Disclaimer: I am not a master of game dev, but I do think I am pretty good at it.
Hmmm… it may be that it is late and I am thinking too much. Or maybe its this cabin fever (its below zero here!!!). However I have noticed something. I lose interest when my skills plateau. When I was little I would draw on paper, even up til’ graduation from high school. Perhaps it was a distraction from schoolwork, but it was something that I enjoyed. When I graduated from high school I would not draw anything for years. When I finally did it was like riding a bike, the skills still existed but its was not fun anymore.
It was just kind of boring at that point. I’m sensing the same with game development. My project has never had sound effects, nor much art. However I implemented some sound effects with ease, and before long had a fully functioning audible demo of the feature I was trying to demonstrate.
The point being, picking up the sound effects from an asset store, and implementing them w/o actually reading the documentation on AudioSources in Unity3d, I sensed that some of the challenge (and my interest) had gone away.
When I say I think I’m good at this, I don’t mean to come off arrogant, and its true I haven’t shipped a title. However I feel the coding aspect is simple enough at this point.
I am cognizant of something lurking in my mind, that being that I am afraid of getting too good at something for fear that it may just become a “grind”. I can perform the actions required, but do I really want to?
My attitude toward anything in life is “Master it. Go a mile deep”, while ignoring everything else. Other parts of my life have suffered a little because of it, but it doesn’t exactly bother me.
What are your thoughts? Do you have similar tendencies?
As much as making games is fun, a lot of it is also work. It’s probably not going to be fun all the way through a given project if you want to finish it, especially if you’re wanting to release commercial products.
In many ways, being able to make something is just the start. Once you’re good at making things then it’s time to practice making good things. This takes longer and it’s harder, so there’s still plenty of challenge there for you if that’s what you want out of making games.
One at a time, set yourself some challenging goals that will stretch your existing skills or force you to develop new ones. Examples could be:
Release a game that makes $10,000.
Release a game that achieves a 5 star rating.
Make a game that gets 50,000 downloads.
Make a game that runs at 60hz on a modest target device while doing something demanding.
Get a game into a curated marketplace or onto a closed platform.
They’re just examples, they might not interest you. You should pick your own anyway. Point being, identify something you think is hard - maybe even something you’ve never considered an option because of that - and figure out how to do it, and then do it.
That said… before you set yourself a “BHAG” (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) first get something released. Anything, doesn’t matter too much what, but go through the process of finishing something, and then distributing it through your channel of choice. There’s lessons to be learned there, and you’re better off learning them on a small, “easy” project before you embark on something more ambitious.
Do you sometimes have a topic/feature that really interests you, that you can perfectly picture in your mind and can’t wait until its done; working on it in a sort of frenzy almost because you know its going to be great. Doesn’t have to be anything big.
Personally I can understand where you’re coming from. And I think an important aspect in development is that you always have a goal that you really want to achieve, some feature or system that you want to see in your project, ignoring anything else.
Over time those small but enjoyable things will come together…
You’ve spent at least three years on the same prototype. Of course you’re getting bored.
Yes. I spent years messing with text adventure games only to come to the conclusion that I was spending so much time experimenting with how to parse the text that I never went beyond it. I never made an actual game. Eventually I decided it was time to move on but by that point I had wasted far more than the three years you’ve invested.
Game dev is not coding, coding is part of it. Adding sounds from the asset store is not sound design.
I’m not sure why you’re isolating and breaking down everything so much.
I mean, you’ve surely mastered clicking a mouse, but has that stopped you from using a computer? Or is the mouse just a means to an end?
So set your goal for something to master to be gamedev. Or more specifically “creating a good game”. The other skills (coding/art/game design/sound design) are just a means to an end.
The tools aren’t that difficult all all. Making a game is. Making a good game very difficult and pretty rare. Not making a game easy, my mom has never made a game. Once you have made a game, then you are actually a game developer, then is the time to be judged how good you are. Til then, it’s nothing to worry about. Time will tell if you were on the path to becoming a game developer or just playing around on the computer. Keep at it.
I would say the hardest part in the years I’ve been making games is the design of it. I’ve never had problems coding, writing or doing art (all of which I invested substantial time into) but finding what works and what does not, and importantly if it’s fun or not is my main source of anxiety. I am never satisfied so I guess I’ll never be happy with things I make - in a kind of bittersweet way, this is my challenge.
For me, the hardest part of design is figuring out what exactly is wrong when something is wrong.
I like to think I have good taste in games, and a good understanding of them, but being able to figure out why something feels off and figuring out how to fix it (especially when having to compromise to timelines and resources) is really f’n hard.
I never understood why some games took so long, or why there were so many horror stories of games stuck in dev for years and years. I’d bet that it’s often the “this doesn’t feel good, there are clearly problems but we don’t know exactly what they are or how to fix them” problem.
It’s also why just friggin copying other games is so common. Because copying something that already works solves a lot of the design problems.
Damn I removed the number cos it revealed what an old git I am when I just wanted to explain how long I’ve struggled with this issue. But yeah the design is I think a crucially overlooked part. A lot of kids join our profession and talk about how they want to be an ideas person and sure - everyone has ideas here - it is why we make games to begin with I guess - but making those ideas work, that’s the hardest part. And some things work for short experiences but rarely do ideas work for a longer haul - across an entire game - and that’s where IMHO most people get unstuck.
I mean, it’s fun bouncing off a frog 10 times but it gets a bit rubbish after 100. For example
Can confirm. We’re doing a point and click adventure, which are probably easier game design wise (or, I think more accurately, they are “differently” difficult to design than most games), but since we want the puzzles to tie into the story, when "My Awesome Puzzle Idea"™ does not work, it means the story no longer works, which may mean the area may not work (“what if you don’t go there at all!”), which means revisiting everything around it, and the changes may ripple through the whole game.
It’s easy to spend a few hours in Unity and have a basic level and a moving and jumping box and think “at this rate, I’ll have a full game by the end of the week!”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
That’s the thing. Game design decisions don’t live in isolation.
Any good game play element needs craploads of supporting elements. So when something feels bad, is it that the game play element itself is bad, or is it that it doesn’t have enough supporting elements, maybe the supporting elements are actually what’s off, maybe it’s a communication problem or a visual issue…
It’s hard to figure out, especially when things are moving and unfinished.
Am I slapping lipstick on a pig, or am I polishing a rough gem?
It can be unbelievably hard to know the difference.
In my defense, the first year I spent just coding away without really learning much of anything. The next two I spent working on it off and on, because I cannot manage school and game dev (aka pleasure) at the same time. It has really come together in the past few weeks and months when I have gotten a chance to work on it. =D
I think it’s pretty clear game dev is a hobby for you, so why would it matter if you achieve anything or not or even finish anything? I say this often to people who seem hell bent on torturing themselves because they didn’t finish a game. Finishing a game is often harder and more expensive than finishing a film or music album, so let that sink in for a bit, hopefully before the next round of digital flagellation.
