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Readers don't realize the physical reality of developing these games.

I think most of them think about their normal life and all the free time they have -- the quiet nights after work when it's not exhausting, or all the free time they have during college, or maybe they are unemployed and have a competent, caring support network... And then they think "I can put some hours to make a fun project". At first it's dreamy and carefree because they are well-rested and fresh. And they think that's it, you just do that and keep doing it, that's their idea of what developing a VN must be like.

But that's really not it, at least not for long. The reality is that making these games becomes incredibly concrete. You do it for a day, and you have to do it the next day too, and the next day as well. You'll forego opportunities to hang out with friends and family for this, and then you'll struggle to tell them what you were doing. You'll make life decisions based on your commitment to it -- you can't take this 2-year long professional commitment because it'd stop you from developing your game. Your finances will be affected, because for a lot of people they could be making more money elsewhere, and even if this is a great deal for you it's not so simple when it becomes a fulltime job.

You'll get tired, and you'll get a creative block. You'll rest and get back on your horse -- and you'll get a block again, until you learn how to push through it. You'll learn that you can keep working even when you're tired, and that a creative block doesn't mean you can miss deadlines and leave your team hanging. You'll learn that there are levels of tiredness, and that what you considered "super tired" is only the first level of exhaustion -- and there's at least ten of them, maybe more.

And it's gonna become physical, yeah. No one told me that a good office chair is "writing equipment", but it damn well is. One day I wrote while sitting on one of those tall chairs, a bar stool as they call it, and it left me in profound pain for more than a week. Nowadays I use a weird, fucked up ergonomic keyboard that clocks me as a fucking psycho because wrist injuries are no fucking joke, and I have 50 macros to reduce repetitive movements while coding expressions. I have an ultra wide monitor because my vision hs gotten worse and I need some geriatric features to be able to write well. I have a guest bedroom in my apartment but I'm facing the reality that I'll have to turn it into an office so I'll have space for all the things I need, but I'll also have to figure out what the fuck do I do about the wallpaper because post-it notes don't stick to it, and I need room for my wall of post-it notes. Even then, there'll come a point where my body starts communicating with me through a variety of discomforts -- and you gotta learn to listen to these things if you have any intention of doing this game dev thing for long.

It just keeps going. There is a physicality to making these games, or perhaps to any form of game dev, that people just cannot imagine. There are intersections, extremely significant ones, with pre-existing health issues and their treatments. There'll be devs who get a ADHD diagnosis and improve their focus significantly when they're medicated, and you'll have people on the autism spectrum who basically harness that same neurochemistry at will and start producing Vyvanse endogenously, but then can't turn it off -- and that's when you start seeing devs coming up with daily or weekly rituals to self-regulate somehow. Me, for instance, I could work during weekends, that's when a good chunk of the team is most available, but I decided to keep my weekends to myself because otherwise I'd go crazy.

I could keep going for hours about this, but that's enough for now. Take care of yourself breastie.