Dealing with failure

@Teila don't go to far, words are easy

 

Indeed, the commUnity ( ) here is a sight to be seen, in all my years I've never gotten this much support in anything lol.
I hope to give back as much as I can whenever it is possible.

 

Exactly, at this point Im just enjoying making games, I'd love to do it full time one day, but I want to do it full time on my terms, where I do it the way that works best for me.
Also it made me really happy that you said 'Some would say you spent all of that time and "have nothing to show for it" but only when measuring everything solely by "releases" and money. People cannot see the satisfaction you get just from "doing" nor the experience and skills you have gained.'. Because its true, a lot of people do say this to me, often in a nicer way but still to the same effect, but yeh your right, Im doing what I love and Im learning off it. So thats made my day, cheers

 

Glad to have brought a little happiness to another. And I've heard the same kind of things before. Family and friends who have seen some of my test / learning projects over the years have commented "are you going to make this one?" And like for my little Halloween game recently one asked "Are you ever going to make a REAL game?" I just laugh. Because I already knew why they found it frustrating. People are always asking what I am working on (because they know I am always working on something lol). Few things have been released.

And a REAL game.... well it went like this... "and by REAL game you mean something like... Skyrim?" He said "oh yeah that is what I am talking about!! I've heard making games is really easy these days like you can just push some buttons and basically does a lot for you!" (kind of explains why many gamers seem to feel games should be basically free, doesn't it?) "Can you imagine how cool it would be to make your own Skyrim? You'd be rich!! People are always getting rich from games!" (and kinda explains why people came pouring in, right?).

I told him "contrary to what you hear and read few people are getting rich from making games. You just only hear about the people who are. And making something like Skyrim is a massive amount of work. Check out the credits for those games you think I should make. You'll see teams of programmers, teams of graphics artists, teams working on music and sounds. They aren't just pushing a few buttons and basically building something like Skyrim trust me".

I think all of these game kit makers have done a tremendously effective job in their marketing "easily make games", "no programming required!!", "make games faster than ever before!" and with so many of them saying these things the general public has been convinced yep it's incredibly easy to make games these days!

The reality is making games now in 2015 (to me anyway) is not much (if any) easier than making games was 20 years ago. What has changed is game development is now far more accessible. Non-programmers can make some games these days and you really can make some nice little games without doing much programming at all. Unfortunately, that is very different from "making games is easy!".

So the message they have sent is not the message they should have been sending. They should have marketed it as "Now You Can Make Games Even If You Are Not A Programmer" and then explained it is still a lot of work BUT it is possible." Instead the general public believes, or is in the transition to believing, that "making games is easy". And things that are easy do not have as much value as things that are difficult which explains why more and more gamers seem to complain about game prices even though the prices are already ridiculously tiny. And explains why gamers wonder why game devs are making all of these "baby" games and not building "real" (Skyrim, Halo, etc) games because after all "making games is easy!" now.

 

I was reading a review for hotline miami 2 and they were comparing the story to farcry 3 and I wanted to flip a table, comparing a 2 man team to a multiple million dollar, hundred man plus team.

 

To be fair though, Hotline Miami 1 and 2 do have a better story than Far Cry 3 imho .

 

Yep I updated my post above. I think a lot of it is not because to gamers games are games. People are not that stupid. They realize that 100 people can certainly do a lot more than 2 people can. But the confusion I think is because if you are a gamer and check into game dev and visit the various game dev sites all you will see is stuff like this:

GameMaker: Studio
GameMaker: Studio caters to entry-level novices and seasoned game development professionals equally, allowing them to create cross-platform games in record time and at a fraction of the cost of conventional tools!
In addition to making game development 80 percent faster than coding for native languages, developers can create fully functional prototypes in just a few hours, and a full game in just a matter of weeks.

Construct 2
Create Games EASILY - Construct 2 let's you make Advanced Games

GameSalad
Want to make games? GameSalad Makes It Easy!

RPG Maker
Simple Enough for a Child

I won't drag it on any more because I think just these few examples should be enough to get the point across. This is what the general public sees if they happen to look into game development. I give Unity credit because on their front page they are not saying EASY EASY QUICK QUICK.

Anyway, in their marketing these game dev kit companies aren't qualifying these games. So to the general public when they think of games they are more likely to think of Skyrim, Halo, COD and so forth. I mean those are games.
So many people probably read it as make Skyrim in a few weeks.

