Community Question of the Week: How do you prepare your workspace to focus and work?

Each week we pose a question to our game developer community on the Microsoft Game Dev Discord. The beating heart of our online developer community, our Discord server allows developers to connect with each other, share their projects, get support, and network with peers in a thriving discussion space.

This week’s question is: How do you prepare your game dev workspace to encourage focus and uninterrupted work?

Rob “BentVector” Targosz, founder of Bent Vector Studios: “I do 95% of my game development work on a gaming laptop, and can work anywhere, anytime, on pretty much any part of our current project, except for testing. To facilitate that, the most important preparation for me is exactly that: preparation.

I must keep track of every detail in some kind of to-do list. I've used many different applications for this in the past, but in the last few years, going from purely solo to having other people working with me on the same project (and then back to solo again earlier this year!), we started using GitHub Issues to track our tasks, bugs, and milestones.

By breaking work down like this and tracking it with milestones, I always have a small list of things on my immediate to-do list, so I'm never overwhelmed by the immensity of the work or let myself get sidetracked by out-of-scope ideas. If I have a new idea, it goes into GitHub Issues for review before it ever gets any work done on it.”

Willem Willemse, currently working on Revalo: “Due to a few constraints and problems, my workspace is not in a separate room or office. This makes organisation a bit of a problem, so I have split my desk into two sections, one for my workstation, having my screens, drawing tablets and books for notes/art ready at hand. The other is for everything else.

As I also have a day job, it is difficult to set aside dedicated hours for continuous work. Thus, I mostly work in two sessions, waking up at 4:00 and working until around 6:00, and then again in the late afternoon for a few more hours, which is also the time when there are the least distractions around the house.

The key contributor to me working during those hours is music: I always have music playing while working, as it helps drown out all the other noises helping me to focus on only what is in front of me.”

Manuel Cota, Software by Tarh Ik: “A focused and uninterrupted game development work is a utopia for Indies like me. I have a day job, a family, and a child that I tutor in Math, Physics and Chemistry. I also have a high maintenance dog. There is no point in planning.

On my most productive seasons, I wake up at 5:00 am and work on game development until 7:00 am when I wake up the rest of the family, and the family day goes until around midnight.

What I do is the opposite: I interrupt my daily activities with game development. I always carry a tablet with me (used to be an HP stream 7 until I accidentally sat on it, so I now carry an Avita Magus II) where I do most of my 3D modeling and animation, usually during hockey practice. I work from home, so all the time I would take for transport, I use it to debug my games. Lunch time is also game dev time. So far, it has worked. Still, I have to admit that, some days, it’s exhausting.”

Adriano Pessoa, Lucky Raccoon Games: “I have been working from home since the pandemic. Developing a work system that works took time and some good conversations. Family support is essential for me to be able to work focused and uninterrupted.

With a wife and two children at home, it was normal to have frequent interruptions. With a few conversations, we were able to adjust things and today we deal with it very well. I also renovated my home office with a focus on providing a more comfortable and organized environment that would facilitate the development workflow, this way I can develop and test games in the devkits in practically no time.

Having an organized, functional and distraction-free productive environment is one of the main keys to productivity. These small changes allowed me to launch six games on Xbox/Windows Store in the last 12 months and the goal is to increase this number to close to 10 in the next year.”

Marlon “Nolram” Wolfersdorf: “I've been mostly working from home for years. To my great misfortune, my working space is also my bedroom. The trick I have figured out to make that situation better is the use of two low-power RGB spotlights (30, maybe 50 bucks each). By default I just have them on a warm yellow or white (one is behind my monitor, one underneath a table next to my main desk to illuminate the back of the room). When trying to really focus in on work, I tend to change those colours, which makes the room feel like a completely different place, which has somehow hacked my brain into treating it more as a "work only" environment.”

Want to join in on the fun? Visit the Microsoft Game Dev community on Discord to hang out with us, we’d love to see you there!

Image from Paladin’s Passage on Xbox by Bent Vector Studios.