Biggest Mistake

We all in the start of our career have done some mistakes. Share your biggest mistake so that others can learn a lesson.

 

Thinking I can just buy a bunch of assets and make a game without learning c# basics...

 

Biggest mistake is try to do nothings.

 

desperately trying to find tutorials for what I want to do, when I already know, that it's unlikely to find any for my specific needs and I just.need.to.start.doing!

 

Same as Farelle, you can't swim if you don't try!

 

Spending a lot... A LOT.. of money for assets on a desperate search for that mythical "make my game AWESOME" asset.

 

Listening to reasonable people™ and try to find a job into the industry to get experience first ... it only made late to the true skills I should have followed, programming ... Design don't make a game, sound don't make a game, graphics don't make a game, programming do. If I had continue to my own I would have start it myself way earlier ... Nothing I want to make is compatible with experience in the industry ...

 

Wasting the first year of using Unity not learning C#. I used a lot of UnityScript and C# has been a lot more helpful to me.

 

Trying to arrange my game so that gravity would make everything fall together properly, when with a bit of elbow grease I could have gotten it together much quicker.

In related news, I'm still trying to do that, and getting closer to succeeding.

 

Spending ages trying to get the polish and shine on something just perfect as I make it, only to delete it and start again from scratch for one reason or another

 

In my early career I bolted half a million dollars of equipment to the ground in the wrong place. Twice. I ended up overspending by about 100k. I chalk that one entirely up to inexperience.

The most devestating mistake of my career was hospitalising a guy because of a gap in a risk assessment I'd done. He came through fine, but that's not an experience I'd like to repeat.

 

Sometimes I like to forget about your other jobs and just assume that the Pond Wars development cycle was an absolute nightmare.

 

Lol.

In a game dev sense my biggest mistakes tend to be:

• Scoping to big
• Asking for too much money
• Not finishing things

Scope control tends to be a huge problem for new devs. Even small games tend to be huge efforts for beginners. And most of my ideas were massive.

Pond Wars was hurt by asking for money too early. I focused heavily on monetised markets, rather then simply trying to get it everywhere. So much time wasted trying to implement ads and the like.

Not finishing things is one of my inalienable rights as a hobbyist. But it has the side effect of things, you know, not being...

 

Biggest career mistake: my choice of PhD supervisor. This mistake wasted years of my life and a ton of money.

Biggest game dev mistake: no failing fast enough. I've been working on the same project for several years and I still don't know if there is a viable market for it.

 

Can't really say that I have any, things tend to go pretty smoothly for me.... The only mistake - not really a mistake, but yeah is that I hate relying on third party assets, I've bought hundreds of them, just to look at how they are made and learn from it and make my own system. It wastes so much time re-creating the wheel, but at the same time - I work better by knowing what I made inside and out rather than having to deal with customer support to fix a problem 3 months later.

The only third party things I really use is Networking stuff, generally they work fairly well right out of the box without issue (Photon).

But yeah, right now i'm in the middle of setting up 3 servers in my house for my game in development. Learning it as I go, definitely exciting. But at the same time, I feel like just hooking up Xampp and going about my day, but - i'd rather do it right.

So yeah, that's pretty much it for me lol.

 

Not finishing things. Easily the biggest problem I have. I can start projects that become functional, and do nothing with them. Not enough content or polish to publish, and too much time needed before I switch project.

 

Being too much in a hurry...

 

My biggest mistake, overall, was not expecting to make a million mistakes.

 

I can guarantee that if you followed programming, you would regret not having graphic/design skills.

Programming does not make a game. Content does.

 

Main challenge is not realizing that you will rebuild your scene 3 to 4 times...

 

Well I had then before I could have the opportunity of going programming. I grew up without a computer and had always lust after programming, reading code in magazine and analyzing them lol, and when I could finally do it ... well I was reasonable and got a jobs and tried to be a drone like I was advise to.

But I beg to differ, you can make a crappy game with programming, you can make no game with all the codeless content.

