As for yesterday I can’t remember. I think I went for a run, did a twelve hour shift and fell asleep.

This morning I started work far too early, the fingers were going before the brain was engaged, but stuff had to be done. Now I can cope with most things and not get too stressed. Today I had a dev kit that was bricked and needed reflashing and no less than nine people on hip-chat. Conversations ranged from why a singleton constructor shouldn’t access itself, to why a data format was in 32 and not 64 bit. Plus being queried about changes to unsigned int limits. Which are all different across platforms just for fun. I can cope stressful situations without too much of an issue, confrontation, anxiety and depression. I can even cope quite well when Captain James says, “Right, now I’m going to roll back the throttle and go for an auto-rotation. You have control.”. Now that last sentence is a bit confusing, does he mean, “You are perfectly in control of the air-craft.”, or, “You now have the cyclic, collective, pedals and need to scan air-speed, altitude, rate of climb, rotor RPM as well as looking for somewhere to land, and my hand is on the throttle so I can bail out if it all starts to go tits-up.” Somehow I think it’s the latter.

Now the two things that cause my stress level to overflow and my body finally says enough is enough and tries to have a mini heart attack. The first is trying to book any kind of travel on-line. It always fucks up. When I was trying to book a hotel and flight to Japan, Jamie had to take over as it was all going tits up, I was bright red and about to pass out. Booking a flight on one web site and a hotel on another at the same time just doesn’t work, ever. And then if you try and do visa’s as well…The other thing that causes me to have a heart attack is tech support calls from my mother. I know she means well and is just trying to get her laptop to print the inside of her bloody cards, but I’m at the other end of a phone, trying to communicate with a dead dev-kit, nine people and debug a bloody file I/O problem at the same time. I installed OpenOffice somewhere, you only have a trial version of MS Office, it doesn’t support power point anyway. My stress levels are rising, I’m getting frustrated, she’s getting frustrated, I really can’t help. I think if I ever had a job in telephone support I would last about the first phone-call. The person at the other end would still be in the same boat they started with and I’d be dead.

Anyway, I finished off my nine conversations, found my bug and resurrected my dev-kit. I then walked the dogs quickly and finally I was returning back to normal. I went for a run at about 6PM then carried on working. So today apart from a 30 minute run and a quick dog walk I’ve done a 14 hour shift, yesterday was about 13 hours and tomorrow I’ll imagine will be the same.

People think working from home in game-dev is all bed of roses drinking coffee and playing games. That really is far from the reality. Even in the non-crunch times, it’s very long hours and very complicated work which requires a huge amount of concentration. Yes, it’s fun, I get paid a lot of money, I get to fly helicopters but you do actually have to work for it. I think I’ve seen Jamie when I got up and I’ve just seen him again now he’s going to bed. I’m now sat downstairs on the couch with the dog, soon I’ll be off to bed and get the joy of doing it all tomorrow.