I'm still a student and probably not the best to answer. I spend 5-10 hours a week coding and practicing. The rest is spent reading and learning. I also play around with some engines a bit to learn some other things (art, design, etc...). I have a full time job that's not related to programming in any way. So it's more ore less my free time, although I would love it to be more.
Hours per week
About 40 hours a week. Was in the industry for about 4-5 years, burned out. Went to an easier dev job outside the industry and now I get to do my own game dev in the evenings instead =)
Hi,
More than one project at a time is not unusual, such as in my case.
About 60 hours per week is currently what I devote to game development, but I would do more if I did not have to spend part time earning a living to supplement my progress in game development. I have worked as many as about 85 hours per week when able to focus on only game dev.
I have been working as a 2D and 3D artist in the video game and simulation industry for about 3 1/2 years, and learning code in Java and C# for about 2 years for my own projects.
Depends on how motivated I feel at work - sometimes I just do 40 h weeks, but more often 70-90 h weeks (if it's a lot to do and I enjoy it). Glad I have the option to choose and most often enjoy my job. Should be noted I write middleware, though it has happened I've been working directly with game projects using our middleware. When not doing lengthy weeks I tend to work on hobby projects (including electronics to keep away from purely doing programming for variation).
I program just to keep basics fresh in my head. 2 hours every night (12am to 2am). I don't have the confidence to do anything with my knowledge so I just do code out of books and stupid things like tilemap tests or movement tests with Allegro, SDL, or SFML.
I'm a novice game programmer, and have only been coding for about a year (C++), so most my time is still spent learning how to do things. but on average i spend at least 6 hours a day coding, but fairly often i get into a groove and will end up spending 12+ hours coding. id say i spend between 40-70 hours a week coding.
im doing this to become a "Professional" game developer/programmer.
ive completed a handful of dinky games, and recently have been cloning classic games, starting from pong (of course!
)
That's a lot of hours
That is nothing if you make it into the industry. I've read reports and had the pleasure of talking to guys in the industry who would work an average of 12 hours a day during regular dev time and doing 14+ during crunch time. I remember watching a making of video where they showed the team slept in sleeping bags on the floor of their offices and woke up at like 6am every morning. That was during the 90s, but I don't know if it is still that bad now.
I got into programming to be a game programmer. Saying that is about as far as my confidence let me get. Oh well, not all dreams can be obtained.
Well - when I'm not writing stupid lab reports and doing tons of hw for EE classes I am about at 15 to 20 hours per week... finished around 8 solo projects - but they werent titles.. just things like Pass the pigs using mooses instead of pigs (complete with 2d graphics) and I have made pong, asteroids, tetris, and a few other games like that.
I have been working on a 3d engine now for the past 6 months that lets people build hex maps using a toolkit - basically formed a company called Earth Banana Games and we decided to produce a heroscape style editor that was capable of playing with heroscape rules along with many other hex tile game rules - we aren't going for realistic physics or crazy cloth animation or anything like that - so the engine is pretty simple - just a deferred renderer capable of using different materials/shaders, some sound capabilities, and very basic collision detection, and simple bone animations. It will work for what we are trying to do. We plan on finishing the engine then doing a kickstarter to raise some money for hiring artists and a couple devs to use the toolkit and help make levels. We will see how it goes. Right now we are revamping our website and launching some fun side project stuff since game engine updates can get fairly boring.. we will be doing dev sessions and game play-throughs and different articles and podcasts
Anyways, no matter what you do - making games takes up a lot of time - but for me it is thoroughly enjoyable.. usually at least.. Its always a struggle to know when to pull the plug on adding features and such.. like with the engine I go and look at the UDK and think... man wouldnt it be cool if I had little windows you could plug stuff in to for shader operations on materials... but - I dont NEED that.. and it would take forever to implement something similiar - at that point why not just use UDK?
My point is - I saw an opening to bla bla bla and be a me monster for a while on this forum so I have taken it - for those who made it through the above paragraphs - I salute you
That is nothing if you make it into the industry. I've read reports and had the pleasure of talking to guys in the industry who would work an average of 12 hours a day during regular dev time and doing 14+ during crunch time. I remember watching a making of video where they showed the team slept in sleeping bags on the floor of their offices and woke up at like 6am every morning. That was during the 90s, but I don't know if it is still that bad now.
That's simply an abusive workplace. If that's happening, it's usually because bad management has gotten the company into a situation where everyone has to work overtime, for free, or it will go bankrupt. The front-line staff suffer because of these failures, and sometimes they choose to suffer because they're loyal, they like their job, and there's 100 desperate students who are still fresh enough to want to take these jobs.
If you're an experienced developer, then you don't have to put up with those kinds of dysfunctional workplaces -- there'll be other jobs with more sensible management around. If you're a desperate graduate, then maybe you'll put up with one of those broken workplaces in order to get some experience 
In my country, these practices are simply illegal -- asking people to regularly work more than 7.6hrs per day is punishable by a $30k fine per employee, per instance... so it's not common here. Irregular "crunch-time" still occurs (again, due to mismanagement, whether by your lead, or your publisher...), but legally you have to be given equal paid-time-off to what you put into overtime -- e.g. if you work 4x 50hr weeks (instead of 38hr weeks), then next month you get 48hrs off work while still being paid (50x4 - 38x4).
All of my projects, including games, vary between 10 hours a week (when nothing is 'hot', or I am busy with family), to 40 hours. I also work 40 as a programmer (~25 years of this).
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