I haven’t done anything 3d or game related for a long time and now I have all these ideas about how to continue my projects, and even though they’re pretty small projects they feel gigantic once I open Unity. I just sit there staring at the screen, not sure where to begin. I don’t even remember how to use the interface.
And on top of that I have to learn 3ds Max again and in thosel folders I have hundreds of unfinished 3d models each with a billion revisions and I don’t even know which one was the last one.
It’s a mess.
The only way I can think of is to start with a fresh, simple project entirely from scratch and learn the tools again before I try to wrap my head around my old projects.
When I’m in a development rut, my strategy is to just re-create something. Just unabashedly rip something off (be it a very simple concept like pong or breakout, or one of my own concepts) to get back in the groove of working on my own project. Eventually the creative juices start flowing again and you can start getting real work done.
If you’re having trouble getting started though, just start anything - absolutely anything. It’s better than sitting around with nothing to do. You don’t have to work on something you’d ever show someone else to make it worth working on. That’s just my strategy though; interesting topic, it’ll be neat to hear what other people do when they havn’t had any original work in a while.
If you are on Windows (don’t know about Mac) in your various model folders, right click and choose sort by Date Modified
(if not available choose more and find Date Modified in the list and add it to your right click options in Vista and Win 7),
this will sort the files in the order they were last modified. This will help you to be confident about which model is the latest revision.
If still wondering if you should touch it in it’s present state due to being away, save the file with name that denotes you are
continuing on from the last known good version.
This is how I do it.
Kyle, those are excellent tips. I can see how ripping something off would be of huge help in getting me started as it’s like having a blueprint of your goal by your side as you work. Now though most of the things I want to do with my projects involve 3d studio so I guess I will just solely focus on that and do some basic models there before I move on to the real deal and then sometime much later I can think about opening Unity.
Don, it’s not that simple.
My folders are pretty neatly organized with one folder per model and sub folders for references etc, and I have the iterating save feature (or whatever it’s called) enabled in 3ds max so the last file should be the one with the highest number, but then I start branching off and try new animation rigs or whatever that messes up everything and have to revert to an earlier save so when I quit and lose track of what’s what it’s hell.
I agree that I should be more organized and implementing the “last save” mentality would probably work well.
This is exactly what was happening to me. I have a bunch of cool game ideas floating around, but it seems like once I get started I’m just overwhelmed by the amount of effort it takes to prototype and revise new ideas compared to the time it takes to just copy something. It’s kinda like practice almost, and requires much less thinking and much more making stuff. And if you build the basics of a copycat game, odds are you’ll start to modify the idea to turn it into something of your own.
