That looks familiar, it has some of the same advice, which I think is good advice. Starts you out simple, and getting something done, whether it's crap or not, always feels good and can be motivating in itself.

Speedhack was good for that. Set yourself a time limit to get a game done, and then stick to it.

I have relatively bad habits that encourage a lack of motivation: I stay up too late, I don't eat healthy, and I j0rb full-time. My productivity varies, but it is noticeably better when I get enough sleep (read: go to bed at like 8pm to wake up around 7:30am). The problem with that is I have no time to actually do anything on my own time. My time is all j0rb's with that schedule. I get home around 5:15pm or 5:30pm and only have 2.5 or 2.75 hours before I'm supposed to go to bed, and included in that is eating something (and, in a fantasy world, doing the dishes). That just doesn't seem like enough time to enjoy myself and get personal projects done. So instead I don't sleep much. Which is almost as unproductive because often I'm too tired to do anything after j0rb.

I've almost given up on game programming. Not because it doesn't interest me, but because it isn't very practical. There are a lot of concepts to learn and it's unlikely to ever lead to a sustainable income. Learning about utility and business programming seems much more practical, and depending on the topic, I still enjoy it. If you develop software that serves a practical purpose in your life then it can actually make you more productive! Today I finally "started" a project that I've been wanting to do for months: write a CLI command-set for managing finances/budgets. My hope is that I'll be able to actually keep track of how much money I spend on what, figure out where I can save some more, and figure out how much (if any) I'm netting now that I'm living on my own (paying rent, telcom, food, etc.). There really isn't any useful code yet. I realized that I had better focus on the back end, and particularly the data schema, before I bothered working on the front-ends so I stopped the useless coding I was doing and began to speculate on the data schema:

https://github.com/bamccaig/ka-ching/blob/0cca9fa85300e4a9e8e76fc5e4dd27a3925e022f/SCHEMA

I honestly haven't done anything budget-like since grade 10 business class so I'm more or less just making things up right now. Advice / criticism / feature suggestions would be much appreciated. Would help to motivate me if I actually had a design that would be useful and not just made up.

In any case, the lifestyle that I keep (see above) does burn me out every few weeks or months and eventually I reach a point where I have zero energy to be on the computer and just watch a couple of hours of TV and then go to sleep really early (like 7pm or 8pm). It feels great to sleep that long though (for me), I almost always have awesome dreams when I sleep long enough (especially so if I'm not wasted), and I feel much better after doing that a couple of days in a row. Perhaps all you really need is to get some more sleep?

Spend less than you make. Works for me.

I'm currently saving up for a new Furnace. Need $2400-$2600 for it. so far I have about $1000. Maybe $1100. Technically I have $1500 in cash right now, but I have yet to pay my power+water+garbage bill, and have about $400 on my creditcard. So yeah, I actually have about $1000 of actual money after including debt and paying the rest of my bills. Which is nice. I might have enough saved up by August.

I was actually thinking about it today and I may get rid of all credit cards once I have my big one paid off. Basically avoid anything that charges interest. I honestly feel the economy is going to crash in the near future and I want to be out of debt and have a few bucks saved before that.

Yeah, I also like to write... but I'm sure nobody here has caught on to that

I'd say doing what you love best for a job is great, the second favorite thing should be your hobby. Like a major and minor in college.

If you're doing the "heavy lifting" of programming work at your computer, then You're Doing it Wrong ™.

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Yes. I wish I had the ability to design, code, debug and test software all while in front of a monitor. However, I have a short attention span, and I often lose motivation while sitting at the computer.

Here's the process I usually follow:

1. Get an idea for some piece of software.
2. Do some technical research via google to make sure my idea is viable.
3. Go to a cafe with paper, pencils and index cards.
4. Work out the high-level design on paper.
5. Work out the core classes using basic UML (very informal) using index cards. Each class gets an index card.
6. Write some code.
7. Write some tests.
8. Print out troublesome source code for a paper-based code review. (For some reason, it's easier for me to find bugs, poor architecture, etc when I'm looking at code on paper.)
9. Goto step 4.

Yes. It's an infinite loop. I haven't really figured out how to finish software yet.

I don't know how to design software...

pff, don't look at me.

My game design process is something like this:

1) Come up with idea for new game
2) Create some basic graphics for the game
3) Create a level editor for the game
4) Create a level with the editor
5) write code to load in level and basic game code
6) spend days trying to track down bugs
7) if (frustrated) goto 1
8) else polish and release game.

I usually don't make it to step 8.

I've been mostly rendering using trueSpace 6, using basic shapes, texturing, lighting to suit the project then once rendered, I use a combination of Irfanview and ImageReady to crop and resize the image. ImageReady has some nice features for this, including one I use to make transparent backgrounds.