My Power Napping Experiment

I've recently had enough of having no time to do anything so I decided to do an experiment.

Time

Since I've started a full-time job I've been thinking a lot about time. Well, I've always been thinking about time. What exactly about time? Well, here we go.

A day has 24 hours and a week has 7 days. This means we have 7 * 24 = 168 hours a week to spend the way we like. If you work 40 hours a week that's 128 hours left. So we lose 40 / 168 = 0.2381 or 23.81% of our week to work. Now, of course, you need to sleep as well. The minimum sleep required is often said to be 6 hours. So that's 6 hours on 7 days or 6 * 7 = 42 hours. So we spent a minimum 42 / 168 = 0.25 or 25% of our week asleep. Now, some people may need more sleep some may need less sleep. If you're a longer sleeper you'll need maybe 8 hours. That's 8 * 7 = 56 hours a week. Taking this into perspective we get 56 / 168 = 0.3333 or 33.33% of our week. Isn't it good that we're doing the home office? Unfortunately, we don't. In my case even worse, I have to drive up to an hour every day to work and back because I don't like living in the city. So that's 5 workdays and 2 hours each for arrival and departure. So, 5 * 2 = 10 hours a week for traveling.

Of our 168 hours we have 168 - 42 - 40 - 10 = 76 hours left. That's only 76 / 168 = 0.4524 or 45.24% time left.

Comparison

• 25% of our week is spent sleeping at a minimum
• 23.81% of our week is spent working
• 10 / 168 = 0.06 or 6% of my week is spent traveling to work
• 45.24% of my week is spent for free time + needs like eating

Too Much To Do

Now this is partly my fault but I kinda got myself into the situation where I want to

• working on a leaderboard in a game
• raid in two different games
• play those games
• play and stream more games
• write these blog posts
• study game design, engineering and development
• work full time
• help a teen and a child in math
• do other projects (programming-wise)
• learn magic

As you might have noticed due to my disturbed frequency of Youtube publishes, streams and blog posts I can't keep up with it anymore. So I need to get time somehow. There are three options I have.

1. Give up work, I can't do that because I would have no income anymore
2. Give up some dedication, I don't want to do this though
3. Siphon the time from another activity

And this is where power napping came to my mind.

Power Napping

So, I've heard and read about this every now and then. People that say they sleep less and have more time for what they want to do. Well, how does it work? According to information, it's as simple as distributing your sleep over the day. This means you will sleep more often every now and then throughout the day but sleepless in total.

Now that sounds very interesting but I couldn't push myself to do it. Until Sunday that is. On Sunday I finally started to give it a try.

Science Behind Napping

On my search, I read some information on sleep duration, purpose and how it benefits us. I found the following information.

60-90 Minute Nap

Plays a key role in making new connections in the brain and solving creative problems.

30-60 Minute Nap

Improves decision-making, memorizing or recalling  (e.g. vocabulary or directions)

Up to 30 Minute Nap

Resets the system, gain a burst of alertness and improved motor performance.

Additionally longer sleep times improve memory and creativity.

My Personal Plan

I've read about people creating or using a power napping plan that helps with napping and lets them have a schedule. I also gave this a thought and this is what I came up with first.

Since I don't want to lose any of the advantages I want to build each type of nap into my daily routine, while leaving the amount at a minimum. I've decided to go with a one and a half-hour long nap, a one-hour long nap and a half an hour-long nap. That's a total sleep time of 1.5 + 1 + 0.5 = 3 hours.

The next question is "When?". First I thought about starting with one and a half continuing with one and last but not least finishing off with a half, however, sleeping a whole hour at work will definitely cause problems. So I swapped that with half an hour. The next plan is when exactly. Since I wake up for work around 6am to 6:30am I would say half an hour earlier than that should do s we got 4:30am. Since I have three sleeping cycles it would make sense to distribute them evenly. Since a day has 24 hours that's every 24 / 3 = 8 hours. So that they would be:

• one hour and a half at 4:30am
• half an hour at 12:30pm
• one hour at 8:30pm

I've set up an alarm and calculate in up to 30 minutes for the time it may take to fall asleep. I'm a light sleeper so getting woken up from the alarm is no problem.

 Problems Arose

At first, I forgot to use the alarm and I overslept.

When I created this I didn't take things into account. I have raided at 8:00pm. So what happened? The hour got shifted back on days I'm raiding.

