Unrealistic ambitions

Don't listen. Make the game of your dreams. Go all out. Let nothing stand in the way of your vision. People will always tell you their advice like they know everything. Everybody's an expert. Or at least they think they are. The truth is, only you know what you're capable of because only you are you.

Stop listening to advice from some forum trolls and...

 

As one of the bigger advocates of starting with clones, I feel I should address this.

Making Pong in Unity should take you less then a couple of days to make. My first game was a Flappy Bird clone that I put together in a day, right from downloading Unity through to deploying on a web page. (For comparisons sake as an experienced dev I rebuilt the game in about an hour a few months ago) .

If you get bored spending a day or a week to get the fundamentals, how are you going to go on your dream massive game where you will have to go for months before you even have a playable prototype?

Plus the speed of progress on your dream game will be much higher if you have a few other games under your belt. Spending one week on Pong, three weeks on a platformer, then one month on a dream game will make your dream game progress further then simply spending two months on the dream.

 

Arbitrary timeframes are arbitrary.

Also, there's a bit more to games than how fast you can knock out a generic, unpolished clone. This is a great way, however, to practice making generic, unpolished clones.

 

@BoredMormon,

With all due respect, and I mean that since I admire your posts and presence on the forums, while it is very helpful for you to share your experiences and advocate for smaller projects such as Pong, it is not your job to stop other developers from making the game they want to make, regardless of the complexity.

Any game, even an MMO starts with the fundamentals. If the new developer gets bored, then they will quit or try something else. No big deal, no loss. They will only find out by trying. Telling them they will fail before they start might backfire..they might never try. Or they might go to Unreal.

 

i advocate simple games to start because they seem simple but if you've never coded before then they are usually more complex than you realise. Bigger games need things like serialisation, pooling, referencing other scripts & probably others that I haven't heard of or used that without a base to build upon will make no sense. I've been learning for a year (part time amongst study & playing house husband/primary carer for kids) & I have no idea with the first 2 & still have issues with the third. That probably says more about me but it is still a big indicator to me that I'm not ready to start my big game & that I should note all these things down on my big list of things to learn if I ever want to get the big games made.

There's nothing wrong with posting "Hi, I'm new, never coded & want to make an mmo. What do I need to do" but expect to be told to start small & go learn the basics or asked how much money you have to pay for someone to help & what is your timeframe for completion because it is a damn sight easier to type that as a response than to type out a huge list of all the things they need to do.

But as Teila said, I should just ignore them & move on.

 

Pong doesn't teach you Jack, if you start from scratch with a 3D game you have to learn the fundamentals anyway so why does it matter?. Buying asset store camera's, controllers, shaders, particles etc. is THE worst thing you could ever do if you're a beginner especially if you want to release it, might as well poke yourself in the eye. (Because you're skipping the fundamentals for anyone wondering why?)

I'd say go, learn your dream game.. If you don't have the patience to stick it out, then you're not meant to be a dev anyway.. Imagine when you're still supporting one of your old games 5 years down the line huh? Can't stick out six months of dev, then what's the point?

But one of THE biggest issues are, people start faffing when they should be prototyping.. I did it many years back, I nearly quit.

Instead of protoyping, you're messing around with UV maps not touching on half the stuff you need to make a game (prototype, get it basically working them move on). After about 14 protoypes of large and super ridiculous games. I could probably prototype a Mulitplayer RPG game faster than a lot of people could make Pong..!

 

Why not just type "go away"... it's even shorter and achieves the same end result.

Better yet, don't respond.

 

@tedthebug,

If someone posts "What do I need to do", then yeah, tell 'em like it is. But sometimes, it is someone posting their great idea and the advice they are asking for is simple, "is this a great idea for a game?" They are not always asking what to do, or how to do it, but just excited and wanting to share with people who will understand.

If one can't be supportive in some way, then probably not good to post. Sharing your own experiences is cool and we can learn from other's experiences. Sometimes though, it becomes a "rag on the newbie fest" and that is not good. There have been so many that have come and left without ever posting again. That to me is so much sadder than the guy who tried to make an MMO and ended up with a single player RPG dungeon crawl because he found out the MMO was too hard...on his own.

 

Don't respond. Go away is not nice and again, not our job to tell someone to go away.

 

Not our job to even post on here...

 

I love you guys, I really do.

 

I'm just starting to stick my toes in the water and try to make a first game but I'm not silly enough to think I can make an MMO on my own.

I think the main issue here is that game development is design work. In general people don't understand design unless they have experience in design. It's not something you can be told about and instantly get the hang of, you need to experience it to really understand what design is and how the processes work. That's why people (usually young ones) come along and want to do a huge project - because they've seen it, would like to do it themselves but don't understand the design process and how much work is truly involved.

