Pick up an analog hobby. Something that is tangible and away from the internet, computers and software. Christ, I sound like some loonie but there is pleasure in fixing your car, building a deck, gardening, or learning how to play an instrument. Avoid hobbies that are competitive in nature.
Though, as it turns out, software is eating the world, and every analog hobby I've picked up eventually wants to become a computer hobby. You can choose to resist this entirely, or give in a bit. The analog part is still there waiting for you whenever you're tired of starting at rectangles.
(Example A: FM synthesis ideas should obviously be reimplemented in python... Oh wait, super collider exists, and now this cheap USB game pass I had lying around is an FM synth. But I've still got a small pile of synths to play with.)
(Example 2: Birds are cool. Eventually I found my way into bird song id with machine learning, but I can now always justify a long walk in the woods as field research...)
Example 3: Board games are cool and analog, I'll start designing those.
Oh but now if I want to find a publisher in this era of a totally saturated market the game should look nice, so I should spend some serious time on the graphic design and sell sheets and writing up the game rules and designing graphics to put in the game rules and making and editing pitch videos...on my computer.
Oh and it's really hard to find enough playtesters to play the game or publishers to look at the game (especially during the pandemic)...unless I make a digital version on Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia, and playtest on the computer.
Oh, people are getting used to certain things being automated for them like the setup in Tabletop Simulator, so now I'm expected to... write code in Lua to automate player setup or handle round cleanup and make things easier and faster.
Or, I don't really want to spend thousands of hours on hundreds of playtests to make sure this game is balanced / no first player advantage / etc...so I'll write Python scripts to model the gameplay and run a bunch of Monte Carlo simulations to analyze the data.
I almost spend more time on the computer than not for this analog hobby nowadays. Especially when working on games that are past the initial pen and paper and basic components phase.
When things largely moved online for the pandemic, it was a great opportunity to reach publishers I normally couldn't without going to a convention overseas, and yet I lost almost all motivation to work on board game design that year. Still had some great ideas for my designs, but I couldn't get myself to do much more than write those ideas down.
Eventually just started coding video games again. Figured if it's going to end up on the computer anyway, might as well make a video game to start and not have to have a publisher in the first place.
I don't care about making money in board games. If I did I wouldn't bother, there's not a whole lot of money in there unless you make multiple mega-hits or you one of a handful of publishers, and that's getting harder and harder to do with so many games being put out there every year (I think it's 700+ that debut each year at Gen Con alone).
But I would like to find an audience that enjoys playing my designs, and pretty much the only way to find an audience is to get your game published via Kickstarter or a publisher (there are other methods, like Print and Play and The Game Crafter, but the potential audience is a tiny fraction of other methods, especially since there's already too many board games released every year by publishers to keep up with. I myself have slowed way down in my game acquisitions and the number of games I try every year, I've run out of room in the house and what I do have don't get played enough to warrant keeping anyway).
Otherwise I'm just designing games purely for the hell of it, and I almost might as well be solving Sudoku puzzles or playing Chess instead.
Also despite it being easier to develop and test board games, I've had a super hard time getting any luck in the industry. I've had a meetings with several publishers, but only got one game signed in about 5 years of trying.
But It's a lot easier if you're a known personality. Like I'm friends with a few people that have made more progress in less time because they volunteer a lot of time in the industry and are pretty well known...one woman has a podcast, works for a game manufacturer, has helped run a few board game conventions, and has three games in the pipeline after in less than half the time I've been trying, but she is fully immersed in the world so it's easier, whereas I'm juggling it with other interests and a job that has nothing to do with the industry. I could be putting myself out there more, but I just don't have the energy for it.
Whereas back when I used to only make video games, I was usually knocking out one or two web games a year, just on my own, and some were getting played millions of times, no publisher needed. If you played Flash games back in the day, there's a chance you played something I made. I still run into random people that have played my Flash games. Two coworkers at my current job alone played them over a decade ago. It has gotten harder to get back into that now that I'm older, slower, and have a wife and two dogs that need my attention, though.
I've considered using Twine for some story-based games before. How are you using it for playtesting?
Yeah, completely agree on all your points. It's a crowded, crowded space.
I'm playing with a design using some decks of cards; Twine seems like it has the right amount of functionality to manage a few different decks without having to print them out. The Twine app is then just a few buttons to draw from different decks, and is really easy to hand off to players. (not that I actually have playtesters at this point, or anything worth playtesting beyond my housemates. :P )
The sweet spot for me is an Idea -> CAD -> Manual Production -> Idea loop, which works for pretty much any hobby that results in a physical artifact. The computer work lets me spot enough problems that I can feel confident the end result will be worth the effort, and I'm not going to hit a dead-end.
Picking up other hobbies got me back into software side projects but not as an end in themselves as they used to be (and I'm pretty tired of "learning" new tech at this point -- it's just the same things over and over and over again, usually with even more complexity); rather, I feel compelled to write little pieces of software that vastly improve my experience of the new, interesting hobbies.
Avoid competitiveness and "getting ahead" -- pursue mastery the same way a zen gardener does. It's very enjoyable to be good at useless things.