I can't seem to fall asleep at work for those 30 minutes. The sitting position is very uncomfortable for this, with clothes, sometimes bad temperatures and constant noises it's hard. Though, I've read about using a face mask and earplugs.

Conclusion

Usually, if I sleep less than six hours three days in a row I'm all tired, grumpy and just want to sleep. It's Thursday already and I feel awake as ever. At least if it's not at work when I am supposed to have taken my 30 minutes nap. I'm gonna continue this experiment and I'm very excited about the results, especially on weekends. I might consider making a vlog instead of using the blog. It depends on the interest of people.

Game Dev - Update Post December 2017

The initial goal of my blog was to keep people up-to-date on what I'm currently doing. Aside from all the theorycrafting I now do - which I don't mind, since I really enjoy it - I also try - when I find the time, which I don't lately - to work on my current game projects. Of course, I have to differentiate between Patreon members and non-Patreons somehow. So what I'm going to do is talk a little about my ideas and projects without going too much into the detail.

General

Lately, I haven't picked up the game development, though I've considered it two to three times. The only code I've written is the picross game on this blog, which you can play by clicking on the "Play Picross". I have several projects at the same time already, though I don't mind, since I'm able to work on one project until I'm stuck, allowing me to work on the other. Also, the motivation to work on the projects is fluctuating extremely. This is probably due to my unstable life situation right now. I don't have a stable income and I don't know what the future holds up. As long this keeps on I occasionally - very often even - feel rather demotivated to work on projects. Anyways going over my projects from the oldest to the newest.

Drakonur

Drakonur or Knights of Drakonur is a project I've created during my apprenticeship as a school project. I've put a lot of time into it designing the prototype. However, I wasn't too happy with it. It was missing something. After working on the game design and starting to develop it for desktop instead of mobile using OpenGL and SDL I switched back to mobile development but instead of using the API I've created with the help of a tutorial I instead wanted to use Unity at the same time one of my friends suggested to make it a web app. So much back story. Anyways it's inspired by games like Guild Wars 1 and Shakes & Fidget. The goal was to make a round-based RPG with multiple classes, dungeons, places to explore, enemies to defeat and villages to visit.

Arcana Magika

Arcana Magika is a project I've created when trying to revive the panel de pon genre. It has first been developed in C++ with OpenGL and SDL but I've ported it later to Unity for mobile devices. The base game is supposed to be a remake of panel de pon featuring all the modes the game "Tetris Attack" did. The full game will allow you to select players like in "Tetris Attack" but with abilities.

Against the World

Patreon members already might've heard about this one. Against the World is a game that is planned for mobile and will be developed in Unity. The goal is to create a game where you have to fight any kind of objects from the real world. The premise is to catch the essence of fighting the Negative Man in Earthbound while going creative with the possibilities. The fighting system will be similar to Earthbound with options like in Undertale. It's the last project I've worked on.

Other Ideas and Plans

If you expect me to tell you more you'll be wrong. However, if you want to check out more ideas of me, I'll keep Patreon members up-to-date with ideas projects, blog posts, streams, youtube videos, education and to be up-to-date on all just costs $1. I mean seriously. $1 doesn't hurt anyone with an income and if every person in the world would give me one I could go full-time game development and game development education.

It's My Life - Game Developer

The completely different topic today. Why? I don't know I just feel like sharing my life, how I got this way, how I ended up where I am currently.

A Gamers Childhood

Due to my brothers, I started playing video games at a really young age. I remember having a picture of me holding a game boy - yes, the old grey one - with both my brothers next to me. It didn't stop there. The game boy was soon replaced with a game boy color, which was followed by a Super Nintendo Entertainment System. We had a SEGA, at some point borrowed a Dreamcast and I grew up with these. If I wasn't living the fantasy of jumping around like Mario in the apartment or playing with Lego or in kindergarten I was playing video games. Alone, with friends, whatever. At some point, I even got my own computer. My brother set it up with OpenSUSE as the operating system.

The Change

Of course, what did I do on that computer? I played video games! We had lots of CDs with games on them. All because of my brothers who played them too. Games like 'break out', 'The Settlers II: Veni Vidi Vici' and even 'Grand Theft Auto: II' (Yes, I know I was too young for it). It came only natural that I started to wonder how these games were made. I somehow picked up that those games consist of 1's and 0's and that those 1's and 0's produced the text you get when opening an .exe with a normal editor like notepad. I also used to do this myself. I opened the .exe files of the games I played with notepad and changes the characters to see what happens, how the games change. Of course as to be expected the games were kinda corrupt and partly unplayable, but it was fun.

