We all in the start of our career have done some mistakes. Share your biggest mistake so that others can learn a lesson.
Thinking I can just buy a bunch of assets and make a game without learning c# basics…
Biggest mistake is try to do nothings.
desperately trying to find tutorials for what I want to do, when I already know, that it’s unlikely to find any for my specific needs and I just.need.to.start.doing!
Same as Farelle, you can’t swim if you don’t try!
Spending a lot… A LOT… of money for assets on a desperate search for that mythical “make my game AWESOME” asset.
Listening to reasonable people™ and try to find a job into the industry to get experience first … it only made late to the true skills I should have followed, programming … Design don’t make a game, sound don’t make a game, graphics don’t make a game, programming do. If I had continue to my own I would have start it myself way earlier … Nothing I want to make is compatible with experience in the industry …
Wasting the first year of using Unity not learning C#. I used a lot of UnityScript and C# has been a lot more helpful to me.
Trying to arrange my game so that gravity would make everything fall together properly, when with a bit of elbow grease I could have gotten it together much quicker.
In related news, I’m still trying to do that, and getting closer to succeeding.
Spending ages trying to get the polish and shine on something just perfect as I make it, only to delete it and start again from scratch for one reason or another
In my early career I bolted half a million dollars of equipment to the ground in the wrong place. Twice. I ended up overspending by about 100k. I chalk that one entirely up to inexperience.
The most devestating mistake of my career was hospitalising a guy because of a gap in a risk assessment I’d done. He came through fine, but that’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.
Sometimes I like to forget about your other jobs and just assume that the Pond Wars development cycle was an absolute nightmare.
Lol.
In a game dev sense my biggest mistakes tend to be:
- Scoping to big
- Asking for too much money
- Not finishing things
Scope control tends to be a huge problem for new devs. Even small games tend to be huge efforts for beginners. And most of my ideas were massive.
Pond Wars was hurt by asking for money too early. I focused heavily on monetised markets, rather then simply trying to get it everywhere. So much time wasted trying to implement ads and the like.
Not finishing things is one of my inalienable rights as a hobbyist. But it has the side effect of things, you know, not being…
Biggest career mistake: my choice of PhD supervisor. This mistake wasted years of my life and a ton of money.
Biggest game dev mistake: no failing fast enough. I’ve been working on the same project for several years and I still don’t know if there is a viable market for it.
Can’t really say that I have any, things tend to go pretty smoothly for me… The only mistake - not really a mistake, but yeah is that I hate relying on third party assets, I’ve bought hundreds of them, just to look at how they are made and learn from it and make my own system. It wastes so much time re-creating the wheel, but at the same time - I work better by knowing what I made inside and out rather than having to deal with customer support to fix a problem 3 months later.
The only third party things I really use is Networking stuff, generally they work fairly well right out of the box without issue (Photon).
But yeah, right now i’m in the middle of setting up 3 servers in my house for my game in development. Learning it as I go, definitely exciting. But at the same time, I feel like just hooking up Xampp and going about my day, but - i’d rather do it right.
So yeah, that’s pretty much it for me lol.
Not finishing things. Easily the biggest problem I have. I can start projects that become functional, and do nothing with them. Not enough content or polish to publish, and too much time needed before I switch project.
Being too much in a hurry…
My biggest mistake, overall, was not expecting to make a million mistakes.
I can guarantee that if you followed programming, you would regret not having graphic/design skills.
Programming does not make a game. Content does.
Main challenge is not realizing that you will rebuild your scene 3 to 4 times…