I started learning about 2 yrs ago and I’ve never gotten much done outside of making prototypes. was wondering if anyone else in same boat or if I just really need to nut up and finish one of my projects.
I would say its probably fairly common, however now is the point that you need to start finishing a project that’s worthwhile. I’m still learning myself but I have also spent a year or so working on prototypes and switching from project to project, but I am currently working on my first worthwhile project. Try not to feel like it was time wasted but rather time spent learning and just getting a feel for game Dev.
In February of 2012 I decided I would teach myself programming (having already been an artist for many years) and released my first game in October of 2012.
I worked extremely hard and dedicated to do that though.
I have now completed 8 games, 6 of which actually got released. 2 were prototypes that werent worth going too much farther with but are playable little games
Still working on mine. I have been using unity for 2 years now and i started my project about a year ago. I still have so much to do haha. I rewrote my project 4 times now. It is super efficient, runs well, and can be run on low end computers. I plan on revealing my game next week and hope to finish it by the end of the year. So excited lol
Heard the quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.” Finishing ANYTHING will enable you to one day be like Melkior, “I have now completed 8 games, 6 of which actually got released. :)” or like me, 6 products, 200,000 customers, accomplished in my spare time, with full-time job, 2 kids, and a wife.
Since deadlines are motivating, allow ONLY 12 weeks: 4 weeks of core gameplay, 8 weeks of polish. Joel Spolsky advises, “Shipping is an feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it”
Save the magnum opus for when you’re truly skilled! “Nut up and finish one of your projects.”
Gigi
@Gigiwoo ! I saw ur other post man. very good read. I’m happy to hear u were able to do all that with a full time job and a family. Thats pretty amazing.
I just got out of college as a Electrical Engineer working as a firmware UEFI BIOS developer when i started unity. Was different… doing programming for a game instead of for hardware. Was getting discouraged at the thought of me not having enough time cause of my full time job and gf but that was motivating to hear.
I think I will go with the 12 weeks plan. I think it will be a good motivator.
thanks for all the stories guys lol ;_; glad to know im not completely alone when dealing with being in a rut due to wanting to hit too many prototypes.
I would suggest doing a new game with the smallest scope you can imagine in the shortest time possible. Don’t invest a lot of effort into a huge amount of visual polish necessarily. It can give you a reality check for how long things take and how long the tail end of a project can go. Plus it just feels good to get a published game out there.
As a hobbyist, I can afford to work on my larger PC/Oculus Rift project as much as I want, but none of us have unlimited time. I took a break from that and published the tiniest game I could conceive of to iOS and Android. I only have nights and weekends, so it took 10 days. A lot of that was spent picking out music and sound effects, learning the iOS publishing thing, testing, and tweaking levels. That’s stuff you tend to think of as the “last 1%” (which really isn’t).
I got two main things out of doing the tiny game: it was surprisingly fun and now I have a better feel of what I can accomplish in X number of days. It’s got me thinking in terms of scaling down the scope of my larger game, which wasn’t particularly ambitious to start with, or so I thought.
Bro that’s really good to hear. I will try that 12 week plan on my next game. Or is it not too late to do that to my project? Lol anyways I like that plan
I failed at the 12 weeks challenge pretty hardcore. I made a nice prototype or so I thought and was well on my way and then all my progress died. Had many other exciting things happening in my life and the game just fell off my radar. It took about a month of not opening it before I dove in again and realized that once again my scope was too grand so I scaled back and suddenly the project was exciting again. I redid some art and boiled the game down to what it was suppose to be.
When I’m done with 100 Orcs I want to try the 12 weeks again. My knowledge is so much greater now than it was at the start of the year. Here’s hoping!
I’ve tried building 2 other games before. The first one got to big so I started on the 2nd. Then that one got to big so I created a third. I am almost finished with the third game, however its proving to be more than I expected as well.
I am not starting anymore projects until I get this one complete!
