The answer to every 'Can it be done?' and 'I've lost my way' post.

Like clockwork, the new posts arrive almost every day: “Do you think it’s possible?” … “How do I make money?” … and, “I’m stuck without progress - what now?” From a distance, Unity is a shining beacon of opportunity bringing thousands of developers and artists to her shores. And, here is the answer to their questions:

One day, I was working on my prototype, when my wife said to me, “You’ve been messing around with that thing for too long.” I argued that I had made really great progress and had a lot of neat features to show off. Though, in my heart, I knew I was far from finished.

My wife replied, “Build something in 6 weeks. Anything at all, so long as you finish it.” And after she threw down the gauntlet, she said, in a softer voice, “You need this.” Of course, I knew there was no way I could finish anything in 6 weeks, so I countered, “Gimme 8 weeks!” And, in the end, it took me 9.

I finished my first product, shipped it to Apple, and sent it out into the world! It was a crappy product, and yet, there it was, in the real world, for all to see. It flipped a switch in my head that changed my outlook. And now, 18 months later, I have 5 products, with 2 more in the works. I’m earning real money, and my products have touched 70,000+. I needed that boost from the first product to prove I could do this. As she loves to hear me say, ‘My wife was right.’

Here’s your challenge! Build something and release it, 12 weeks from right now. To accept, simply reply, 'I accept - ’ and when you finish, simply reply “It took ## weeks” with a link! It your choice - accept Gigi’s Challenge to find yourself on the right path!

(PS - Update. It’s now been four years since I began, and I’ve released nine products, on three platforms. I have over 200,000 customers and a steady income from my spare time, Indie endeavor. In addition, my skills have improved so dramatically that I’ve gotten 2 promotions at work, won several national awards, and am now leading new initiatives in the medical field.)

So, what do you build? Try this quote from Ted Brown:

Or these from Mike Bithell’s Develop Conference rant:

Wisdom from Joel on Software

Shortcuts to Notable Replies:

Gigi.

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Thanks Gigi Master, for bestowing your excellent wisdom upon us all. worship

Moral of the story, be okay with making something tiny and totally crap, but at least it gets finished.

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My addition to this: don’t reinvent the wheel but use what ever you can find. (in the assetstore!)
I see so many people building things like a gui which takes days or even weeks. Just spend that $65 so you can move on and finish something :slight_smile:

No one makes a perfect omelet right off the bat. The first time you crack an egg, there is a possibility that everything will go perfectly. You could crack it just right, and empty it into the bowel without getting any shell in the way. But it’s far more likely that you will flub it, at least a little, and end up with egg all over everything. It can help considerably to watch someone else break those eggs first, but that is still no guarantee of success. At the end of the day, there is no substitute for rolling up your sleeves and breaking some eggs yourself.

Making something small and not very good is how you experiment. It’s the game development equivalent of learning to break eggs. There are a lot of other steps that you will learn later. But there’s always a baseline of where you have to start, whether it be a functional version of pong, or even just a basic “Hello World” program. Personally, I always start my larger projects out as tech demos. I always want to prove to myself that I can get the core gameplay and functionality running before I start working on the “trim.”

Well that was a long way of saying “Yes.”

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Great thread idea, Gigi. It’d be awesome if it got stickied, actually.

This is some advice that I’ve been giving so often that I keep the link handy to paste into threads about once a week:

This one’s recent, but I think also worth re-posting. It’s a response to someone essentially telling us not to be pessimistic and discouraging by telling people to do small projects instead of large ones, and telling people starting out that they should go for the big stuff if that’s what they want to do.

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I like this a lot, great work guys and it’s good to have the elders advice.

I’m going to throw in my own experience so everyone can face palm and those who are starting out can learn something. If anyone is thinking of that hard to reach and impossible giant project, I’ve been down that dark road, and this was my experience, a train wreck of mistakes.

I felt like I’d been there done that, developed in the big engines and I was a cocky little student, so when it came to my final project at university, I not only thought of developing in an environment that was completely alien to me, but making something completely outrageous and ambitious. Fabulous idea.

In the beginning I had to wait for the SDK of this engine to be released for free. Then while developing I had to come up with a number of work arounds for features I had intended to include in my game as well as waiting on the engine to release updates that would include those features, then when upgrading to the new version, having it break everything I had coded.

Time till deadline, about 3 months, I decided to stick with it and stay with my ambitious project, I was determined to finish it. So to cut this short because it is a long story, about 2 weeks before the deadline, the whole game was stripped of everything and left with a variation on design with it’s current mechanics and placeholder art. What was going to be an ambitious FPS project, turned into a wave based FPS horde game. That’s all I managed to finish, I still got great grades and graduated, but that was something I never wanted to do again and project I’m not particularly proud of.

So moral of the story, whatever you have in your head to begin with, cut it down about 90%, make that remaining 10% awesome. Have a mechanic or feature you’re not sure will work? Make something small based around that one mechanic or feature you’re not sure how to make, you’ll gain experience and knowledge and maybe change your mind on it in the long run. By all means, reach for the stars but you need to build the spaceship first.

