Tricks for motivation when you lack skills....

How does everyone handle their limitations when it comes to the multifaceted process of game development?

I’m currently building what is fundamentally a simple game: a sort of Gauntlet clone. Pixel art sprites, run around maps killing monsters, Picking up loot, worrying about Health economy. Fine. Great. But I’m working towards a rough picture in my head that is significantly sharper than my current skills are able to reach.

For example I’m not an artist, so I started using placeholders for things. However, without even simple animations the controls I have feel slack and unresponsive – I’m not happy with 3 or 4 simple colour palettes I’ve used so far – I’m pretty sure the tileset I’m using to build the levels is severely lacking in proper shading and detail…….

OK – so I stop and take a breath and accept that graphics can be enhanced over time. So I look into simple art programs, and realised immediately how far away from competency I am. This is going to take months and months to learn just how not to suck at art, and that’s before getting the right art for the game. Frankly, even to get this very simple game “Looking” right – not even taking into account balancing the animation to sharply match the controls – you’re looking at years of learning and upskilling..............And that's just the artwork to hit the minimum level where you still retain an excitement in the project......

So limitations being what they are –and the fact we all have them in some capacity and to varying degrees – how do you keep working? What’s the trick or solution to making something that fundamentally will never be as good as what you hope it will be, even something as simple as a gauntlet clone?

 

Get better at it.

 

One option is to specialize. Find a team of competent people that are doing all of the aspects of game dev you aren't good at/don't like. Spend all of your time becoming good at a skill they aren't good at/don't like. Everyone profits together.

Spoiler

Otherwise known as getting a job.

 

Also, there is bunch of available assets to grab. From models, textures, to scripts.
If for example I don't want / or I can not afford a team, but want to make game, I look what is feasible for me.

I don't try copy AAA shooter, because only considering aspect of Graphics is already overwhelming. Not to mention AI, or Multiplayer, and rest on top.

But If I can model at satisfactory to me level, then I can make own models, which are low poly, and fits to the game.
This way I can progress, not needing too much external help, and not be overwhelmed by graphics and animation matter.

But reading and practicing, is one of number of things, which can help you to to excel skills.

 

I think you've nailed the point I'm having problems with - satisfaction and progress. How do you set your satisfaction level (Good enough), to a point that allows you to progress beyond it (Aiding motivation) while aware that if you put in another week/month/year of study and practise you'll have improved nearer the point you're ultimately aiming for (the initial ideal)?

It's like a cycle: You can always improve, which means you're always operating below your potential, but you're ideas and designs often stretch beyond your skills, so you have to practise and learn to get better, but you can always improve.....It's the point at which this cycle stops that you achieve satisfaction and feel like your progressing.

Do you have a way of breaking that cycle so you can remain motivated and actual feel like you've achieved something?

 

Pretty simple actually.
- Personally I divide my projects down to small pieces and do everything step by step. Why? Because I guess when I succeed one little thing while developing a game my brain fills with dopamine, thus giving me more motivation. If I look at the whole project I have to finish and I don't succeed or get stuck in some little thing I lose my motivation and get really stressed and depressed. Breaking your game down to small pieces is the best thing to do.

 

Indeed ! The same thing I do, makes you feel progress.

 

Yep, pretty much what @MusicBoxx said.

Making game modular is tricky at start. Specially for new learners. But highly beneficial along the way.
I tend to work on smaller pieces as prototypes, before moving and integrating, to main game.
If you manage to keep in pieces, is easier to modify individual game module separately. And then re-import.
Or even later review, or use as template.

Thing is, continuous improvement is inevitable.
But me, in case on focusing on strictly one part and trying to finish, I work on bits until I am happy with, or tired of. typically few days to few weeks may be. Then I can move to other part and repeat process. Then other, or return to previous.

Then test multiple bits together. I will see what need to be changed, or improved. Or if works at all.