My first couple of games each took less than a week. One of them was a long weekend (~4 days), another one I think was most of a work-week equivalent.
Most projects I complete are less than a full-time month of my effort.
But yeah, time to “nut up”.
Pick a small project and dedicate yourself to finishing it. For personal projects, this is the main reason that I do them one at a time. I start something, I then finish it before starting something else. It encourages me to keep the scope small, because the more I add to the current thing the further back it pushes my next thing.
When I say “small”, pick something you think you can do in half of the time allocated. To do it well you’ll find takes longer than you thought. Polish takes the lion’s share of pretty much any game project.
Been a month and I have yet to finish my prototype, mainly because I’m new to fairly programming and game design in general. I’ve basically done application programming, but I’ve never programmed a game before. My experience with Unity is very limited, I need to finish the 2D tutorial and plan on moving on to the scripting tutorial… problem is, it’s a lot of information for me to take.
I already created the sprites I needed (look like complete rubbish), I just need to program them. As of now, I’ve been doing a lot of research on how to create a “pixel-perfect” 2D game and how to improve in the art department since my art looks like a 3 year old drew them.
It’s a very basic game at it’s core, to which I plan on adding once I finish it… which as of now, I am not rushing.
Right now, I am working on a fighting game, but development is being slowed down by life, other pursuits, novel publication, and R&D using Unity. Most of the time is spent on asset design and testing new tools for my pipeline. It is more like a CG film than a game. I am hoping to have a working alpha build done soon, and maybe I can find some programmers to help with it. It’s a hobby really…
It depends a lot of the scope of the game of course. The game I’m working on now is not small, as it’s a 30 hour (or more? not sure) game with an open world, lots of dungeons and environments. Top down RPG.
I started about 10 months ago, working full time, just me and the asset store.
It’s been “almost ready” for the past 3 months, but the last bit of polish/fixing is crazy tedious. Just re-did my enemy scripts today (and cut their processing time by 100x, only using 1% of the frame rate they did before!), so it’s all important stuff.
But I will be VERY happy when it’s actually released.
Fear of failure is a barrier to success. Use blocks, cubes, circles to make the SMALLEST fun thing possible. Lack of art, programming, and experience are the adornments of the barrier your ego erects to protect itself from the fiery onslaught of criticism that is the crucible in which mastery is born.
So my first project - SHMUP: Orbital Combat - took about six months as it was a prototype/learn Unity for myself project. I had a part-time job, complete lack of fear, and time. I didn’t work on it anywhere close to 24/7, but it was a release.
My second project, Zombies vs. Knights, took me about a month to create, and I spent closer to 8 hours a day on it for the month it took me to make it. It’s currently my most successful game.*
My third project, The Hero’s Journey, took ten months, and is doing only slightly better than SHMUP did after its release.
My experience so far shows me, that as a one-man band, a short dev cycle is better than a long one. That’s why I’m dusting the fear of networking code off of my boots (I’ve done it before) and getting crud done this week. I need to put a playable prototype on the WIP forums so I can get feedback and peer pressure, and said prototype won’t write itself!
*: It took about two years of lying fallow on Wooglie for it to start consistently giving me income. As of this morning, I average about one eurocent per day on the game, with 20-40 plays per day. Prior to that it was doing about as good as SHMUP: Orbital Combat, which is to say, < 10 plays per day, no income ever. The ‘initial spike’ even sucked.
I wrote the music in Zombies vs. Knights myself. The Zombie theme was the first time I ever wrote a percussion-only piece, what’s more. The tunes, and theme of the game, were inspired by Warcraft III, written in Anvil Studio, and rendered into OGGs using SynthFont. I did no post-production on them, as I couldn’t preserve the looping with the filters that needed to be used.
I started programming javascript in november 2013, i started using unity in march 2013, so i knew how to use unity before i started programming. I also had experience in photoshop so the art was not a problem.
I released my first game "Out Of Orbit 18 february 2014 on google play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.EQUAL.OutofOrbit
