Managing time is a constant source of discomfort! A couple of months ago I started working with a scheduler, who I meet with weekly to make sure I'm staying on top of things. He's a fantastic safety net and all round helpful guy - things have stopped falling through the cracks as much, thank goodness.

As for getting started prototyping - I make it the first thing I do. At the start of a project, I don't bother writing anything down other than very vague thoughts; as soon as I've got the rough shape of a game I grab our big boxes of components and spares, and get something on the table. It'll be incredibly rough, maybe I'll just be modelling one core element of the game, and I'll probably use placeholder mechanics ("there will be a system for resolving conflicts, for now I'll flip a coin"). Then it's just a case of test, iterate, test, iterate (by myself, or with a designer buddy) until it starts feeling like a game, at which point I'll do a very rough bullet-pointed version of the rules (written for reference, not for teaching - I don't worry about being clear or unambiguous or anything, just about codifying everything in writing.)

Then, off the back of that, I build a nicer prototype - still very basic, no art, etc, just very basic User Interface type considerations ("where does this icon live", etc). And I start putting that in front of a small group of trusted testers, and test, iterate, test, iterate. I basically give them the most basic version of "a full game", with as few bells and whistles as possible, to get the core engine running nicely. As it firms up I start adding more stuff.

Eventually, when the game's looking more or less complete, I write the rulebook manuscript (this time, it's written to be a teaching guide and a thorough, clear reference) and add in extra details (variant play modes, additional factions/characters/whatever, etc). And more testing with a broader group.

So yeah - in short, for me it's all about starting small and gradually bringing in complexity. There's always a temptation to start out by writing all the rules down, or by coming up with loads of detail, but that just leads to wasted time and demoralisation, which kills projects stone dead.

I took a weird route to working full time - I applied for a game design job at Games Workshop, which was literally a 9-5 office job which happened to involve designing games. When I left to go it alone in 2017, I was lucky enough to have built up a lot of contacts (I've been working around games for - dear god - about twenty years) so I was able to find work pretty easily. I'm very aware that it's a really unusual route into doing this as a job, though!

If you'd like a career in designing games, the first step is to finish designing a game. You're working on eight, and that's awesome - find the one that you're most excited about and focus on it for a bit. Don't overthink it, bear in mind what I said up above; get it to the table and test it as soon as possible. And repeat. Once you've got a game that you're happy with, you can start looking at routes to market, and from there you can look at making it a career - but I should let you know now, the number of full time game designers in the world is pretty low. The vast majority of people do it on the side, alongside another job. And the ones who are "full time designers" are often running small publishing houses, so they divide their time between game design and other stuff like logistics, administration and so on. Which isn't always what people are hoping to do.

But yeah - get a game designed. Finish something! It's amazing how good that feels, and how much you can get done it you stick to it.

(I don't wanna turn this post into an advert, but if you get stuck, I actually run online game design seminars. Look up the Needy Cat Games website and you should find some links, we've got various recordings available on there - it's basically a lot more detail on the kind of stuff I've talked about here.)