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This is a fun thread. Love it.

@Angry - I loved your ideas so much, I condensed them to their essence. If this thread continues to be useful, might be worth sticky-ing.

Gigi

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very nice, also very emotive, made me think and realise that, I happen to have choosen the left path, and all I reached was a dead end, with only fails, but now that I am starting that right path I refused to take, I can finally see and realise that I have talent, all I need is to awaken it! Find what best suites me, and work on it, improve it, thanks for the motivation mate!

That actually sounds a lot like the first experience my (now professional day job) team had, as well. It was a huge learning experience and didn’t really go to plan at all, but I’ve never considered it to be a “train wreck of mistakes”.

We wanted to make a small but open RPG demo. On area, half a dozen NPCs, half a dozen fights, a shop with 3 items. If we were to do it now we could easily do it in the time we had allotted, but back then… not even close. We ended up with a linear string of 3 “quests” ending in a single fight, and a kickass windmill script.

Actually, the biggest thing we learned from that is that although we only saw what we hadn’t finished, everyone who played it on demo day loved it. Nobody cared about what wasn’t there, they just thought it was a cool 10 minute game where you walked around a bit and had a fight.

That’s actually a lesson I refer to almost every day that I design stuff: Players don’t see what’s not there.

Yes, absolutely!

Based on trade show reception, as we’ve no sales data yet, the game I just recently had published (in my sig) is a really solid example of this. It was originally made in 7 days, around a full time job, because I’d signed up for a trade show but had nothing to take. So I restricted myself to 1 night for getting the gameplay working, and spent the rest of the week on dressing up the presentation. It’s of course had a lot of work and rework since then, but the positive reception that it garnered with so little effort compared to everything else I’d made before changed my focus on all of the hobby projects I’ve done since.

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Cool story!

So, what qualifies as short? In the past 2 years, I’ve released 5 products on the app store - usually requiring between 8-16 weeks to develop. Enough time to give it meat, without it turning into a career. In order, they took: 9 weeks, 16 weeks (Gratitude Habit), 9 weeks (Good Sex, Great Marriage), 2 weeks (Xmas), and 14 weeks (Compliment Habit).

My skills have improved, so now, I can start new projects to re-vamp the two most popular: Gratitude and Sex. That’ll take ~8 weeks each and it’ll not only add to the 300-400 downloads/day, it will also have a one-time ‘Update’ bump out to 60,000+ users.

Even when things don’t go as planned, I’m still filled with the warm feeling of pride from accomplishing something real. I’m taking the slow and steady approach by developing small, frequent projects as I travel down the right path toward success.

Gigi

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Have to admit; I went left. Not as far left as an MMORPG but making an RPG. However, I didn’t just jump in blindly. I had some idea what I was getting into having taken multiple programming courses in the late 80s and early 90s. Even wrote a text based DnD dungeon crawl with some classmates back when BASIC was pretty much the only language people were using. I also watched and did every single free tutorial I could find; even paid for a couple of them and I have spent a lot of money on starter kits, models and pretty much everything else one person needs to make an RPG game. Got a few prototypes out - even have a playable demo on the Play store. But it’s been a long, long haul to get where I am. And I’ve learned so much about Unity, programming and everything that goes into making an RPG with Unity. At this point I can write a fairly complex code without looking at the reference and getting no errors. I am actually surprised now when I get an error and not the other way around where I was surprised when my code actually worked. I’ve stopped doing the happy-chair dance every time I get a script to work. Now I reserve it for when I accomplish really, really difficult tasks.

Whatever your dreams are, consider them crushed and trampled under the weight and magnitude of your competition; a roaring and raging tsunami of AAA sweeps over you as you cling to a small slippery rock at the abyss of certain failure.

As your grip slips and you look into the abyss, you feel your dreams being washed over the side, cascading into the gloom.

If you’ve got this far and still hung on, you’ve already won.

I thought I was a paid passenger on the Starship Unity though! How disappointing to actually be required to don a spacesuit and patch up the hull :S

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That was the most depressingly beautiful thing that I’ve ever read.

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that was the most rpg way of saying it, it was awesome hahahaha

yeah, that sounds pretty much my first years interested in game development, A LOT of stupid mistakes, still making a lot of mistakes but trying to learn from them as best as i can

This post should be made sticky! :roll_eyes:

Perhaps some of us could share the huge AAA projects we took on and never finished, or are currently developing. I’ve been building a game for about 1 1/2 years and I get the feeling its one of those big game ideas being talked about here. Givin the current development, What do you think my chances of success are or how long it will take to finish? If other people could share their massive projects that never took off, I could compare it to mine.

Videos

game description and WIP thread
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/154536-Steampunk-FPS-game

To answer your question, I added an additional story to the original post. When you’ve re-read it, take a few moments to decide whether you accept Gigi’s Challenge. 12 weeks starts right now … tick, tock, tick tock.

Gigi