This post is going to be a bit different from my other posts, but is still semi-related to the development of Nano Pets. If you've been following my twitter, you'll know that I've spent the past 3 months in Japan. After quitting our jobs back in February, we found that traveling through Japan would be cheaper than continuing to live in our dumpy SF apartment. We were planning on moving out of SF anyway, so we decided to live in our favorite country for 3 months while we don't have to pay rent on an apartment in the US.

The experience living in Japan for so long was amazing. We traveled through Osaka, Kyoto and Hiroshima for a month and then spent the two remaining months living in Tokyo. We saw a lot of art, music, fashion, and technology that were all incredibly inspiring for my game development. I won't go too much into detail about the more sightseeing portion of my trip, but I did want to talk about how I was able to work on my game during this time.

Just as a side-note, we had been planning on going to Japan for a while before we quit out jobs, and given our pretty minimal lifestyle in San Francisco we were able to save a lot of money before going.  I'm not going to pretend that what we did was something anyone can do; despite our planning and saving, we had a lot of privileged in our position to save that kind of money. I was making an engineer salary, and my girlfriend was making a moderate salary as an editor. I don't want to give the impression that anyone can just uproot their lives and move to a foreign county, so please 

Working Remote in Japan

Though we primarily wanted to go to Japan to relax and get away from the depression my girlfriend and I felt in San Francisco, I also wanted to try working on Nano Pet as a "Digital Nomad", i.e. working while traveling. During March, while traveling through Osaka, Kyoto and Hiroshima, I only got minimal work done in our Airbnb. In April, we worked at a co-working space in Akihabara and I was able to get a good amount of work done. In May, I went back to working in our Airbnb and got a moderate amount of work done.

The co-working space in Akihabara was a place called One-Third Life, which cost us 12,000 yen (about $108-$110) for an entire month of open-desk usage, and it came with free use of their big coffee machine. Given how new the space was and the staff's earnestness in making sure we were comfortable and accommodated, I think this space was a great deal for the price compared to other places.

Besides One-Third Life, we also worked at random cafes and in our Airbnb at night. Some cafes were better than others, for example Starbucks always had guaranteed power/WiFi making it a bit more favorable than

I think the biggest pro of working in Japan was just being in  Japan, especially Tokyo. The way of life is a lot more convenient than being in the United States. Everything you need is always within walking distance, the entire city of Tokyo is safe at all hours, cost of living is relatively low even as a tourist, and there are always things to do to break up the monotony of work. Especially compared to San Francisco, with a high cost of living and and a growing affluent culture geared towards tech elites, Japan just felt a lot more accommodating as a city for me to do work in.

On top of Japan being  a really convenient country, there's is a lot of things that sparked inspiration for me. Walking through all the different parts of Tokyo and Osaka gave me a ton of great ideas for Nano Pet as well as ideas for new games/art unrelated to my current game. It just felt like there was a lot more resources put into art and culture in Japan compared to a lot of places I've been in the United States. It felt like there was always something interesting event happening, and experiencing it all always felt accessible. This was in deep contrast with San Francisco, where the most enjoyable parts of the city were increasingly inaccessible and the older culture of the city was becoming more and more gentrified. You can walk through San Francisco and feel a subtle caste system between New Tech Money and everyone else. That just doesn't exist in Japan.

Working in a co-working space was great for productivity. Compared to working at home or in a loud office, there are just far less distractions. The most amount of work I got done in Japan was in the co-working space in Akihabara. Coming back to the US, I'm definitely going to look at inexpensive co-working space options.

Cons

While there were a lot of positives with working remotely in Japan, not everything worked out at expected.

One of the biggest challenges was the inconsistent amount of work I was able to do. With how much site-seeing we wanted to do and the constant hunt for an adequate working space (when not at a co-working space) made it difficult to do any meaningful, focused work. Most of the engineering work was done on smaller portions of my game. I think after a while I would've gotten used to working inconsistently as opposed to a regular weekday office hours, but this was still a big challenge for me.

Another challenge was balancing my guilt to work VS my guilt to enjoy Japan for the little time I was there. Even though we were in one city for two whole months, it felt like there was some event or thing to see every day while we were there. For that reason, we tried dedicating more "work" time to April while living in Taito near the Akihabara co-working space and making May a more "vacation" month while staying in Shinjuku. I think this worked pretty well, and I don't have any regrets of not seeing enough in Tokyo, but I still feel guilty for not working as much as I was hoping to.