Lets imagine graphics.
You start game from making super graphics. Spending time and effort for a while.
Then you writing a game. You decide along the line to change something, which affects graphics.
So working back again.
Or, working on graphics today, to polished level, what you may think, then end up releasing game in 5 years time.
Realizing your graphics is outdated. Unless was pixel art from start So you either release outdated look and accept it, or spending again effort, to improve. Which is costly (time / assets).

Also, along the development, you may learn about new assets, new tech, or new other ways. Then decide improve bits.
Is much easier, if you spread work across.

But as I said, and many as well, you will end up redesigning certain parts multiple times. If not whole game.
For me is easier, as I have no deadline. But for others, they need say stop improving at given point and must be it.

 

First, manage your expectations. Don't expect to create something on par with what teams of people typically create. One strong person cannot outdo two weaklings. That's hollywood hero nonsense.

Second, you are a human. Get a team. Doesn't matter if you like people or not. You just got to do it. If you can't or won't, revert to step 1.

Third -- who cares if you are motivated if you lack skills? Get skills! If you can't get more skills than you already have, revert to step 1.


You've got to adopt a long-term mindset of personal growth. You are a hobbyist learning, right? Have you already made dozens of games and this is your triumphant masterpiece? I don't think so. The real goal here is jump in the fire and learn by trial and error. So forget about delivering an awesome masterpiece, and focus on growing yourself as a developer, programmer, artist, whatever. You just keep doing the work and delivering it to the people. One day, it will be good. But a watched pot never boils, so don't be dragging yourself for every day that your work isn't awesome yet.

So the key to motivation is to keep perspective, know where you are going, and discard petty emotions. Maybe you feel down today. So what? There is still work to be done, and your emotional state is not the boss. The work is the boss -- no, it is your God, and you must be a devout worshipper.

 

Scope your project to fit in with the pace you are capable of developing, and within your skill set. Preplan to farm out parts of the project you know you can't do a satisfactory job and can't commit to learning at this time (if you're no artist, then textures and models are good candidates to hire someone else to do for example). Also you will learn a lot just by doing, don't underestimate yourself.

 

How does a man move a mountain? By first removing small stones. The road to competenvy is a long but it's like that for a reason. Nothing in life worth anything is going to come easily or quickly. Just put your head down and nose to the grindstone and keep at it.

There's a common notiom of not feeling ready for certain things. Whars wrong with this is you're never gonna be ready if you keep doubting yourself. You gotta want it. Badly.

A strategy you might employ is to learn as much as you can and practice what you can along the way. If something doesn't seem to make sense try implementing it and see where that takes you. If you get stuck try asking thoughtful questions while seeking help.

 

One more thing: don't learn to make games to achueve a specific vision. That's getting it backwards. Aim to learn to make games just to make games .The vision may change or you'll find itveasier to achieve further down the road.

 

I disagree. A far less skilled individual will generally take longer to complete a task than if you had handed it to a highly skilled individual. There will be exceptions like having to complete a task that a far less skilled individual would have normally been given but the high skill tasks will be way slower.

 

Limitations? Moi?

 

Well, in the case of idiots, sure. Idiots make everything worse.

But the point is, work with other humans to get stuff done. It's what winners do.

 

I'm not referring to idiots. I'm referring to less skilled developers. If the task you need accomplished is just barely within their range of knowledge it's going to take them longer to complete than someone who has had to repeatedly perform the task across multiple projects.

 

Oh, I see what you mean.

 

I think there are 3 useful options:

• Learn to do it yourself.
• Buy it from an asset store.
• Pay someone who can do it consistently and well.

Doing things yourself is hard, but it's free (I know people like to price every hour of their day at $120/hr but I wonder how much money they will make in the time they have so judiciously freed up?). I like to do things myself - or failing that, to at least be good enough to do a competent job if I have to.

Buying from an asset store is fairly easy, but is more pricey and may not be successful. There's a lot of stuff out there that's hard to modify or combine. I'm doing this for music and SFX, and maybe a few other things but not many.

Paying someone who is skilled is ideal, but is the most expensive. Good people know they are good, and price accordingly. People who are cheap are not usually cheaper simply because they are not quite as skilled, but rather because they are, for various reasons, difficult to work with. If you have money though, hiring a skilled person is the best of all possible options, in my opinion.

