games related: updating the website, graphic design, art or playtesting, or something similar.

I leave work between 5 and 5:30 most days and usually get home from work around six and get to spend 30-60 minutes with the girls before bedtimes begin. This sometimes includes a family dinner, but often The Wife and I will eat once they are down as the girls will have eaten earlier.

At seven, while The Wife gets The Baby to sleep, I get Daughter the First ready for bed and read her stories. Once The Baby is asleep she takes over and I head downstairs to clean up. The cleaning and dinner take until 8:30-9 most nights, then we have some free time!

Now as I’ve mentioned already, The Baby sleeps really badly, and The Wife takes the brunt of it, so I help out where I can in the night. If I go to bed at 10 I’ll get 7-7.5 hours of broken sleep. I’m one of those guys who needs eight hours, so I’m never really functioning on all cylinders. But ten pm is doable as long as I get one or two earlier nights a week (Games Night on Thursday usually means getting to bed after 11, which hurts).

So I get 1-1.5 hours a night for fun. I want to spend several of these with The Wife, Games Night takes up one most weeks, so I get 2-4.5 hours a week for Eurydice Games! A batch of six copies of Zombology takes 4.5 hours to make, so with a following wind I can make one batch a week (it’s been one a month for the last few months as I’ve been focussing on FlickFleet instead).

I’m looking forward to The Baby sleeping better, so I can extend my evenings later and get more done in fewer evenings so I can spend more time with The Wife too.

Hopefully we’ve less than a year to wait!