Lessons learned from Japan Trip / Working Remotely

Here's a short list of things I learned while working on my game remotely

Working remotely is full of interruptions, so you need to be prepared

Unfortunately I wasn't prepared for just how much I would be interrupted during my work. I think this is a skill that just requires a lot of focus and ability to pick up where you left off after a distraction, something that I realized I'm kinda horrible at doing. I've been slowly getting better at focusing on work, but if you're not always working in a perfectly consistent/quiet environment there will always be distraction. Some ways I've learned to be better prepared include: having a Trello board and a prepared list of tasks, putting reasonable due dates on your tasks, having a backpack with everything you need for your work, and setting hard time-slots for when you start and stop working.

I have a tendency to "sorta work" all day where I'm mostly checking Twitter and Reddit while sometimes alt-tabbing back to my project to do 5 minutes of work. This might be an after-effect of the burnout I experienced while working at my last company, but it's also just the result of a lot of bad habits that I need to work through. Being in a place where I was seeing fun new stuff every day was NOT good for these habits, so I did my best to make sure I had designated work-time VS leisure-time and a hard list of tasks for me to accomplish.

Co-working spaces are well worth the money

Working in a cramped Airbnb or hotel room sucks! Finding a cafe with WiFi AND Power AND a guaranteed open seat is impossible! A co-working space solves all the problems I had by being a nice, quiet place with everything I needed to get work done on my laptop. We used a website called coworker.com (there's a TON of these types of websites) which let us search for a space on a map. It was super useful to find a cheap space that let us get a month pass. We found that a lot of co-working spaces had very different price-points and types of memberships, so don't feel shy about emailing a space with questions or requests. From my experience, co-working spaces aren't very strict places, so they more flexible with accommodating your needs than you would think.

If co-working spaces aren't really an option where you are, then I hate to admit it but Starbucks is my honest second go-to. Every Starbucks is very consistent design-wise and they always have power/WiFi available. Plus, as much as I don't like Starbucks as a mega-corporation that puts smaller coffee houses out of business (not to mention their CEO is a weirdo billionaire centrist running for president right now), I actually really like their coffee and the giant ice-waters they give you for free. For these reasons, Starbucks is my one problematic corporate fave and an OK substitute for working imo.

Don't miss any sights or events because of work, you'll regret it later

In March and May, I made sure to prioritize relaxing, events and sightseeing. We went to several big art conventions, several music performances per week, and a LOT of random art/fashion/tech popups. We also went to a lot of parks, shopping areas, monuments, tall buildings, tourist areas, etc etc. I didn't want to miss anything because I didn't want to have any regrets, but actually vacationing while traveling is super important for your mental health (who would've thought?). Not staring at a screen for a long period of time and seeing a new place was super inspiring for me, and taught me another lesson:

Take some "work" away from a computer screen and wonder around a new place with a notebook

I really like what David Lynch has said about Ideas. He wrote a book that I really like called Catching The Big Fish, but here's a portion of an interview where he gives a kinda TL:DR of that entire book:

This really resonates with me because ideas have come to me in the most random places at the most random times. I have a hard time sitting down and just coming up with Good Ideas. Instead, I just make sure to capture whenever new ideas come to me, and write them down in either my notebook or in my notes app (Google Keep). Taking time away from my computer screen to daydream is super important for my creative process.

Everything I saw in Japan gave me a lot of inspiration. Everything I saw was so new and different from everything in the United States, and a lot of ideas came to me naturally. Unfortunately though, I don't think I spent enough time at the start of our trip capturing all the new ideas that came to me. There are at least two great ideas I had for Nano Pets that I know I completely forgot because I didn't write them down, and it totally kills me to think about it. In April, I bought a small notebook and began writing down ideas and designs for my games, as well as ideas for possible other projects in the future.

So in brief: Don't work too much, take time to wonder around and daydream in a new place, and if you are hit with inspiration make sure to write it down!

Conclusion

In conclusion, I honestly don't know if the Digital Nomad life is for me. I could maybe get used to it, but I still have a lot to learn before I can be as productive and I am at home. The only way I can see myself traveling and working is by finding co-working spaces wherever I go. That doesn't mean that this trip was a total waste or anything, it was still an amazing experience and a much needed vacation after leaving my last job. I feel very rejuvenated to get back to full-time work on Nano Pets.

Sorry this post wasn't too focused on anything new in the game, I just wanted to talk about my experience working remotely in a different country. My next post will have new stuff to show.