When people hear that we travel full-time while working on our games the most common question is: “How do you find the time to work while you travel?”
Mostly the answer is “stay somewhere for two or three months”. By staying somewhere for an extended period you can get past the novelty shock of a new place. The first few weeks is usually a write-off as you explore and lean about the new place you’ve found yourself. But after that you start to find a rhythm, the laptops can come out and you can start pounding out lines of code.
There are places that are better for working and places that are worse. Tropical paradise is pretty easy. When you’re on a beach in Costa Rica or Thailand or Honduras you don’t really have that much to do. There aren’t many people around so you probably don’t have many local friends and there isn’t that much to do besides go snorkeling or swimming for a couple hours a day. That leaves you with a lot of time to just enjoy a banana smoothie and the sounds of the waves while you get some work done. Plus your Internet is probably pretty bad so you’re not going to be streaming any YouTube (streaming video is a big time-sink for me).
The harder places to work are big interesting cities. There’s always something to do and something to see. Since there are a lot more people in big cities you’ll probably make more local friends and so you’ll go out more. Friends are a real drag when you’re trying to get work done :) Istanbul was really hard to get any work done. San Francisco is pretty hard even though most of our friends there work 9-5 but for the last month we’ve been in Tokyo. Ack.
Tokyo is the biggest city in the world and it’s very diverse. Every neighbourhood used to be its own city and they all feel very different. Tokyo feels like a whole country where you can take local trains to get between the cities. Imagine if you could go from Paris to Berlin in half an hour for 2$. Would you get much work done? Worse, we have a bunch of friends here now.
So I haven’t gotten a lot done this month. I’ve done some PR, given some interviews, worked on the website. All that stuff is important. But if I’m really going to get any work done on Incredipede I’m gonna need a hammock and an ocean. Luckily the Philippines is next on the list and should provide the perfect atmosphere. Unfortunately we’re traveling with friends!
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