A Young Developer Already

I already mentioned that I used to recreate those games by making my own rules. Like for example, I said:

"okay, the green grass now represents the weird green liquid from the Legend of Zelda games that had those zombies in it"

• Or during winter I've created pathways in the snow that were supposed to represent the overworld map where you can select the levels from Super Mario World.
• For the bathtub, I used to build Lego towers where the people had to climb while it was sinking in the water
• And with matchbox cars, I recreated the missions of 'Burnout: Revenge' creating my own missions partially inspired by 'Blast Corps'  
• I have also picked up the hobby of drawing and building my own Mario Party board games on thick paper.

Age of the Peg Game

I got this mosaic peg game where you had small rectangular colorful stones. There were red, orange, black, white, blue, yellow and green and I was all over this game. It was probably my favorite game when I wasn't playing video games. Now, what do children do with these peg games? They create pictures of scenery! Now, what do I do with this peg game? I've created and recreated games. For example, I used 2 red stones above each other and said: "That's Mario!". It was a lot of work to keep everything "up-to-date" on the "screen" but I somehow managed. I also created completely own games where for example you can place a stone, then the other players place a stone and by adding to already placed ones you can upgrade those. Higher upgraded buildings are stronger in taking over lower builds, the one who eradicates the other has won. For all these games I also needed a point system. I could have used those stones to build the numbers but that takes too much space. So I had to define a color code and I did the following:

• red - 0
• orange - 1
• black - 2
• white - 3
• blue - 4
• yellow - 5
• green - 6
• orange up-side-down: 7
• black up-side-down: 8
• white up-side-down: 9

Up-side-down because they had a hole in the lower end.

Beginning of Internet Presence

Graduating from the elementary school I've also started getting used to my own computer with a Windows XP running on it. During my first few years in the Realschule - I guess that would be the middle school - I was already surviving the world wide web, playing browser game after browser game. During my search, I came across a game called 'Super Mario Flash' that had a built-in Level Editor. I got into it making my own levels and quickly started to play others and sharing my levels on the Super Mario Flash forums. My English must've been terrible. That terrible that even some people responded that they don't understand what I mean. Reading other people's posts and trying to learn my best to communicate with them with the English I've picked up in 2-3 years from school I've improved my English quite efficiently. Chatting every day with some friends I've made. I still remember some of the names "Pipe", "Ocelot". I've even picked up two long-distance relationships there with one being several years. Meanwhile, I've started playing MMORPGs. The only one I remember was 'Metin 2'. However, since those MMOs I've played weren't good and they got extremely grindy after the first areas or didn't really pick up my interested I told myself to give up on MMOs and never play those again. Especially how time-consuming they are.

The Dawning of the Programmer

Those first years of my experience in the browser also got me teaching myself HTML and CSS to make my own websites. A few years later I've decided to get into programming. So I've started to learn C. I've learned quickly that this was too hard and since I actually wanted to learn C++, a trial of learning that instead was given. However with no success so I jumped back at HTML, CSS and added JavaScript into the mix. At some point, I tried C again and this time I understood and progressed swiftly. I've taught myself C until I've gotten through one or two tutorials so I've picked up C++ next and went through the tutorial successfully. With these languages learned I have programmed my own text-based games, but it wasn't enough. I wanted to make real games. So I looked up for possibilities and I found an API called Allegro. I read through the tutorials and used it to make a few of my first games which included a game full of achievements that requires you to press space to gain points, a game where you can make music and use your keyboard as an instrument and a badly programmed Mario remake that actually only contained him jumping linear and some collision detection. Sharing my experiences with my friends in the chat

Age of Level Designing

At some point me and my friends also picked up another Mario game with a level editor. It was called Super Mario Brothers X. It was a desktop application that you had to download and it was free. I was intrigued, especially since I was searching for a new one. So I've got into this, played more levels and projects of other people and made my own game projects.

Fun fact: Super Mario Brothers X was actually programmed by the same game developer of Terraria: Redigit. So at this point greetings to all your old friends: Redigit, Valterri, Knuckles, Bossedit and many, many more of the SMBx community!

OpenGL & DirectX Trial Time

Continuing my adventure to create my own games I ditched allegro due to it not feeling professional. So I switched to DirectX instead. Oh boy, what did I get myself into here? I've tried, really hard and got a lot done. 3D graphics of simple shapes, some 2D mechanics but it was hard. Real hard. Additionally, I was limited to Windows only, not really what I wanted. So I've switched to OpenGL. It wasn't a huge difference but OpenGL is missing a lot DirectX had because OpenGL is only for graphics. So I've been on the search for something else.