 

Not spending enough time teaching myself art work although I've an inventory of purchased assets to make up for it I still have that 'I want to make the art for my game' urge (It's not really that needed either) even though I'm a programmer.

Other is not just going ahead and creating my games but always finding something somewhere else to do like a bored student skipping class.

 

Asset flipping? Game maker?

 

I was the 'IT Manager' for a home improvement magazine company, so was responsible for the server, managing backups of all the data, i.e client art source files, PSD's etc

This was back in 2005, back before the 'cloud' was a thing, so we had a backup system where we had 2 USB drives, and this backup software called Novastor that did a daily diff backup of all the client artwork folders. Each day I would swap the drives out, and take one drive home with me (in case the offices got broken into, which being in South Africa, was very possible).

The software seemed to work well, there was always a big green tick in the interface, and the logs looked good, saying everything had backed successfully.

Then one day we needed to upgrade the OS on the server, so did a complete re-format of the server's drives.
All was going well, until I restored the backup folder... about 70% of the folders were completely empty. The folder structure was all there, but... empty folders.

I restored the backup from the second drive.. and empty folders... I almost died. I contacted Novastor telephone support, which was completely useless in being able to help me. I tried numerous data recovery tools, but alas nothing worked.

I had to tell my boss that we had lost years of artwork and print information for the magazine, it was horrible. He wanted to sue me and all this other crap, but eventually we settled that I would do x amount of hours for him for free to pay back the damage.

Moral of the story...

Always make sure your backups are restoring before you rely on them.

 

Alternative moral: Get public liability insurance.

 

Not if you want to make NEW gameplay. And even then there is no asset flip for game of yesterday like spore (especially a seamless spore), everything, no man's sky, versu, civilization, command and conquer, battlezone (the rts), impossible creature, sacrifice, etc ...

Without programming you are just an idea guys trying to find someone to make your game for you and will be doomed to do endless game design doc and concept art that will never translate into anything tangible, boring people with how amazing your idea would really be IF ONLY they would believe it and helping you

And gamemaker you can only do anything serious by using the gml, ie programming.

 

I thought we were talking about crappy games?

You're gonna need all of it if you want to make anything good

 

I'm talking about the bare minimum to make anything different
I don't consider reskin new game.

 

For me it was creating expectations and assuming things (mostly related to revenue, haha).

 

Game maker can do bare minimum to make anything different, the point is you need all disciplines to make something good

 

But I never said anything about being "good", I cant' make tetris either

 

Well if it doesn't need to be any good then knowing how to code isn't essential either

 

I expect I'm still on the hunt for my biggest mistake ever, although the first marriage ranks up there in the top 3 of all time.

Passing up guaranteed money from freelance gigs in exchange for current, zero ROI game development could be considered a mistake - but not the biggest and - I'm employed full time so I got the bills covered, though it's tight!

 

Letting the balance between marketability and creativity get too far out of whack, either way. I've released a lot of games/projects, and the ones I regret the most were the ones I either made with too much a focus on the (eventual) money, or too much a focus on being "creative and unique". My most successful projects were when I kept both sides of the equation in balanced view.

 

I am actually very new to unity but my greatest mistake was being indecisive. In my professional life I work with C on a daily basis, as a hobbiest I work with C++ and C# most often. I spent months tinkering with libraries and jumping between UDK and Unity. I researched and started backup and re-researched. I constantly wondered if I should build from the ground up on my existing skills By using SDL AND C/c++ or if I should try a C++ and UDK or Unity. I would have been better off spending a month working with each technology and then making a decision and skipping the stop and start method.

 

Biggest mistake is reading these forums every day and getting sucked into threads like this.

Joking aside my thought is the same as @goat. I wish I had spent more time improving my art skills and not simply coding.

