Break burnout with another project, not a holiday

Everyone gives the same advice, “take a week off, it will clear your head.” So you go on holiday and check your Steam page five times a day. You are still thinking about the game, you are just not working on it. You are not rested, you have spent the week waiting and feeling guilty.

The reason is this. The job of a person who commutes stays in a building, your job comes with you. Your game is also your identity, so there is no such thing as getting away from it. There is only trying not to look at it.

What rests your brain is not stopping the same work, it is solving a different problem.

And the real cause of burnout is not tiredness. On a two year project nothing finishes for two years. People are built to finish things, and you are permanently in the middle of one. Every month you work without the feeling of having finished something stacks on the last one, and one day you open the editor and feel nothing.

A small side project solves exactly this. It finishes, it ships, somebody plays it. You get in two months the feeling the big project would give you in two years.

I made DriveWave with my kids last summer for exactly this reason. Not to get away from Metal Thunder, but to be able to come back to it with a different head. What came out of it was a completely free game, and I saw someone on Steam who had played close to 3000 hours of it.

For a side project to work it has three conditions. It has to be short, because if it drags on it becomes a second weight. It cannot be the same genre as your main game, because if you solve the same problems you are not resting. And it has to finish, because a side project left half done does not reduce burnout, it multiplies it.

And do this before burnout starts, not after. A side project begun after you are already spent does not get finished either, unfortunately.

The reason you notice it late is that the symptoms look like laziness. Opening the editor, doing nothing and closing it, refactoring constantly, going round the same system for two weeks without being able to decide, feeling nothing when you open your game. And when you take these for a discipline problem and push harder, it gets worse.

The worst thing you can do in that period is watch someone else’s launch. Everyone on the timeline is announcing something and you have been sitting in front of the same scene for two years. The only thing that comparison gives you is feeling worse about yourself.

If you think you do not have it, look at the numbers. GDC’s 2026 State of the Game Industry survey asked 2,300 developers, and 94 out of every 100 say they have at least one symptom of burnout, while only 20% say their mental health is good. So this is not the exception, it is the industry’s default state.

So what do you do? Open your calendar and put two two-week windows into the coming year. You do not need to know now what you will do in those windows, it is enough that you have set them aside from the main project.

It creeps up more quietly on people working alone, because there is no team to tell you to stop. No boss, no working hours, and the deadline is something you set yourself. So you have to build the place where you stop yourself as well.