Telling them to "go make pong" doesn't really help either. Sure, if they did it they'd learn something but their work on Pong will either get thrown out or cannibalized later to use in their first original game. If you look at whatever their idea is and help them break it down to the first small tasks (e.g create one room, make a cube character move, do an item pickup with a sound) then it will help them learn and also do productive work on their project/idea at the same time.

People get discouraged and lose motivation if they're told to forget their dreams, go do something basic first. The concept is start small and learn but that doesn't have to mean it can't still be on their project.

 

Consider Pong a litmus test, then. If they can do Pong, or equivalent challenge to the finish, they're worth talking to or helping. Everyone else is just playing around.

 

I skip the "help me, I'm new" threads now. Mostly because they consistently follow a pattern of "Learn section. Pong. MMO Button. Locked."

Also OP almost always leaves the thread.

If this forum's goal is to make people leave after one thread, it couldn't be doing much better.

 

This.

People who have completed a simple basic game seldom ask questions like "How do I make an open world RPG with customisable abilities and hundreds of characters and an awesome story?" They ask things like "What sort of code structure do I use for customisable character abilities?"

The answer to the first question is "You have no idea what you are asking. Go learn the basics of making games. Learn how to break a game down into its various systems. Learn how to break each system down into a series of solvable problems."

The answer to the second question is "Consider using components for each ability. Expose as much as you can to the inspector, instead of hard coding it.... and so forth"

When one of them comes back in five years and and says "Take that you guys, I actually did it." I might shed a tear. Until then I'm not overly worried. Good forum contributors quickly get past the "I'm going to revolutionise the world of gaming single handedly" phase. Those that don't are no real loss.

 

Well this is the second thread I've joined and I replied to every reply on my first thread so guess that's failed with me.

From what I've seen everyone here seems to be generally helpful and I understand if a lot of people avoid the newcomer section because they're tired of saying the same thing over and over.

That said, I've watched a lot of tutorials and read a decent number of threads on these forums and my observation is that newcomers would stay engaged with their ideas for longer and benefit more from it if they weren't just told to "go make pong". As hippocoder said, if they can complete an equivalent challenge then they're "worth" helping so give them a nudge towards that equivalent challenge rather than pong. Same lines that good customer service works in now is to provide a unique response rather than the same carbon copy to everyone.

So if someone says "I want to make an MMO, please help me" or "I want to make an MMO, where to start!!??" by all means point them to the tutorials but give them the starting point of work on one basic part of their idea first (one room, one character moving etc) rather than the generic "make pong". It engages people better and gives them direction at the same time.

 

So either it's your explicit goal to make them leave somewhat upset, or just a tertiary effect that you could care less about.

Hmm.

 

Although while we're at it, that's of course via ScriptableObject, an unsung hero that's not scene dependent.

 

cool, I knew some of these but hadn't found this that listed all of them. Thanks

 

Tertiary effect. I personally love seeing a beginner take my advice and run with it. Its one of the key reasons I hang out here. There is a certain type of beginner that won't listen to any advice. Over the months of watching how people turn out I'm convinced the loses to the community in general aren't that big a deal.

 

That's why I advocate to noobs or anyone at any age to find people in their actual school / work / living neighborhood to collaborate because good ideals are exciting even when you truthfully know you don't have the money or the 'street cred' to act on those ideals or make a business of them. Or you can interest your friends that have no interest in your interests by teaching them, maybe they'll become interested. I taught myself and played football, basketball, baseball starting in 8th Grade after moving again for like the 25th time to specifically make friends in the new places I lived. I knew nothing of sports before 8th grade. My sports was being out sunup to sundown running around in the unexplored places of the neighborhood. In 8th grade, I was considered too old for that type of activity, so sports it was. It had nothing to do with bragging, glory days, difficulty, exceptionality, or notoriety seeking - just a new teenager in town trying to make friends with what they seemed to be interested in. I wound up enjoying those activities.

You and you friends making up ideals and sharing them with each other is fun and exciting when they really are your own ideals. I think the mistake people make is going for what is popular or notorious and trying to copy Hollywood in their game ideals. You start off with a massive disadvantage from the get go that way. Is there nothing in school, the scouts, sports, invented games, or childhood play, from your childhood that is unique to yourself? Learn the basics then you and your ideal making friends plumb those childhood experiences for ideals for unique stories and unique takes on game play. They don't need to be 100% original just a new way and better way to do a game or technical activity sometimes is a big reward. Me and my friends discussed many ideals and as often as not these new ideals required us to design HW, something neither of us had training for.

It is the ideal that you build around that is important not the size. Will you need to learn? Yes. It is a new ideal after all and we've seen Unity and the Asset Store will only take you so far - namely an FPS, RPG, or MMO, or one of the other genres. Will you need to design? You better believe it if you're ever to get past those great but ultimately too binding pre-fab game genre frameworks. It's up to you and your friends to implement your ideals that aren't supported by those pre-fab frameworks.

