Echo from the Void started during the pandemic. A side project. A curiosity. A way to keep my brain from climbing the walls.
That was six years ago.
Since then, the project has outlasted a global lockdown, three projects at work, a role change, and more “I should probably just wrap this up” moments than I can count. It is still going. I am still going. And the question I get asked the most, when people find out I’m building a game on the side while working full-time as a technical director, is some version of: how?
The honest answer is less inspiring than people expect.
The post-pandemic dip
When the world opened back up, I nearly stopped.
Echo from the Void was born from being stuck inside. Every pixel I had painted, every system I had built, carried that memory. When I finally had the freedom to go out again, to see people, to exist in the world, the project felt like a ghost of a harder time. Sitting back down at my desk to work on it felt like choosing to go back into the apartment.
So I didn’t. Not really.
For a while, I was working on it maybe once a week. A small fix here, a quick test there. Nothing sustained. Nothing like the rhythm I had built during lockdown.
But I didn’t stop entirely.
And that turned out to matter more than I realized at the time. The project was still alive. The flame was low, but it was there. And slowly, week by week, I found myself coming back more often. Not because I forced myself. Because progress, even tiny progress, is its own kind of gravity.
The shape of a week
Right now, my life has a particular structure.
I work West coast hours from the East coast, which means my mornings are my own. Before the workday starts, I have roughly an hour. That hour belongs to Echo from the Void.
It is not glamorous. There is no dramatic creative flow state at 8am with a coffee.
After work, the project doesn’t exist. That time is for my girlfriend, for food, for decompressing. A clear line. No guilt.
Friday and Saturday nights are different. That’s when most of the real work happens. Longer sessions, bigger problems, the kind of work that actually moves the needle.
But I want to be honest: the mornings matter more than the evenings. Not because of what gets built in them, but because of what they do to your relationship with the project. Showing up every day, even for ten minutes, keeps the project present in your mind. It keeps the context alive. It means you never have to spend twenty minutes just remembering where you left off.
The trick I stumbled into
At some point I noticed something about my most productive sessions: they almost always started with closing a bug I had already diagnosed the day before.
Not a new bug. Not a complex problem. Something I already understood, something that just needed the fix applied. A five-minute win to start the day.
That felt almost too simple to be useful. But the effect was real. Walking into a session knowing exactly what you’re going to do, and being able to finish it before you’ve had a second coffee, does something to your energy. It makes starting feel easy. And once you’re in, you keep going.
So now I do it on purpose. When I find a bug at the end of a session, I don’t always fix it immediately. If I understand it, if I know what the solution is, I save it. I leave it there as tomorrow morning’s easy win.
It sounds almost like cheating. But motivation is not a resource you have or don’t have. It’s something you manufacture. And small wins, deliberately staged, are one of the most reliable ways I’ve found to manufacture it.
What “keeping going” actually means
People imagine that passion projects run on passion. That you wake up every morning buzzing with the desire to build. That the love for the thing carries you through.
Sometimes it does. But six years in, that version of passion is rare. It comes in bursts. It comes after a good playtest, or when a system finally clicks, or when a friend plays a build and reacts exactly the way you hoped they would.
The rest of the time, keeping going just means not stopping.
Not stopping when the pandemic ended and the project felt too heavy. Not stopping during crunch at the day job when I had nothing left. Not stopping on the evenings where I genuinely could not bring myself to open the editor, because those evenings happen too.
Ten minutes counts. Closing one bug counts. Touching one pixel counts.
Because progress is the motivation. Not the other way around.
The project is alive because I kept showing up for it, even badly, even briefly, even when I wasn’t sure why. And somewhere along the way, six years in, it became something.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about long-term side projects: you don’t finish them by staying inspired. You finish them by deciding, quietly, again and again, not to stop.