I think this is a great article! I especially liked the paragraph: “Always finish things if you put a lot of work in them already. If you are tired from a long development, you can adjust your plans and release the game with minimal additional work, and it could bring few hours of fun for players (or maybe it can’t, but it still worth trying);”
So don’t give up, even if --and most certainly-- if you’ve put a lot of work in to your project, but don’t let it affect your personal life!
My own piece of advice might be: don’t get yourself in to too much debt. Debt is like making a deal with the devil. Its nice to receive money ahead of paying for it yourself, but when it comes time to pay it back you will be woeful.
Try to mitigate debt accumulation as much as you can. Never pay purely interest!
Persistence separates success from failure, but so does knowing when and how to pivot to avoid the sunk cost fallacy. (Or here for several gamedevs’ take.) Blizzard is a perfect example. Instead of pushing their Titan MMO out the door to justify the work they put in it, they stepped back and refashioned it as Overwatch, which I understand is moderately successful.
I agree with the idea of always finishing your projects. However, that comes with a few huge conditions:
Your early projects should be small in the first place. By “small” I mean “completable with existing skills, resources and time”.
Your projects should be validated before you commit to them. That is, you should have some reasonable confidence that you’re going to get what you want out of doing the project.
You should understand and accept that “completed” does not necessarily mean “commercially released”. So a project that is “prototype this thing” might be “finished” when you’ve got some boxes moving around on screen enough to test an idea. That’s fine!
Also, you should know what a “project” is. An idea you’re tinkering with is not a “project”. A “project” is a thing with defined outcomes to achieve. If you can’t clearly describe what “finished” will look like, you are not doing a “project”. Plenty of hobby games I’ve seen in development aren’t projects because they’re just one or more people working on something because they like it with no particular end goal. There’s nothing at all wrong with that, but treating it like a project when it isn’t one just opens the door to stresses that shouldn’t get in the way of a hobby development.
I have to disagree wholeheartedly on these points. These seem like auxiliary concerns. To me there is no point in making something that doesn’t interest you. Small, medium, large, and ‘huge’ being subjective terms and almost not quantifiable in game development, I think you ought to do whatever the damn hell you want. It will be a learning experience, unsolicited advice be damned. The last point is obvious, you have to market and put your game up for sale once its done.
Again, seems like a bunch of auxiliary concerns and what your opinion of what a project is.
On the other hand if your aim is unrealistic you may spend months or even years working on a project only to never reach the point where it is ready for release. For someone wanting to make games for giggles this isn’t a problem, but if your goal is to be a game developer you’ll need to aim within your abilities or accept you’ll never become one.
I think what you’re both getting at is that professional game devs make games for a living. I don’t do that, I have other commitments at this time that are paramount. Time management is not one of my stronger skills, and only work on my projects when I know there are few other commitments. Game dev is really enjoyable. Oddly enough gaming is not. There’s too many buttheads in online games, and playing single player feels lonesome. Additionally I don’t enjoy gaming very much (at all) anymore. I have career aims outside of game dev, but find myself practicing game dev more than learning more about my chosen field…
Along similar lines, if you’re trying to do stuff that’s out of your league you can wind up struggling more so than you would if you started with a simple project where you can learn the basics. If you started learning math by trying to learn differential equations, you probably wouldn’t get very far.
I feel like Braineeee caught some flak because a lot of us (me included) wanted to propose a corollary to “Always finish things…”, something like “…as long as it’s worth finishing.” But I wanted to recognize the main point of the post, too, which to me is:
That’s the deciding factor in a project’s success since, no matter how wise our design decisions, every project hits bumps that require hard work to overcome. And, especially for hobby projects, it takes grit to get past them rather than giving up and switching to a new distraction.
Its alright guys, I’m not the least bit upset, so if it seems that I have a tude’, rest assured that isn’t true. Valid input!
[edit] I wanted to share something: this article resonated with me because it made good sense. I’ve had serious confidence issues for a long time, but recently found it within myself. Many times I had doubts about what I was thinking, and I read an article read an article named “Intuition is the highest form of intelligence”, and you may have read it too if you’ve been using FF Quantum. Anyhoo that article in particular also resonated and gave me vindication. Something I excel at is turning turning those unconscious “gut feelings” into concrete thoughts. If you’ve ever seen the TV show NCIS, Gibbs has that infamous “gut”, and I liken myself to that.
Back to the topic, I don’t just believe anything somebody says if it doesn’t make good sense ie. goes with ‘the gut’. The original article I shared here resonated with my gut on more than one level. Hence why its been shared.
There’s a famous line by some dead guy about common sense. If I could paraphrase, its something about common sense being pretty uncommon or something. I think this is what it was about in particular.
Isn’t the whole point of this thread… unsolicited advice?
To add on to what @TonyLi said, “always finish” isn’t good advice. “Know when to quit” is.
There is an old adage that says being a great artist is knowing when to put the brush down.
That is contradictory, going with “your gut” is pretty much the definition of ‘common sense’. Not a great strategy, knowledge and experience beats “the gut” every time.
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Twain said “Common sense is uncommon.” but he was a humorist.
Franklin said “Common Sense is neither common nor sensical. Much of what passes for common sense is not based on any underlying principle it’s just anecdotes that have worked for the current situation.” which is pretty accurate, anecdotes aren’t a strategy.
I’m going to add another tweak, which is to say “Don’t give up, unless you have a better plan.” I think that a perspective on how what you’re doing is the best thing to do given the circumstances (and you’re honest with yourself about what those circumstances are), can give back a lot of motivation that would otherwise disappear into the ether of uncertainty.
