It looks like a well meaning group are attempting to restart interest in a Scottish chapter of the IGDA. While I’m all for more cooperation between Scottish developers (and engaging with other people interested in the industry), I’m still rather soured on the IGDA itself. Since my earlier posts relating to working hours, the organisation has only been further devalued in my eyes. But rather than rant about it now, I’m going to make the effort to attend a local meetup and meet the people in question, and tell them just why I’m cynical. Maybe I can be persuaded that I’m just being a stick-in-the-mud, but at least they’ll be going into it with open eyes. Either way, I’ll thrash out the arguments both ways, and write it up for here.

In the meantime, I haven’t much that I can interestingly write about here. We’re juggling now 5 distinct projects (6 if you include the much neglected internal prototype work), none of which I can freely write about here. Well that’s not true, of course I can talk about our own project, but right now I don’t quite want to, at least not until we can put up some interesting looking screenshots. But more importantly for us is the fact that we’re actually progressing one of our ideas, instead of continually putting it off till the next bit of down-time between client work. I think that’s good, both because it’s cool to be doing our own work, but also because it keeps us from going a bit mental with an seemingly never-ending pile of work-for-hire. As much as we like our clients, their work is theirs, and it’s hard to get super-enthusiastic about other peoples’ projects.

I’m personally feeling a bit of burn-out, largely because I’ve been working solidly since before October, with no breaks of more than two or three days, and there’s not likely to be any let up for the next month or two at least. So refreshing our heads with a bit of our own work is a good thing to stave off the madness. Sadly the same lack of available energy is the reason why the scarcity of posts here. There have been plenty of interesting topics come up, I’ve just not been able to find the time to write them up for here.

It’s funny, because when I was working as an employee for someone else, it never occurred to me that I needed a holiday. I threw myself into the work, but not completely, there was always room for personal stuff. Since starting up for myself, the greater focus on work means that I’ve had little creative energy left over for anything else. And if I want to refresh my batteries, I think I need a proper (i.e. not thinking about work at all) holiday. But I should stop dwelling on that now, because I find myself staring out of the window here at the pretty sunset, day-dreaming about what I’d do on a holiday, and that’s just rubbing salt in the wound. 🙂

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2011 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Tales from the grind-stone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.