 

Words are important. They can be used to help or hurt. Nice to see when they are used to help rather than to be cynical or discouraging.

 

That's usual thing in business nowadays. "You won't believe how EASY it is to make games with out FREE!!!!!!!* app". They're appealing to laziness and search for people who want a miracle.
IIRC advertising always worked this way. "Our toilet paper will bring everlasting happiness to your household and grant you eternal youth too! (maybe)". Also, all the training material on the web caters to the newbies only.

That "easy/free/quick" thing reminds me of what people once said about GUI-based application: "GUIs make simple things simple, and complex ones impossible.". So, if something is easy to get started with, it is very likely you'll hit a wall when you need to do something complicated.

 

Cynical just means believing that people are usually motivated by "what's in it for them". Not to be confused with pessimism, but nobody much knows the difference anymore. That's just how people are, and look, if the facts are discouraging then the facts are discouraging. What YOU must do as an individual when faced with overwhelming negative emotion (i.e. failure, depression, losing courage) you need to hold on tight and keep pushing through, even when you feel like you are literally drowning in your worst fears, just keep moving forward and eventually YOU WILL get through it. Encouraging words like "everything is fine" don't help, anymore than tossing a drowning person a cool glass of lemonade helps.

Just push on, you can finish, you can succeed, just keep going.

Hint: The point you get through the mess is usually just a little bit past the point you say, "I don't think I can go on..."

 

Very true on all accounts. Yeah marketers are always doing what they are taught... selling the benefits. The "what's in it for me?" QUICK, EASY, MORE HAPPINESS and so forth.

And definitely there is a purpose for these things. I agree these modern game dev kits have made game dev accessible to nearly anyone and everyone. But like you said it comes with a price. Two big ones I think. First, those limitations you mentioned where simple stuff is simple to do and more complex stuff is more complex than it should be if it is even possible at all. And second that all of these people never get a real understanding of game dev so they don't even know about that first one. Particularly for the gamers who never try their hand at game dev. They may have the sense to realize that Skyrim would take more time than Flappy Bird but they definitely have no clue as to how much more. Like I can see people thinking knock out Flappy Bird in a few days. Knock out Skyrim in a few months. One person. lol

 

Cynical referred to Teo's comment, not the OP's.

 

@Markzi - Did you watch the Ira Glass video? I prefer this one:

Last night, a friend told me that he had begun mentoring young game devs. And, he has a new rule. Before he meets with them, he makes them listen to Ep #09 of Game Design Zen.

TL;DR - Finish small, crappy projects. Try, Improve, Repeat.

Gigi

 

Always nice to hear encouraging words, I am definitely in a place where I feel like my content is not as good as I want it to be. But I have decided to take a few steps to combat this.
First I will be taking a small break from everything to let my brain recharge it's batteries.
Then I will get more involved with the community, sharing my work, giving my opinion on other people's work.
Eventually I will get better, and it might take some time, but it'll happen!

 

I recognize there is a message being sent that game development is easy ... but I would think for most non-developing game PLAYERS they get far more message from the `persona` that the game puts on. If you think about it, the entire process of making a game involves you hiding all of the inner workings and cogs and wheels from the end user to create an ILLUSION that stuff is happening. You're creating a make-believe fantasy and trying not to let on that it's not real.

This is far removed from what's really happening (calculations, data being processed etc). You actually deliberately bite yourself in the butt by making a game at all, because you're putting this shiny veneer over the top of a lot of very complicated stuff to create the impression of an experience that is far removed from the underlying technology. So you hide the inner workings from the player. So all they have to go on is this super polished `end result` - what you WANT them to see, what you present to them. So is it any wonder they are CLUELESS about how much effort and complication goes into making a game?

The game isn't there to educate them on that or reveal that to them, or turn them into developers. This alone is enough to send a really powerful message, across pretty much all games, that the end result somehow just `magically` functions, especially if you really get into the game and totally forget it's running on a piece of binary computing hardware purely from 1's and 0's. The end user doesn't have the awareness, plus you've hidden it from them, so what do we expect? Them to suddenly say, oh yes, I too am an advanced game developer and I too absolutely appreciate the huge effort and pain that went into creating this, it's worth at least $1000 price tag. ... they aren't your audience. Your audience has very little knowledge of this stuff. And in some ways, the better you pull off hiding the inner workings and technical 'engine', the less they will be able to perceive all the work that goes into making stuff happen on the screen. Immersion!

