Well as with all things in life, your best laid plans don’t always pan out. I had hoped to have a regular 15 hours a week to work on various projects but that allocation was tenuis at best.
With family demands and personal experiences the time left in an evening was quickly diminished, and soon any free time was eaten up by kids or playing games as means to unwind. So a few months of time lost ( optimistically about 180 hours) I’m back and I need a more pragmatic approach.
Firstly, the extend time from development has lead to rapid decline in my skills. I have gotten rusty with programming, forgetting the little in’s and outs of Godot and having to hit API more frequently. Familiarity with Affinity Designer gone too, I have to use it more often to start firing those old neurons and relearn old tricks.
The take away from all this is even a moderate break of a few months has a time and knowledge cost when returning. So I still like to manage 15 hours a week goal, but what more important is that I regular engage in game development skills just to keep them warm. It’s better that I sketch for an hour, write a short script and follow a blender tutorial for a total of 4 hours one week than nothing at all.
I will have more time, children are starting to grow up and attend full time school in a few years. This could give me 36-40 hours a week it would be a shame to have to spend some of that covering old ground.