 

my biggest regret: waiting till i was 40 to revisit a passion i've had since i was 10 years old.

i made games as a child and adolescent but never knew this could be a career option. instead i did grunt work (first waitressing, later IT jobs) for years and years and years.

it took me 25-30 years (and the need to practise c# coding on linux) to find Unity and then start making games again. and wow! it's like a light in my head turned on. all that motivation and tons of ideas. it's crazy. i love it.

so, here i am, 40 years old, it took some time, but i've finally found what i want to do with my life.

now, where's that restart button? ;-)

 

Its on the Unity startup screen, click +New, enter project name and click Create project.

 

I made the dumbest mistake today and remembered this thread so I came to post it...

I've been fighting with OnTriggerEnter and raycasts for a week now, trying to get a popup menu to show whever my collider/ray hovered over item.. but for some reason there would always be a window popping up in the middle of my scene whenever I try to hover from one item to the next. I thought this was a bug or transform issue..

After going through pages and pages of unity answers code and video tutorials and almost giving up, I realized today that my environment gameobject was tagged as "Item" (what I use for items) and the trigger kept instantiating a UI window for it too.. ... T_T FML..but i'm happy now its fixed and don't feel so bad anymore

Still a noob, so I'm sure there will be plenty of these before I get it right

 

@yaezah I wish I had your problems

 

Learning Macromedia Director at University. I was told it was the future. It was not.

 

My biggest mistake was to turn down a multi-million dollar offer from a big company, thinking I could make ten times as much. Had to to settle for ten times less and being backstabbed by my business partner learned me a valuable life lesson. Never be greedy and never collaborate with someone who is.

 

Premature launch, the worst thing you can do is release too early. It's a messy experience for the end user and your amazing little prototype falls into the waist bin of failed to deliver games. And if it's a novel idea smart game developers can run with the concept and build it up to it's 'full' potential. (If it's made in Unity on a none native platform they can steel your code. Hint: ILSpy).

Or first Impressions last, make sure your game is good before you launch it.

Then again we all need good feedback, which can be hard to find.

 

I had to really think about it. I don't really see a big mistake for game dev because I've enjoyed the time I spent on it. Maybe if there was a biggest mistake it was not just hiring people to create games or tools to allow me to work much more quickly. I found that hiring artists to create graphics was a very good thing to do. It saved time just to have someone else creating the content and saved much more time based on the quality of the art they produced. So... not outsourcing as much as I could have should have I guess is it.

I suppose another thing could be not being willing to spend more than maybe 50 hours on a game. But that is kind of a tough one to change. I'd much rather figure out how to compress more into those 50 hours. And that mainly means hiring other people to pitch in.

Then again actually I think my biggest mistake was that although I tried hard to not get sucked into the graphics black hole time and again I ended up spending far more time on graphics than I should have. I should have just stuck with my original plans of not giving a damn about graphics as far as "looks" go and tackle a bigger game knocking out art as fast & simple as I possibly could.

 

My biggest mistake is don't have a gameplay trailer at the launch on the App Store. In the first 2 days i had thousands of views but little few downloads, i think i could have more with a good trailer.
I didn't make any marketing before launch.

 

Coding drunk.

I might as well have run the code through an obfuscator. Somehow it worked amazing, but I had no idea how.

 

Sounds like subconsciously you are a master software engineer. Need to drink heavily to tap into that.

 

Way back in college (like, waaay back) I once helped a friend debug his final project while I was falling down drunk. Took me a couple of minutes to find the problem but I have no memory of what it was. He was kind of annoyed, but grateful.

My biggest mistake/regret is not finishing. Problem is, the games with a small enough scope for a single developer aren't really games I enjoy making, so there's no motivation there. So my game writing attempts have generally been just out of reach of my ability follow through.

 

Been there.

There's a reason I'm on build #3 of Bravely Bear.

Anyway, my biggest mistake is allowing myself to get into a cycle of over doing it, burning out, blowing off, getting sick of myself not working, and then over doing it.

By far the #1 skill you can give yourself is structure.

Allocate time for learning, practice, community, and work.

Then do it consistently until it become a nice routine.

You can be as clever or skilled as you want, but it doesn't matter if all you do is make a collection of false starts.

 

#2 - discovering Vuforia