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my productivity is always low in times of work. i can motivate myself to do a single demo and some party organising once and then i need the rest of the year to recharge.. even if my work is not very game/demo oriented and even a bit remote from IT stuff.. it's still a bit of a hobby. so it consumes my motivation for demo coding.

a good solution would be taking lot of vacation days and weekends for coding. and, as skrebbel suggests, not having internet at home.

nice thread, good to hear some thoughts on the topic.

actually, i'm in similar situation as niels: I'm way too wasted to code in evenings due to job and commute (2 x 2h!), so what happened the last months was coding marathons at weekends - the result is complete burn-out now. Although I will have a finished demo for nvision it will not be the quality it could have been: Currently i'm so fed up with the project that I only want it to be over soon - this has nothing to do with fun anymore. Creativity is killed this way and deadline pressure feels even higher..

smash: I really like your approach of coding in small rushes. But normally you need some 15min minimum to get into "flow" and every distraction keeps getting you out of low. Or is this not so much of a problem?

Agile demo development? :)

yeah without the backlog whiteboard :) hasn't democoding always been "agile development"?

I guess, in the sense that both "methods" include the phrase "There is no such thing as missing a deadline" (which made me crack up and almost die laughing when I first heard about it at a seminar at work :)

jar: i think because ive had enough practice at it i can get into the flow in just a couple of minutes, so its not bad at all. having a job where you're coding helps in that respect - you're just switching to different code.

i think everybody gets to a point in a demo project (or most projects, really) where it feels more like a pain in the ass than an enjoyable hobby. usually about a week before the deadline when theres shitloads to do and no time to do it.

i think the particular problem with nvision is it's got this very work-like quality if you got a demobox - you probably feel like you *have* to do it and release it, even if it sucks or if you dont feel like doing it. for most demoparties if you arent feeling it you can just leave it for another time, and just that release of pressure makes it more like fun and less like work. ive personally had that work-like feeling for the intel compos, and it does kill your motivation. you get into work mode where you easily and happily find things to take your concentration away (like pouet,youtube and msn) rather than fun mode where you dont want to have it taken away.

(hah, dont i feel smug i didnt get a demobox now eh? you thought it was free, but noooo!)

Selling your soul has never been easy ;)

smash: Back when I had to commute 30min train + 30min subway* to work, I managed to code a few things but 30 mins was too short and the train usually too noisy and crowded to really focus.

Do you listen to some music or use a noise canceller headset ?

*: forget about having room to pull out your laptop during the rush hour in the subway

poi: yea, sure, listen to music, although the train is pretty quiet (its a modern train, and in britain talking on the train is frowned upon ;) )

Iam not really a coder, but iam programming in real life :)

So for me its totally opposite, when iam done with my job, or the motivation for commercial work is done, i take a glass, and switch to scene work, preparing gfx etc.

I cant somehow sit an watch a movie, or read a book, i have the crazy idea that i could use my time somehow more effective :)

But i admit that the way some of you discribed is great ...
I wish i could "switch" off in the evening sometimes ..

Goddamn you lucky man! I actually had to buy better headphones because I got sick and tired of people loudly talking in the train!

It's sad to hear people's tales of gargantuan daily commutes. I'm lucky enough to have a ten-minute commute from my front door just out of town to my desk in the city centre - not even enough time to bother sitting down on the Metro train. Having said that, sometimes I think it'd be nice to have a dead half-hour to do some tracking on my Eee.

I work in a postgrad digital art research facility, so there's a shitload of opportunity to work on projects loosely related to sceney stuff and my efforts to acquire programming skills actually fall under professional development, and are encouraged :D

Parapete's just got a job basically writing demos for the company who did the graphics chip for the Nokia N95. An actual job, writing actual demos. Ridiculous. So hopefully between the two of us, we've now got working environments that are conducive to our maybe doing a *good* demo sometime soon.

For instance, I do demoscene-related lectures and presentations here at the university from time to time, and after the last one I got an excellent 3D modeller/animator bloke interested in working with Parapete and I (we're always in desperate need of artists...), and another bloke came out of the woodwork to say he had 20 A600s and funding to do some sort of museum exhibit where they all play music/demos etc. and wondered if my department could help out as an official project.

So I'm gonna enjoy it while it lasts - maybe my next job will be a cruel grind - but I do admit that I spent 6 months turning down better-paid jobs and really fighting for this one, so that I could get the work/life balance that I really wanted. An extra few grand a year wouldn't help me if I didn't have time to enjoy it.

</hippie>

come on, nobody is using drugs ?? (including the legal ones : chocolate, caffeine, cola, taurine, coca leaves, various herbs, ...)

How does that differ from half the employees at Fala... I mean ARM Norway? :)

the pay ;)

"I cant somehow sit an watch a movie, or read a book, i have the crazy idea that i could use my time somehow more effective :) "

indeed!

magic: how the hell can you compare trading to coding, making graphics or music? not as if you have to concentrate on it very hard is it?

I guess he does.

Devistator: what magic does (or has done) for a diskmag shouldn't be despised, it also needs time and skills (even if different from the ones you mention).

Zest: it may be time consuming but i wouldnt say skillful in magic's case, it doesnt take a lot of skill to interview people, come on, wake up bwoy! I guess the only "skill" he posesses is being annoying, irritating and living in the past. mad skillz that is!

IMHO ofcourse..

To me, there's a short answer to the posts' question: I don't... and I've tried :-)

I've just moved to other hobbies, like photography... staying on the PC after work is just being too hellish for me (and I still have to do some Camera Raw and Photoshop for photos, but I try and get that to as little as I can).

you're right skrebbel. i could pull out the wireless router (it's downstairs) and it would require some serious effort (tell this to the little african children walking 20 miles a day just for a bucket of water) to re-enable it.

do it, it works.

Niels: dont be such a dork I just tried to help you out..
anyway looking forward to your new release ! Keep the dutch scene alive! ;-)

coding at work during hefty perforce syncs seems to work as well :)

Interesting thread.

With voxreen I surprised myself by finishing it in a week or so. My schedule was in such way organized based on the fact that I really want to finish a little thing in time no matter if I scrap things out or don't do some things as I imagined them. The effects were old, they were just applied on the voxel scape which was the only newer effect I had coded since a year or so (but this one was already ready too). In the past, the worse time of democoding was taken into putting all parts together and maybe do few sync/transition if possible. In the past I was writting spagheti code for this and for the timing/transition on every different part I spent a lot of time. This time I just had one cool transition that crossfades both palette and voxel height from current and next part, wrote a little functions that made life easier when I want to say at this time start to fade to next part (though it still needs work) and so I could easilly write the script of the following parts.

Actually, I think that because my intro followed the revolving around one effect concept (voxel) with old 2d effects running on it (lot's of copy-paste of old code) and just the same transition, it was the way to release it in such limited time. I would prefer to code different effects, different transitions but in more time. I also learned that maybe I should start (or continue) working on a good demo framework which makes my life easier when demo scripting or any other little things I need. My next big PC demo might be accelerated, hopefully in a good easy to use demo framework I might try to code slowly each day and maybe I have 8 months time to work in my pace.

I just don't know if I will have any more time for coding smaller things in CPC, C64 or gameparks or nintendos or anything else in between. I really want to!