And maybe that really is the ultimate goal of all game developers, to make a game that creates such a deep experience that people completely forget the technology, forget the cameras and the lights and the texturing and all the artistic work, and they are simply enjoying the end result on a whole other level. You want that, right? You want your players to be absorbed in the fantasy and believability of it all, completely ignorant of and kind of special magic or `machinery` driving that illusion? You can't have your cake and eat it. So then the end result is people value the game based on the value of the end experience, maybe wowed a bit by the graphics n'all but if you did it right, they shouldn't even care about technical stuff, they should be enjoying the game.

So they're never going to value your game based on what it took to make it. If they do, you probably have made a game that sucks because it exposes its machinery too obviously and that interrupts the whole gaming experience. Prepare to go unnoticed, and hope that the final form of what you created is itself enough to transform people into a paying customer. Nobody cares if you spent 6 billion dollars on content. What they care about is what they feel like when they play with it. They don't want to know how it functions. They don't want `the great and mighty OZ` to step out from behind the curtain to reveal that he's just a puny human with a bunch of levers. If you're making games, you're creating dreams, for dreamers, who do not want to wake up.

Your game is going to be evaluated on its final end condition, not on anything it took to get there. It's the same as how the body of a car is all nice and shiny and it conceals all of the ugly mechanical processes `under the hood` that are dirty and messy and complicated and which almost nobody wants to know about. Does the car go? Do I like it? Hmm yes. Sold. You have to INFUSE your game with value and experiential merit that the user can experience when they play it. Otherwise it's, what, a tech demo?

 

You definitely make some great points. Certainly the programming the underlying systems and so forth should not be visible to the player only the experience the synergy of all of those systems and so forth creates.

Still... gamers used to value games more. Those same things were going on with highly polished games yet people didn't think "ah that is not worth $5!" It's like your car analogy. The difference here is if companies started pushing Build Your Own Car Kits on the mainstream. And ultimately they all start pushing "easily and quickly make your dream car!" Then you'll likely see the very same thing happening where people are thinking I am not going to spend $25k for that car. Heck with BuildACar3000 it says anyone can create a car and it's a whole lot less less than $25k!! They even have tons of examples of go karts, golf carts, dune buggies and so on. I think in that environment the perceived value of cars would drop considerably. If there were multiple options to Build Your Own Car and loads of tinkerers building and selling their kit cars.

And it'd be pretty much the same thing where people would look at the example dune buggy that says build in 3 weeks and probably think building a fully loaded Hummer Zombie Apocalypse style would be no more than a few months. For the reasons we both stated... they have no real understanding of what is involved or what the differences are.

 

Subjectivity at finest...

I saw peoples really happy playing a game where they hit a cube with a stick. Just go on Steam to see what peoples play, you will find out that our tastes are far from covered when comes to games

 

I usually am wary when I open these types of threads... but this one was worth it.
The Feelz!

 

I have only read the OP and done a quick skim. Looks like there's great advice here already. My possibly redundant two cents:

• To me, the OP sounds like the games are all just too darn big. This is based on the fact that you've been doing this for years and seemingly haven't got even remotely close to any of them being finished.
  
  
• Doing small games will teach you a lot about the design process. The main benefit of small games is that they'll be finished sooner. This means that you get to learn from the stuff that happens after the game is done sooner. And you'll want to have learned a bunch of that stuff before you invest years into a big project with no idea what you're getting into.
  
  
• Doing small games will also help you learn technical skills in a way that you're more likely to be able to "scale up" to larger projects. You don't make Assassin's Creed scale games by bolting lots of little tutorials together. Each step up in scale involves learning some new skills or approaches. Some of those steps up in scale are served very well by some early, small projects. In other words, you'll learn things that will make your bigger projects easier and/or take less time (and/or be possible in the first place).
  
  
• It sounds to me like you're more or less creating your games blind. Why is it taking months to find out if a game from a dev team of one is fun? You should know that in the first month. Do you do prototypes to validate your ideas before diving in? If not, you should. I'm personally not of the school that a prototype should necessarily be all primitive shapes and quick-and-dirty code (presentation can impact perception a lot, and dodgy code is inflexible which is bad when you're experimenting and this might want to change things a lot), but you should definitely do a minimum thing to test before investing months or years into a bigger thing. (The prototype can't show that your game will be a wild success. It can show you that nobody's interested and your time could be better spent elsewhere.) Also, a prototype is something you can finish, and tie a bow on, even if you decide not to take it further afterwards.

