How Good Habits Can Help You Ship Your First Game (and Your Second)

New year new me, right? While I appreciate big ambition, sometimes you just need to take the steps to be a little better each day. In honor of the beginning of 2025 and of the recent release of our “dailies” feature, I wanted to drop a message to those aspiring to build their own next big thing.

Whatever your niche is or whatever you want your niche to be, you should be completing smaller tasks consistently each and every day.

Progress Over Perfection

If you are making a game (and you probably are if you’re here), iterative work allows you to create a playable prototype faster. You might be wondering what's so great about a playable prototype if it’s not what you want as a long term goal?

You Develop Skills Through Repetition

You may not want to, but try to remember attending school. Consider how some of the most fundamental skills you learned in life came about from showing up each day, doing your homework, and putting your new skills to the test.

Good habits like coding daily or practicing your pixel art ensure steady skill improvement over time. In a widely referenced 1993 study, K. Anders Ericsson and his team found that expert violinists achieved their high level of skill not due to innate talent but through extensive, focused practice - roughly 10,000 hours over a span of a decade or more. This idea, later popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the "10,000-hour rule" in Outliers, emphasizes the importance of deliberate effort in mastering any craft, including game development.

It’s not quick, and it’s not always easy. Sometimes you just need to grind to get to where you want to be.

Feedback and Refinement

One of the greatest benefits of showing up each day, building something that challenges you, and putting your work into the world is that you establish a feedback loop where you can uncover issues early and find out what works. Even if it’s only your mom paying attention at the beginning (hi mom!), you'll find people are there to give you encouragement. Plenty of others will give you feedback that lets you know where to focus your efforts.

In the game development industry, you often see this in the form of “early access” and “demo releases”. These are creators putting themselves out there to dive into this cycle. Quietly thinking about your game won’t make progress, but sharing the tiniest proof of concept propels you forward toward your ultimate vision. Find out sooner rather than later what works and what does not.

So What Does This Mean in Practical Terms

Start by scoping your work. Consider the first step you could take that would get you closer to your end goal. Maybe today you want to figure out an interesting combat mechanic or maybe have some art you have been meaning to work on.

Start to ask yourself the following when you think about what to work on next, and make sure you can answer each question with a resounding and comfortable YES.

• Can I finish what I’m working on within 24 hours?
• Can I share what I’m working on with others when I finish it?
• Does what I’m working on move me closer to my bigger ambitions?

Version Control Is Your Friend

We are blessed in software development with the popularity and adoption of tools like git. If you are a total novice, invest in learning how you can save your work at any point in time. Give yourself a solid foundation for incremental improvement by always having a stable place to start from. And I don’t mean just go learn how to use git if you’re unfamiliar (though it’s not a bad idea)... I mean adopt and embrace the philosophy of incremental improvement and resilience through history. Apply structure to produce a work style which values making progress in small, manageable steps while always maintaining a stable foundation.

Ship early and Ship Often

As soon as you can, you should be producing something and sharing it.

Abandonment is a huge risk in indie game development. Many people are starting these projects on the side while they maintain the normal chaos of their day-to-day lives. Shipping something imperfect beats waiting for perfection and shipping nothing every time. Smaller, consistent releases create a sense of accomplishment and can help keep your passion alive.

Even a simple demo or a single mechanic can spark excitement and feedback. You never know until you get that rough draft out into the world and out into the hands of players. One of the most daunting tasks for indie developers is exactly that - getting their game into the hands of players. This is why Final Parsec is dedicated to building dead simple game hosting for games no matter how you build them. Whether it’s a prototype, a demo, or a single level, hosting makes it easy to share your progress and gather feedback. Even a bare-bones version of your game gives you the opportunity to showcase your progress and let others experience your vision. Shipping isn’t just about finishing your game - it’s about giving it life, even in its earliest form.

Show Up Every Day

Show up every day. I mean this literally. Show up every single day.

If you have a project you aspire to complete, make sure that you are doing something no matter how small. No one makes progress standing on the sidelines.

Building a habit of showing up every day is powerful, and our new dailies feature is designed to help you do exactly that. Telling a good story is a key skill for a game developer and daily writing fosters accountability to hone that skill. Adapting effective journaling techniques to your storytelling can help you identify what you want to work on and keep momentum. Show up each day to respond to a prompt about a fictional universe and see where your creativity takes you.

Keep Moving Forward

Game development is a journey of small, consistent steps. By embracing habits like daily progress, seeking feedback, and shipping early, you give yourself the best chance to build something meaningful. Whether it’s just jotting down ideas in the world building tool, hosting a demo to gather input, or pushing a single mechanic into the world, every action you take keeps your project alive and moving forward. Show up every day, share your work, and remember - progress over perfection is what turns dreams into reality.