A Day in the Life of an Indie Game Dev with Kids CA,USA

My day usually starts between 6AM - 6:45AM. I get up with my little girl, and get her dressed and fed. My wife gets dressed and ready for work. Then she takes our little one to day care.

I try to get my three year old's lunch ready the night before, but today I got it ready before I woke him up. He is super picky and today he's eating pasta with parmesan cheese, apple slices, and grapes.

I get my son up around 8AM, and get him dressed and fed.

Here are some pics of the kids' room.

My son's breakfast consists of eight cherries and a cup of milk.

I have to cut out the seeds or he will break a tooth or choke and die. Doing this reminds me of Dexter.

He drinks his milk on the way to school. Today he said that if I don't remember to put the rest of the milk back in the fridge, when I get home I won't be a super hero. Don't worry everyone, I got it in the fridge.

We have two black cats.

Here's the view out of our bedroom. The neighbors have probably seen my dong several times now.

Here's our bed. To be honest, I rarely make the bed. You're welcome, Imgur.

We like putting up our children's artwork on the wall. They like it.

Here's some stuff I've painted. That's up on the walls.

Toys are EVERYWHERE. We clean the house everyday and when the kids get home, it's like a hurricane comes through your house.

Notice the huge sack of rice next to the bouncy. I'm Thai and I'm married to a super smoking hot Norwegian. My mom lives with us, which I thought would be bad, but it is actually really awesome. She cooks us authentic Thai food almost every day. It's like we have our own personal chef.

Here's a charcoal drawing a did for my wife for her birthday. I asked her what she wanted as a gift and she said anything. Now she is very direct on what she wants for her birthdays. This is proudly on display for our guests.

I used to work for a major motion picture company. I won't tell you what company, but let's just call them "Reamworks." I was a lead stereoscopic image finaling artist. I used compositing to fix rendering errors or to enhance footage based on what other departments and higher ups wanted. After working on a movie, if you get a credit, sometimes the company would give you a crew gift. These are most of my crew gifts. Sometimes the gifts would be a bag or a book. The maquettes were always the favorite.

Here's my desk where I do everything from creating art to coding it for my game. When I was at Reamworks, my job could be done solely through Photoshop and Nuke. I was really curious about coding though and was able to learn Python from some of the awesome trainers there. I went out of my way to incorporate scripts into everyday tasks. After that job ended it was an easy transition going from my last job to making video games.

Here are some signed posters from the crew from my department. I worked on the Dragons poster on the right as well.

Here's my breakfast. It was an apple pastry. I may or may not have followed it up with a frozen burrito.

Here's my trusty Wacom tablet. I just upgraded to this one from my tiny Graphite tablet three or so years ago. I love it!

Here's today's work. I created the fifth boss of our game in Photoshop and have to color correct the shapes and make it all fit together. Then I need to break up the parts and export it to the engine.

Here's my garage. I used to play hockey three days a week, but now that I have a looming launch date for my game, I quit all my leagues. I try to play at least once a week so I don't get fatter.

Here's my trusty Subaru Forester.

Charles Schultz lived in a town close by and built a rink and museum. I play ice hockey here when I can.

I use a rocket dryer to dry my gear since I used to play a lot of hockey. I spray all my gear and then throw it in the rocket dryer and set the timer. Next time I use my gear, it is dry and doesn't smell like balls. The rocket dryer has a heater and a fan than constantly cycles the air around the gear. The gear is hung up inside the bag.

Lunch time! My mom made me pork chops and boiled rice. Boiled rice is cooked rice that is then cooked again in water. It makes the rice super soft and mushy. It's good for saltier foods. I usually cook my own food, but my mom loves cooking me food and does so without me asking. She's the best.

At around 5PM I pick up both kids and bring them home. I start getting them fed and wait for my wife to get home. My wife usually bathes the little one and we trade off who reads the big one books. The little one goes to bed first and then we put the oldest one to bed hours later.

Tonight was my turn to read books to my oldest. He loves anything from Curious George to Ninja Turtles. We read a story from a Batman book once and he had a hard time understanding why Bruce Wayne looked exactly like Clark Kent, but they were different people.

Here's the loneliest place in the house after the kids go to bed. My wife usually works out and then goes to bed and I keep working until I feel like I've gotten enough progress done on the game.

Tonight I got the boss in the game and it barely works. I need to code some of it's behavior and attacks tomorrow. Still lots of stuff I have to add to the fifth stage as well. It's coming together though. Slowly but surely.

Time to clock out! I turn off my computer and then post some stuff to social media on my phone in bed. I have to try to do as much on social media as possible because independent game developers have very very small reach. We have to do anything we can to get more eyes on our games...

Cat tax.

Edit: I didn't want to post any info on the game because I didn't want this to be a self promotion post. I LOVE the day in the life posts. But, my info is:

www.leadmoneygames.com
www.twitter.com/leadmoneygames
www.twitter.com/abpungprakearti
www.facebook.com/leadmoneygames

You guys are awesome! Thanks for looking.