What you say is reasonable and I agree. I definitely need to do more activities outside the home to relax and clear my mind.
But isn't there the possibility of being a Workaholic temporarily, until I start receiving monetary benefits at a decent level? I know that donations won't make me a millionaire either, but I'm sure I can get to a point where I can receive small joint donations if I work hard.
You make two assumptions there.
First, that you could make it, if you just work hard enough. As an indie game developer making enough money from it, that is. The possibility does exists. But it is a possibility, not certainity. There is no formula, work x hours and now you are successful. Just look at real professionals. And it is a profession. Game development. It is a combination of software development and design and story telling. Depending on what aspect you look at. It takes years of study to aquire the professional skills. And there are people of that profession that try to make it as a solo developer - and fail regularly. Even whole companies, not even small ones, fail. Oh, they might make a game and even have some income, but still go into bancrupcy after releasing one game and then never to be heard of.
But of course, occasionally, sometimes, a solo dev does make it. But this chain of logic is similar to this: you see winners of the lottery and see, ohh, people get rich by playing lottery, I could do that. So you convince yourself to invest all your savings and even make debts, just to buy lottery tickets. This is actually a sad real life occurence, not a hypothetical example. People can get easily obsessed with something, even if it is detrimental to their health or their goals.
Which brings me to the second assumption. That you could stop. You should read about the sunk cost phenomenon. Your cost is time and health. You will have serious trouble stopping, if success won't come. Or worse, it might come, but is so tiny that you convince yourself to work even harder and collapse.
This is advice from the internet, so you should be careful anyways, but those things about how humans behave, is known stuff. And that there are more developers than time to play their games is a fact. If you look at numbers, you face a similar situation as youtubers, writers, singers, actors, etc. But just as with singers (just look at all those casting shows) singing good is not enough. Even perfect voice will not guarantee success. Just as those graduated game designers are not guaranteed to have success.
To be blunt, what makes you think that your success would be guaranteed, if not even trained professionals can do it with any certainty? No amount of work you possibly could put into this can guarantee success. This is why I compared it with playing lottery. It is possible. But failure is also possible. And the number of developres trying to do this, says, success is too unlikely to bet your health on it.
By all means, pursue your hobby with more time, aquire skills that help there and create. But try to have fun with it, so your creativity does not suffer. You might even have times where you feel the urge to work on a project day and night. But please do not plan on trying to force this on the cost of your mental and physical health.
If those arguments did not reach you, you might believe this one: creativity is not the same as other skills. Hurting your mental health by overworking can hurt it seriously up to the point where your effectivness amounts to zero (burn out, writers block etc). So even if it were true that x effort will bring success, this x effort is not work hard for x hours, but produce x amounts of good stuff. If you overwork and reduce your effectivness, you will take longer to reach this x effort that brings success.
I have no more doubts, you have answered everything and all you say makes sense. Those concepts that you present I didn't know, like the sunk cost phenomenon or the fact that using a lot of your creativity wears it out.
I myself know that I can't dedicate myself to this 100%, and that's why I study to be able to exercise a profession. I know how people ignore stories of failure to make this whole world look like something different from what it is. But, the reason why I have been very motivated to achieve this, is that I turned 18 years old and I could finally say that I was the right age to publish creations on the internet (besides Itch asks you to be 18 to do it) so I saw this as the moment where all the years of doing this were going to pay off. But, it turns out that creating story-focused games is so difficult that it takes more than that. Not to mention that the environment I'm in is demanding more and more of me to start generating profits from my work.
For something so difficult and so unpredictable, as much as I want to start generating even a little profit from this.... I will not put my health below my work by any means, and I will continue on the path of taking this with regulation. I will not become a workaholic. I love doing this, and I want to do it in the most efficient and appropriate way. I will take everything in this post into consideration. Thanks for all the comments Redonihunter, to you and others.
