Like everyone else I tend to lose focus once in a while and specially when my life revolves around software & game development and having an average of 4 to 6 hours of sleep.

My daily routine goes from waking up early around 5-6 AM and then going to a software programming day job which means I'm working 8 to 9 hours shift to mainly pay for bills and keep money coming in, once I get out of work I spend around 3 to 4 hours with my lovely wife and kids which I love with all my heart, right after putting kids to bed I quickly run down to my office, start up the coffee machine and begin looking at my personal project's Trello boards / backlogs to see what’s next to do in game or software development.

If you do that everyday from Monday through Friday’s it really can get old and in times very discouraging, specially when you go out and watch other people just live their day to day life and no even bother to do anything extra or take an extra mile that indie game developers (or entrepreneurs) have to go through, I am honestly not complaining but instead talking facts if you know what I mean.

Keep in mind that by no means I’m saying you have to have extra projects to be motivated or that some people are lazy or don’t have dreams, we all have busy lives but some of us have a different vision and passion in which sometimes can take you to a level that can definitely be unhealthy.

What do I do to keep passion levels going up?

I often look back at early game prototypes that I’ve created years back and evaluate progress over time, I also keep an archive of all the testing level videos and often watch them to see where the game can improve on, I also follow many great game developers in Twitter and feel so proud when I see super busy game developers work through years of development in a small teams and having to support a family and still yet be able to release a beautiful, playable, and awesome game… those are some of the things that keep me going!

To me passion / persistence is the key to becoming good at anything you’ve ever dream of. I often think that we as individuals have the same potential and opportunities in life, even when we’re not born with a skill or have are gifted at “x” as other’s do naturally. If you work on it you can overtime train yourself and gain the experience required to become good at anything.

I remember my early years when I started going through college with a major in Software Engineering and taking a class on C++ class, for the first 5 minutes of the class I was already giving up, asking myself questions about how will I ever be able to understand all those “(*678%^&&^%” codes and make sense of them, it was worse when I took an assembly class in college, I was in the edge of giving up, however in the back of my mind there was that dream of becoming one day not just a developer but also a Game Developer.

To summarize try to keep your passion going and don’t let anything or anyone tell you what you can’t or can do, always believe in yourself (follow your gut) and learn from mistakes, look at mistakes in a good way since you know that without mistakes you wouldn’t have ever learned what you know now.

If you have a project or idea and you have the though of success just do it and start it and remember that time goes fast and if you don’t start now you may regret it in the future ;)

Thank you for your time and don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter, also be sure to find me at @dilmerv and stop by and say hi as I love to chat with everyone.