 

Is playing around with Unity officially frowned upon, now?

Yes, they're called "normal people". That doesn't make them punching bags.

Look, other people are entitled to their "unrealistic" ambitions, the same way random regulars are qualified to give them "advice" and hijack and derail threads just to start the same "begin small" rigmarole that was given in every other thread the day before. Is it sound advice? In my opinion... in theory, probably. But it's not the only way. And that's not even the point. The point is, if you're just going to derail and sandbag someone's thread about their dream game... it's better to just not post. And yes, that's an available option.

If you simply have to post on that thread you think is pointless, to the poster that you could care less if they ever post again,,. maybe try being nice, supportive, uplifting... humorous, insightful. Or at least post a friggin' meme or a lolcat or something, if you have nothing nice to say. Shia is big right now.

This is all just one person's opinion. Your mileage may vary. But I think from now on when someone starts lecturing on how to be a pro game developer... let's examine if the lecturer is that.

 

Sounds good except I thought the goal was to be a successful indie developer. The word indie here not being synonymous with making a living as a game developer. If you want to make a living as a game developer that is really much easier - you go to university and specialize in what you need to get hired by a game developer company.

I still think the ideals you take from your own experience in life are far more valuable to your chances of success than copying Hollywood or other game genres but maybe I'm taking the implied meaning of the word 'indie' too seriously.

 

Agreed! My first project was an 8 player RTS game with up to 2K units on the screen at a time. Needless to say, it wasn't completed but I eventually did create something that can handle 2K units/8 players and earned a couple Ks from it. Practically, the dream wasn't achievable but the rewards for trying are pretty nice.

Unless you're super busy, it never hurts to try. Worst case scenario, you play a bit less SC2 and come back as a silver leaguer. Actually, an even worse case scenario is you somehow get the idea that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is on the Asset Store and you (me) waste a couple hundred on assets. But even then, you learn a ton.

 

The first post I remember seeing of yours was a prototype for a deterministic, network enabled physics engine. I may have missed earlier posts. But having achieved that does meet the criteria for equivalent challenge.

 

I think that the collaboration section is a very strong argument for capitalism.

 

?

 

Well, your reply confused me for sure.

 

Maybe @Teila is right and I don't understand because I don't have kids. But I don't really see how encouraging guaranteed failure from people not even taking the effort seriously is a good thing.

Most of the really ridiculous threads we're talking about are from 'idea guys' who are 16 and don't even plan to learn how to do any of it themselves.

There's a difference between those threads and guys who are legitimately trying to learn something.

For the people who are legitimately trying to learn, encouraging unrealistic goals instead of ones they can actually achieve is not "crushing their dreams", in fact, it could be saving their dreams from being tossed in the trash after they hit the wall of colossal disappointment.

There's also just a real difference between a guy who has some skill in one of the areas relevant to making games and a guy who has no relevant skills at all. Like if you can at least code or do art or something. You don't generally see these kinds of threads from people who have actually developed one of those skills to a reasonable point, because just that process, the process of learning to create something detailed and tricky, is often enough to give you some basic respect for the challenges ahead.

 

There is never any guarantee that anyone will fail or succeed. Actually, when folks attack someone for wanting to make a complex project with Unity it is not encouraging someone. As I said many times, telling them your experiences and being supportive will go a long ways.

The 16 year olds are kids and yeah, kids are naive and helpless at times, but they are kids. Give them a break. If they bug you, just pat them on the back, tell them good luck and move on. No need to crush their spirits just because they are kids. We were all kids once upon a time.

Someone who wants to learn rather than just build their dream game will listen to your experiences and those of others and use those to proceed. However, they may still build their dream game, they might just be more willing to break it into smaller pieces rather than start with some huge document that will overwhelm them.

Yeah, posts are different, some have no clue while others are more sensible. If they bother you that much, better to just skip over them. No one is forcing you to answer one way or another.

 

The problem with science is that it's like statistics - it mostly works in the aggregate. At the individual level, we're so different, that what motivates one individual may be a soul-crushing experience for someone else.

The science argues that the strongest learning occurs when people practice just slightly beyond their current ability, over long periods of time. The term for this is deliberate practice (DP), coined by Anders Ericsson. For some, this will mean tackling an MMO, one small bite at a time. For most though, this will mean producing a series of smaller efforts that continually push their skills.

The downside of the magnum opus is that the learning is focused inward. Until you are releasing products, there's very little learning coming from OUTSIDE. Player feedback, silence, marketing, screenshots, monetization, gaining attention, and all of the nuanced bits that leads to creating a truly engaging product.

The science, my own personal experience, and the observations of hundreds of young devs tells me that the fastest, most effective, and most sustainable learning comes from successfully releasing products.

