I mean, when I first started to make a game with unity, I followed a ton of tutorials, They usually tell you you to remake an old game like pacman or some early 3d game to help you to get used to using Unity. Which… btw… is fine… It’s education, but do any of you fall into this remake mode like I did? I mean, I feel like I wasted a lot of development time fixated on a game that is already made.
I got lost into trying to remake Among Us in 3d… then I realized why am I doing this… this took me many months of 3d blender work, and c# programming to finally give up… I mean, The game is already made… And I got into this to make my own game.
That’s when I gave up… I wasted my time trying to re-make a great game only for fun. and wasted almost half a year on this personal learning project.
So my question is, how many new unity game developers lose focus on what they meant to create and focus on what was made for education?
One word…STOP. Stop making a game thats already made, or a project you obviously dont like, and feel you wasted time on. Its time to think outside the box, and do what you really want to do.
Not every dev starts out the same, but it is about learning, experience, and moving forward…
I empathize. For my first music single I got the big idea of creating a fancy CGI video. I spent six months in Blender hard at work, creating a scene where two rocks deep underwater collide and shatter, falling away to reveal a single smaller “island” that rises to the water’s surface (fluid dynamics here of course), before a storm comes and weathers the island (changing its geometry visibly and changing the materials), after which plants and animals appear, ending in a stirring scene with birds flying against a sunset, dolphins jumping in the water.
I actually made the scene, but when I uploaded it to a render farm I found out it would take like 10k to render it…so I dropped the idea. six months I could have been spending on actual music and game dev wasted.
But I think it was helpful. Now I can look at a plant or various objects and imagine how I’d model them in Blender, or think about how to create various particle-type effects. Not directly related but using Blender’s shader editor got me to try out Unity’s shader nodes, which seem pretty useful.
So in a general sense getting more experience with a tool and the general activities you were engaged in is useful.
Finish the project and do your best job on it. If you quit at this point on this one, you’ll probably never finish any in the future. There is nothing more important than the habits you develop - and being a quitter when the going gets rough is worst habit to have.
If you don’t like the project you can
find creative ways to turn it into something you like
dont worry about what you like, the game is for others to play so you can find play testers and see what they think
It is a good thing that you realized there is no point in total remake but nothing is lost.
You have to rethink your project and do something new on it, 99% of games are basing on something that was already on the market.
You should always aim for re-usability, the actual game is just a “skin” for all the technical solutions under the hood.
You have really neat graphics with a consistent style! Achieving this is already a feat. In every case look at the positive side that you surely learned a lot. Even if it is not something to boast with in terms of game-design obviously, the fact that it got so far will be great as part of a porfolio as a programmer or general games dev/artist no matter what.
I have a similar experience. Not with a game but I “wasted” two years with a custom visual programming language that will never have a bugfree GUI or really be viable. However that project certainly helped me get the job I currently have and I learned the depths of programming languages, so I’m happy.
That said, what exactly do you not like about your project? Actually the visuals and all mechanics, or the fact that it is a copy of the original and thus has little chance of forming a playerbase?
In case of the later: Why not take a different direction now?
What I always thought could be a cool idea: A semi-horror adventure/survival game. Not round based but a continuous adventure instead where either a single player or as a group you have to repair a ship or maintain a base while something lurks in the shadows and wants to kill you.
Could be a way to give this a new touch and put your own creativity and ideas in without having to worry about the sensitive balance of the original game.
Whatever you do, while it might be a “bad habbit”, I bet the absolute majority of game devs or even general devs have unfinished projects.
So don’t sweat it too much. You gained knowledge and that counts a lot.
And if all else fails and you really want the feeling of at least a bit of material success: sell the animated 3D models you made on the asset store xP
When I started with Unity, I spent several months making a clone of Berzerk (an really old arcade/Atari game from 1980). I finished the project but the result was certainly not very impressive. I don’t think anyone would be interested in playing it, even for free.
The important thing is that I learned all of the most basic aspects of Unity. Things like- how to find a reference to components and GameObjects, how to use CharacterControllers, rigidbodies, How to use collision detection and all the weird caveats surrounding that, the difference between static and non-static GameObjects, how to create animations, how to create a coroutine. This is all knowledge that I’ve used in all of my projects since then. So even though my Berzerk clone was nothing special for it’s own sake, it was still something that I needed to do in order to start working on my dream game.
It also sounds a heck of a lot like unclear expectations to me. You got months into a “clone” before realising it was nothing new? That’s what a clone is, by definition! You say the purpose of the project was to learn, but your reason for cancelling it has nothing to do with whether or not you’re learning.
Before you decide what to do, decide what you want. What is your underlying purpose? Learning? A specific dream game? Getting a job? Having fun tinkering? There are no wrong answers, you just need to know your answer so you can make choices that work towards it.
There was a famous story about how Henry Ford almost gave-up on building his first car. He felt like he’d made so many stupid mistakes and his design was so janky that it would be better to just quit and start-over fresh. Instead he just pushed forward and finished his first model. He said that he was very glad that he did, because he learned so much more from finishing that car then he ever expected. When he finally did start his second model he avoided many more mistakes that he would have made if had never finished his first model.
I think it’s a good idea to go through all of the steps to develop a full project from beginning to end. That way you know that you’ve learned the full stack.
