Indie game development in the real world

It's a pretty rough hobby to stay active with, this whole indie game development hobby thing. If my job isn't asking for a ton of my time outside of a reasonable work schedule I find myself compensating by winding down way more than I would. But that's not going to cut it for indie game development. You've got to be immersed in a project to produce anything. An hour here and there just isn't productive in any sort of software development.

I've started writing a game I'm calling Rhythm Shooter. It's about as shallow as it sounds like. You control your small pixelated 2D avatar with your mouse in a top-down shooter. There's a persistent song. To shoot to the left and right you need to click to the downbeat of the music. To shoot up and down you need to right click to the upbeat, that is, you'd need to play syncopatedly with right clicks. You can alternate between left and right clicks but the bullet stream will be lighter for all 4 directions.

I like the idea because I think it'll produce a strong feeling of synesthesia with the player. This should be particularly synesthesic because not only are you asking the player to play to the rhythm of the song but your asking him to play his own beat to strategically get through a situation.

Rhythm Shooter would be easy fun. It's a small project as long as I kept it as a small project. And I'd get another shot at producing something other people found fun.

But it's not happening anytime soon. I'm at the critical point of a project with one of my company's biggest clients. I'm busy. In fact, I shouldn't write anymore. It's late.