The Age of the Modder

Minecraft has been released! The hype was great and I've got it back when it was in the alpha, I think, and it was worth it. I've found a gaming clan and played Minecraft with the friends I made there almost every day. At some point, we were modifying our server and Minecraft client with mods and add-ons getting even more out of the experience. Testing all those mods and add-ons left me with my own ideas. Hyped to create them I read myself into Minecraft modding and taught myself Java to a certain degree and continued learning it while modding.

The End Is Nigh

Of the Realschule I mean... not the world ending or something.. Anyways many people didn't know what they would do in their life but I was certain: Programmer. I want to become a programmer and so I've searched for apprenticeships (that's how it works in Germany) and applied to several companies. It took a while but like 3 or 4 months in I got several messages back. I've visited about 3 companies to introduce myself and then decided for the Technical University Munich because it sounded good and maybe I could educate myself further.

The Apprenticeship

During my apprenticeship I had a lot of fun with colleagues, I've learned more Java and C++, got introduced to Qt, taught myself C# privately and creating more games like a text-based RPG or a text-based version of the 'Alchemy' game for Android. I got the chance to get introduced to Python, which was one of the best things that happened in my life and in the 3rd year I've also learned to develop for Android and we got to create a game project in groups of two. The only thing that wasn't good aside from some hierarchical problems between the boss and the colleague that was taking care of me was that I didn't feel the same from developing these apps that I felt from working on programming games. Thus I've decided to finish my apprenticeship, go to the Berufsoberschule in Freising and get the certificate that allows me to study. Going through the summer holidays, I came across an API called SDL.

The Berufsoberschule

During my Berufsoberschule, I already informed myself a little about what the study Computer Science: Game Development contains and since friends of mine were interested in developing a game we've decided to use an engine for that. Our options were the Unity Engine, Unreal Engine, and Cry Engine. Since I would have used the Unity Engine during my studying anyways we've decided on that one. However, problems soon occurred and we weren't so convinced of it anymore and decided to switch to the Unreal Engine. Unfortunately, the Unreal Engine is much more complicated than the Unity Engine. So we put our project on ice for now. I went through the two years trying to balance my gaming and school life as good as I can. Occasionally developing something in Unity or SDL.

And Then Everything Went Downhill!

The time has come to the exam is in front of the door and it went bad. Real bad. The exams were in German, English, math, and physics.

I've got a 3 (C) in English.
Usually, I'm writing 1's (A's) or 2's (B's).

Got a 5 (E) in math.
I know I've been struggling with integration, it always felt like a puzzle to find the correct path.

Got a 5 (E) in German.
My German grades have never been good, but writing and analyzing poems got my high hopes and better grades in the previous tests.

And a 5 (E) in physics.
For some reason, I have huge problems in math and physics with solving the problems that are described in front of me.

Overall I would've graduated with no problems but you're not allowed to have three 5's or E's in the final exam. To solve this problem I could choose one topic to go to the oral exam and I chose physics. Did the oral exam. Bam! Got a 1 (A) on the oral exam.

However, the problem remains. My grades are bad and I'm too proud to repeat the year. I've never repeated a year, I've always pulled through somehow and it felt just wrong to repeat the year. Especially since I know repeating the year is going to be a lot easier and the grades are a lot better. It's like cheating.

Matriculation

Next step after graduation: the matriculation. Sending all my data into the University and hoping for the best. Due to my bad grades, I wasn't able to get in right away, I had to go there for an oral exam where I can introduce myself and with this information they collect, they calculate the number of points I get in the end. I need 70 to enter. After the matriculation, I got 50. Alright, 20 to go sound doable. Whelp. I went there answered the questions as good as I could and the end result is...

63 out of 70

I couldn't believe it. 7 points are missing. 7 points for my dream to come true.

Life Goes On and On

I won't give up yet. I'll make my dream come true. I have so many ideas all I need is to earn money somehow while having the time to develop my games. I need a start off but I can't go with Kickstarter. I'm not experienced enough and every idea has a chance to be a flop. I'm not a fan of risks. So yeah, here I am writing this text sharing my story up hoping to make my dream come true by finding a way to be able to do what I love or finding a job as a game developer or similar.