 

One thing I try to do whenever I start feeling dread about the visuals of what i'm working on not being up to where I want to be is calmly remind myself that it is an iterative process, and nothing needs to look good at the beginning.

The longer amount of time you spend on the part of development you are good at, the less likely you are going to be willing to give up a year or 2 down the road when it comes to the parts you are less good at.

You have to basically not let yourself get overwhelmed with what you can't do, and focus on what you can do as much as you can, and slowly improve small things over time as you go.


Another smart thing that I found out on accident, is have a younger relative/child playtest the game. I have found they generally find more joy in what they are able to do in a game, than what they see, and how polished things are, and the experience will definitely inspire you to keep going, just to re-live that experience of seeing wonder.

 

I've accepted the fact that I'll never make really impressive looking art if I continue to specialize as a programmer. But I have friends who specialize in other disciplines that can offer me advice and help my basic looking art look slightly better.

Something looked off about my character model, so last night I asked if my friend, who's a 3D artist, could take a look at it, and they walked me through what faces/edges/vertices I should manipulate to fix it.

So that at least helped my character model look better, but if I want truly impressive art I would need to bring someone else completely onboard.

 

Believe in yourself!

 

The general rule of thumb is, your art doesn't need to be brilliant. It needs to be better than 99% of people who play your game could do. (If you're happy with 1% of people saying "I could draw better than that!" And how many people in the world actually know how to make 3D models? Probably less than 1%.) So good thing about making children's games is that children are usually rubbish at art! So they'll be impressed no matter what!

 

Are you sure that's what really matters?
While there are certain games that have art that I don't like or I'm not interested in, whether someone can draw "better" than me doesn't really occur to me.

Edit: ...as a player, I mean. When wearing my "artist" hat I start to become obsessive about comparing my art to other's but that's neither here nor there. As a player though, I don't compare other's art to my own, and you're selling your game to players, not necessarily artists.

 

If you are bad at doing art and 3d stuff don't try - especially when your are a programmer. It takes years(!!!) to become good at it and in this time you are not programming/doing your game.
I don't know your current age but if you are not underaged and still bad at art you will not become good at it in an acceptable amount of time.

If you can spend a bit of money:
- Hire an artist for your most important art, like the main hero.
- You can find very good assets for under 10 dollars in the store - buy and modify them. Mesh cutting tools are your friends;-). Also changing colors of textures or painting over an existing texture is a lot of easier and Gimp is free.

If you cant't spend money:
Get money! You are a progammer right? Work on a small project elsewhere. It still will be faster than getting better at art.

Don't be afraid that people will say you used assets (PUBG did it and sold millions). 99.999% of your target users are not game developers and do not care who made the graphics. They just care how the game looks and plays!

 

As a solo developer myself, I’ve been where you are, in fact I regularly come back to this feeling every now and then.

What keeps me motivated is staying engaged with others on the forum, helps me to build more knowledge. Also remembering that I can always learn something new, and that’s exciting!

Most recently learned about Scriptable Objects and Modularity, amazing to have researched.

• Just have fun
• keep learning
• Art you can get an artist or use/pay for asset store
• Be realistic, have low to no expectations at first
• experimenting with ideas is great
• many projects may end up no where and that’s ok.
• Don’t give up, breaks are ok for thought but don’t give up

 

Give yourself permission to make stuff that just "gets the job done".

That sounds counter intuitive when what you want is to get good at something, but it's important. Moving on to new stuff gives you lots of learning opportunities that spinning your wheels on old tasks won't. If you're making stuff that other people use then it also helps you both get feedback on your work from others' perspectives and learn what "good enough" really is. Also importantly, moving onto a new thing is an opportunity to apply what you learned from your last task to a fresh task.

I wasn't a very good programmer until I gave myself permission to write crap code as long as it "gets the job done". This allowed me to get stuff done faster because I wasn't focusing on "getting it right" as a priority. That increased the amount of experience I could expose myself to, which meant I learned faster, which lead to me making better software anyway. The trick there is that "gets the job done" needs to be judged at least as much from your users' perspective as from your own.