 

Oh god I want to type so much, I agree with all of this and, to be honest, I thought I was the only one. Especially that stuff about non game devs trying to suggest that game dev is just a walk in the park, oh I could rant on about it but you covered it perfectly, and also Im very tired at this point.
But yeh just wanted to say fantastic points, totally agree, and yeh, you made my day!

 

The best way would be, in my humble opinion, the following way:

Sit for a while and think of a game you would like to produce within unity. Once you have the idea get yourself ready for an amazingly fun time producing this game.

Fun? Yes, here is how.

Begin development but change your mindset to thinking now in this way. When you start development enjoy failing to make your game. Smile! When you look at this failure I want you to now think of it as the most incredible failure you have ever made and while smiling and thanking yourself for failing in this way I want you to open notepad or your favourite text editor and write down in it the details of this failure. Write it down and don't spare a single detail.

Now rest. You have failed incredibly and you are happy. Why? When you wake up in the morning and read this incedible discovery of yours that details how you failed you will smile and thank the coding lords that you discovered this way of failing.

Now, start work on your game again, with a glad heart and a big smile, you will approach producing your game armed with an incredible bit of knowledge. That knowledge is that magnificent failure you discovered and jotted down in you notepad or text editor. Be confident because you are fully aware of how you travelled to failure.

Today is special and thanks to that discovery yesterday you will now approach producing your game armed with the incredible knowledge of how you will never approach producing your game in that way ever again.

 

That is a very good point. I have a folder just called "_notes" that includes all the technical crap, such as crashes or config problems that I went through for each program that I use, from Blender, Visual Studio, and Unity, to the frickin' Wacom drivers that seem to f*ck up every Windows revision. Sometimes, this stuff takes days to solve, and it saves you the trouble next time it happens because you wrote down what you did to fix it.

Same goes with bug fixing. Document what attempts didn't work, so you don't try and fix it that way again.

 

Yup. In fact I just bought an Apple TV and some of the games on there are $4.99, $9.99 ... and part of me feels like, that's a little bit too high, even though these games (some of them) are quite awesome and, compared to where they were at years ago, through the roof on quality and polish. Yet because I've become used to the $0.99 iphone world, and stuff being free, I now get the impression that $9.99 is quite a lot to pay. It's silly. I mean, I used to complain that iphone users were nuts for complaining about having to spend less than $1 on a really good game. But we have all been kind of coaxed along to believe everything should be free now. Or at least everything should be so easy to begin getting into that it appears free to begin with.

 

Gotta agree with the "layers" principle, you don't know if your "game" sucks until you're out of the prototyping stage and heading into the polishing section. Because before that, all you have is a framework with specific items.. Artwork by itself is NOT a game, neither are pieces of code / this that and the other. Like any "product" it's the holistic experience or "journey" from start to end.

It's like trying to enjoy a pizza without cheese and tomato (plus toppings), it's not a pizza is it? You don't know how it's going to taste until you add the rest of the ingredients and pop that bad boy into the oven.

If you're approaching the end game, take a couple of weeks away.. When you play it fresh faced holistically, you'll know whether or not it truly "sucks" in no time at all.

 

I have to ask, then, what is the prototyping achieving?

There are of course different types of prototype. To me, a prototype is built to answer one or more questions or hypotheses. So one game may have many prototypes, some of which might not be playable things, to find out as much as possible about the important questions as early as possible.

You're right that I can't confirm your whole pizza will be amazing just from looking at a list of ingredients, but I can still tell you your pizza sucks if you're putting moldy cheese on it way before the cheese actually touches the pizza.

 

For me a prototype is a box and some action. If it's fun, more proto gets done, or not. If I don't like it's face, it's gone. I've made 4 games for PS4. This 5th one is a WIP, but looks like it's a go for fun.

 

TBH, I'm surprised this is even a question. You're essentially designing and implementing a framework, a small portion of an overall picture, with future "predictions" of tasks required and time lines via design documentation / story lines / key events. It's a "basis" for a game, not an actual game.. Unless you want to release it on greenlight of course, then anything goes (JK)..

But really it's like mapping out a song in Midi, you don't know how it's actually going to sound until you put in real instruments and it's been mixed and mastered. Plus if you're putting "mouldy" cheese in from the beginning, you gotta be pretty daft.