Nope. I just wanted to share the article. This bit about unsolicited advice is about many experienced game devs giving unsolicited advice about what a newbie ought to do… I think its better to learn by doing than to never do anything challenging. You can’t grow without challenges. Most people are going to ignore whatever advice you have so why waste your time?
True. But one can’t and shouldn’t put the brush down with the work half finished.
What I was getting at with that diddy about the gut feeling/intuition was not everyone has the ability to pick up on those intuitive signals. There is the level that everyone thinks on every day, and then I think there are higher more abstract realms of thought. Lets not get in to political subject matter as it is against community rules here; but I think a lot of political arguments are the result of being boxed in by beliefs and how world events are perceived. No other examples come to mind here… Surely many people will disagree here, but that is what I think.
If you’re stuck on the same challenge for years though you may need to choose an easier challenge. It’s a bit like learning to run as a child. You don’t start by running. You start by crawling. Once you’ve mastered that it you move to walking and only after that do you start trying to run.
By the way no one is saying that you shouldn’t do anything challenging. Learning to crawl, learning to stand, and learning to walk are all challenging for someone who lacks the ability to do them. Likewise so is learning to build a simple game before you make a complex one if you’ve never made one before.
There are works out there that were never finished despite the people being well known for their work. Some of them may have been unfinished due to reasons outside of their control but there were many that were simply abandoned. If a well known creative puts their brush down you can bet there is a good reason to not simply continue trying against all odds.
I get where you’re coming from. Do consider my points in the context that they’re adding to the idea of “always finish your projects”, though, and my thoughts on what a project is later on.
Whether you agree with them or not, my points come from the perspective of having seen people do big first projects out of passion, sometimes for years, and having a much harder time than they might otherwise have had largely because they got some basics wrong at the start and carried that baggage around for the life (or death) of the project. Doing a small game earlier to learn from some of those newbie mistakes (which in no way reflect negatively on anyone - we all start somewhere!) could easily save far more time than it costs, especially when it comes to a multi-year project.
So I’m not saying “don’t do big projects”. My own current project is huge. I’m saying do some small ones first so you’ve had some practice.
Just keep keeping on, eventually it will work out for you. You are going to get better and better at development and at the end of the day what else are you going to do
Imagine that you’re trying to paint. You’re stuck on a picture for months. Frustration starts to set in. At this point you need to swtich to something else where you can quickly get the sense of achievement from completing the project.So, put away the picture or throw it away,paint few hundred of small works, and if you still feel like working on the original idea, create it again.
Basically you need to keep your level of satisfaction in check. Bite off a project that is too big for you, you’ll sink into depression and eventually may start feeling disgust towards whatever it is you were trying to do.
I don’t want to sound like I’m disagreeing very much with this post, because I think in most cases it’s the right thing to do. But I think it’s worth pointing out a couple of things that may or may not apply to some people.
I think it is not only also possible to perform something of a ‘psychological recovery’ en route to a particular goal, but also, in my experience, there’s a sort of sinister cycle that can sometimes build up where one’s mind gets used to giving up at a certain point of exertion/lack of motivation/lack of clarity about the thing that one is working on, and deludes itself that working on something else or ‘taking a break’ or some other ritual of recovery will actually fix the problem. It’s something that I think builds up after routinely using these recovery rituals without actually succeeding regularly in achieving the various objectives that one is aiming for. And this is very very hard to break, because to get out of it you basically have to starve your brain’s reward mechanism at the same time that you most need it - there’s a very fine line that you have to walk to get out.
The mind is capable of some incredibly sustained and focused activity in some cases - cases which usually involve pressure and don’t involve easy access to a set of alternative options, which is sort of the opposite of the usual prescription for curing this kind of problem. While I think it’s good to manage one’s mind carefully and take breaks at appropriate times etc, I think it’s also important to cultivate an obsession with what you’re doing - to live it and breathe it to the expense of interest in at least the closest set of possible alternatives, to constantly think about why you’re doing it and why (and if) it’s going to help you be who you want to be, and to basically restrict (after rationalisation) the ability of alternative options to lobby for the focus of one’s mind.
That way, the mind’s ‘muscles’ (the parts of one’s mind which can become fatigued and manifest in physical symptoms) relinquish some control to what might be called the mind’s ‘ideological’ drive, which is a good thing - I think this is why ideology is able to carry someone through a very difficult set of circumstances. It’s a double-edged sword in a way, in that it can take you further down a dead-end than you otherwise would go, but I think it is part of what makes some people able to consistently achieve difficult goals without obstructive fluctuations in motivation.
So I would say that sometimes, instead of working on something else, it’s better to look inward and ask yourself if there’s anything that you actually really want, and also to ask yourself if you’re even capable right now of wanting something badly. And if there’s not much of a positive response (or any response whatsoever), it might be worth spending one’s time consecrating one’s mind to an ideal of one kind or another, rather than trying to develop fleeting interest by working on something else. It’s not always the case that this is the problem but I think for some people it is.
As said “knowing when to put the brush down”. Taking breaks, clearing the mind, are common practices in the creative process. Sometimes pushing through may work, though not as common. Regardless, “knowing” is the critical, key element. (Though more commonly the phrase refers to knowing when to end, and not keep tweaking). Starting is self evident and easy, stopping is learned and what separates the wheat from the chaff. Saying “always do x” is pointless advice as there is context. Knowing how you work and when to pivot is critical, and cannot be summed in generic platitudes.
Valid input!