 

I disagree with parts of this. I think just doing a blanket statement of something like "it's too late to get good" is not a good idea. In game development, good enough is often just fine. You don't need AAA quality in a single-dev game. Some people are indeed capable of learning the art side of things even later in life, especially considering the level doesn't have to be as high as some think.

That being said, the rest of it is sound advice. I've bought some assets(mostly music and sound, but some visual stuff as well, mainly for special effects type stuff). I'm no artist, but I've learned enough to know my way around Blender and the Substance suite(and some other stuff too). I'm good enough to make some of my own basic models, and modify other models from assets and other sources. I'm also good enough to make materials using pre-made stuff(like from gametextures.com for example), and I can make some of my own materials as well. I'm no artist, but I feel like I can get "good enough" results for the games that I'm making.

I agree with this 100%, in all disciplines, art, code, etc...If you insist on perfection, nothing will ever get done. If you go over even AAA code, you will typically fine //hacka hacka, //redo this section, and similar comments all over the place, because they want to hurry up and get things done instead of trying to get it perfect.

 

The notion that it's ever too late to learn something new is completely wrong.

I'm 29. I just got a guitar for the first time in my life. I'm learning to play it though my sense of rhythm is whack, yo. I had some unpleasant experiences in grade school ehere I began to *gasp* hate music. Some of you 29 may be one year short of 30 and significantly older than yourself and to others this may seem silly. 29 isn't very old at all and I get that.

Attitude is everything in life. If you're gonna let someone tell you you're too old to learn something new then i'd say you're not ready or it was never something you wanted to do anyway.

It is indeed true that if you want to specialize in one area then it's best to do that and let others focus on the other parts of the project or find someway to to fill in the gaps.

Someone famous said something about learning, and I don't recall the source or the exact quote but lets paraphrase: "the day you stop learning is the day you die"

Even 75 year old grandma's go to college these days. What's stopping you?

 

1. I maintain a very messy folder on my hard drive that is full of all the things I've done in the past that instilled these same exact feelings. Over the years I have accumulated a ridiculous number of screenshots and gameplay videos of my work, and every once in a while I go back through to remember how far I've come (which, regarding art, isn't that far).
   
2. Suspend your disbelief. We do this all the time with other people's creations, be they games, movies, books, etc. There is nothing wrong with a blue square representing your character, and most of my projects stay in "prototype" phase for as long as I can hold them there. I don't see much point in spending a ton of time on artwork if I haven't proven the mechanics and gameplay concepts.
3. I keep my long term goals in mind when I am away from my desk and sort-of forget them when I sit down to work. If you constantly focus on what you want to ultimately accomplish while you are either learning or trying to produce an asset for your game, you will feel the weight of it all resting on your shoulders and doubt, self-criticism, etc will inevitably find their way into your psyche. It's easy to look at the big picture and say to yourself, "I'm never going to get this done." You'll find yourself in a much better position to make progress if you adopt the perspective of "today, I am going to get this done."
   
4. Keep in mind that everything you fail at is experience gained. Life doesn't give you an XP bar but that doesn't devalue the knowledge gained from falling flat on your face: you just learn to put your hands out next time. I played Wolfenstein recently and there were a few points at which I just kept dying over and over again, but each time I died I learned how to not die the next time, and it's really no different with learning gamedev and art.
   
5. I'm a programmer by trade and I used to look at art as this magical land that others are lucky to be born into and I can only sit on the sidelines and wish, but that's simply not the case. Great artists are great (at least in part) because they put in the time to hone their craft, and I'm guessing that a lot of them were sketching during their childhood years whereas I was programming. Don't get caught in the trap of looking at someone else's art and feeling the dread that comes with the assumption that you'll never be able to produce anything of similar quality; the only thing standing in your way is you.

I have been in this industry for years and have been working with Unity all that time and I have yet to try Cinemachine. I will undoubtedly suck at it when I start, there's no way around that. Granted, my experience with Unity will help me learn at a faster rate than someone who is new to the software, but my greatest asset is my experience in sucking at just about everything when I first started to learn. I just keep at it for the sake of future-me, and if past-me hadn't been so stubborn I wouldn't have learned a darn thing except how to quit.

Change your perspective and you'll be doing yourself a huge service. Laugh at your screw ups and results when they fall short of expectation rather than beating yourself up about them. Take a moment to revel in small victories because there's a good chance it will be a while before you get the opportunity again.

Lastly, I learned art through getting stuck on programming bugs. We've all been at that point where there is a bug that simply refuses to show itself and something that should have taken a few moments to fix ends up taking much longer; those are the times when I would go learn Blender. Art became my escape, which gave me an entirely new perspective on the low-quality results I was getting because my goal was simply to step away from a mind-numbingly frustrating bug, and little by little I learned.

TLDR: When my daughter learned how to walk, she didn't learn overnight. She used the tools at her disposal (eg. a coffee table or a Dad who could stand upright) and just kept getting back up, literally over and over and over and over again. Even when she learned, she was incredibly awkward and running was out of the question. A few years later and she's damn near a pro, but even her 37 year-old dad still trips over the leg of the coffee table from time to time.

 

@Braineeee Sure you can learn many things even if you are older. I never said that you can not but that it takes way too long! In my opinion the time factor is crucial in game dev.
An artist can learn to write code fast and i would suggest it . No one will "see" his bad code and when it works no player will care about clean code .
But i stay at my opinion that learning to create good art takes way longer. Sure you can try it but when you have a goal or time deadline for your game it is almost impossible.. So you can spend years practicing drawing or 3d modeling or working on your game. Decide yourself!

 

You're right that nobody cares about "clean code" from a user perspective, but they do care about bugginess, stability, and performance, and having well written and maintained code has a flow on effect of helping the rest of the dev team work more effectively, which indirectly impacts user experience across the board.

You're right that good art takes longer to learn than bad code, and you're right that not all code has to be good, and I think it's really useful for every discipline to learn the basics of other disciplines... but I certainly wouldn't plan a project based on the idea that "no player will care about clean code".

 

Well, in my opinion clean code > existing code > no code. And good art > no art > bad art. This is the difference.

 

I think the issue that isn't discussed is that it may take years to get good at making art, but it can take only months to learn to make "acceptable" art, at least what in my opinion is acceptable for many game types. I'm not talking AAA though, I'm talking pixel art, simple styles, or even some styles of 3d model art. So it takes years for the good stuff, but I think a year or less for the "acceptable" stuff. So if you are so inclined to learn it, why not? If you go in with achievable goals, it will be fine.

 

I think this is almost correct, but based on my experiences and observations I would say that "The day you try to build a wall around what you know, is the day you begin to die". There are things that no walls can stop, not least of all Time itself.

 

I have no idea what you are talking about as that is definitely not the quote I referred to.

If you think a few months to two or three years isn't enough time to learn anything new youve got other pooblems.

 

I'm not totally clear on that quote either...I'm thinking by "building a wall around what you know" maybe what is meant is blocking what you know from expanding, as in, not learning anything else. But then the rest of it maybe instead of meaning that after too much time you can't learn, means that the walls in the second part are obstacles to learning, and those obstacles can't be stopped by time, as in, if you put the time in, you can learn. That's basically how I interpreted it.

 

He's saying don't settle in with your conclusions. Be a nomad, always packed up and ready to move when necessity demands it.

 

I'd rather see artwork from someone who was passionate about their game and had creative ideas than from someone hired in to do polished artwork. But that's my personal taste. I prefer B-Movies to blockbusters mostly for the same reason.

 

If you are a true B-movie fan, then I hope you will have spent this thanksgiving weekend watching the ultimate turkey-horror-romp, Thankskilling.

Yes, I know many people here aren't american or celebrating the holiday, but you've got to see the movie if you're a b-rate fan. Just stop what you are doing, find it, and prepare for glory. Be sure to get slightly buzzed and call all your friends.