Gigi

 

Thinking on it a bit I've realized that, despite recommending newcomers start with simple arcade games, I never actually made any of them myself for the purpose of learning. I created a simple Pong game in XNA but that wasn't so much a matter of learning as it was trying to cure some temporary boredom.

I don't remember a whole lot from that far back, but I do recall running through the typical trivial exercises to learn my first language and then diving straight into the game I wanted to build at the time (a Zork clone).

Modern game engines have changed things quite a bit. Creating your first game is no longer a matter of learning how to create a window, how to load a bitmap, how to draw the bitmap, etc. If our engines have become easier than we may need to start increasing the difficulty of those initial games.

I haven't had the opportunity to really glance over the new Unity project tutorials, but I do have to wonder about your comment concerning Pong and other simple arcade games. Why do they have to be 2D? It isn't like there aren't existing examples of adding a third dimension to some of them.

​

 

One could also ask why there are so many elitist asshats that care and get off on talking S*** about people.

 

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/creating-an-open-world-game-in-unity.340899/

Here's the most recent "Unrealistic Ambition" thread I could find. Looking over it, I probably overstepped the line more so than anyone else with a few of my initial comments. That said, looking over that thread - I think there is actually a ton of useful information in it if someone wants to get serious about making a game.

As a whole (despite two of my more egregious earlier posts), I think that thread was constructive in it's criticism.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe my perspective is off.

 

@Gigiwoo

You should really be marketing / releasing in closed beta groups long before anything gets actually released. It really helps in avoiding getting too close to a project early on (blinkers) and get's a name out there before hand. Also it stops people from releasing sucky games ..

@Ryiah

Whilst I still believe you should know how an engine works at a fundamental level, yeah pretty much. There's so much material out there for putting games of all types together, there's no real reason to start with something "extremely basic". Like the Quill's videos of an FPS etc. it's simple / easy to follow and gets you where you need to go.

The RPG game tutorials I've seen are a bit too heavy for beginners. RPG's are a great example of big vs. a small game.

Ok, so you make a char controller, camera, combat system, UI, AI interaction, curve based levelling system, make some very basic artwork, small dialogue system and some terrain with speedtree stuff.. Cool that may take a newbie a month or two, maybe three? If they're really into it and want to learn.

Then you look at your favourite RPG, it has thousands if not ten's of thousands of meshes in it. It has 250 quests, 50 cutscenes, thousands of lines of dialogue, hundreds of animations, hundreds of character models and terrains that stretch for literally miles.

So you look at your setup, try and implement the same thing. Realise it takes 4 hours to a day just to make one asset look decent. There we go dishearten city.. It might take a week just to finish one quest and make it engaging.

When I say start SMALL, I mean just a basic framework of any game you want to do. That's not the hard bit, it doesn't take long and you'd learn much more than you ever would from pong. Nobody indie can make the same amount of content as AAA, some AAA's don't even bother putting that much into content outside of art anyway.

It should NEVER mean don't do the game you want to do, but it does mean you'll have to compromise in size, not type.

 

I have seen at least a hundred of these type of posts across any engine or forum where game development is discussed.

"Help me guys, I want to make a [awesome game] and I have no experience with any engine, language, art, or basically anything."

Cool, so where are you at right now and what questions do you have?

Invariably, this type of poster has done zero work. They don't even have an empty scene yet. How would you help them exactly? Pointing this person to tutorials is the fastest way to actually help them.

The people who are going to dive into the deep end head first tend to not ask for permission to make a mess. These are usually the people who ask much easier questions that I can actually give a real response to. How do I make the camera bob? What is wrong with my code?

 

I got question banned on Stack Overflow when I first started (Still am). Starting out is reallyreally hard especially if you haven't grasped the general concepts of programming. I.e. If I change this boolean to false, will the other statement execute?

The hardest part about being a beginner is not knowing the right question to ask. "This script no work!" tells much less than "What is the logic of if statements?". Eh, even now it's hard to ask something like that because it seems so basic. Tutorial series really are the best things to learn from because they don't require you to ask questions - good ones ask and answer the questions for you. I never understood scripting until I watched Unity's Scripting tuts. Bite-sized, comprehensive, and many of them are done with a British accent (tutorials in a British accent are the best).

 

This perfectly illustrates the issue in this thread.

For me, tutorials are the worst thing to learn from. Video tutorials are even worse still. I like manuals with code examples. That's how I learn best.

Point being, everyone thinks their way of learning is the best way, and no other way is valid. False. Everyone learns in their own way. That's it.

 

Look at that video of that guy melting down because he put 1 year into his game and then had a meltdown because it was no good, and he didnt even realize it was no good.

 

Definitely. A large project can be broken down into smaller parts, which can each serve as a learning experience. However, a new developer will most likely not have the skills needed to break down the complex project. That is why new developers are better off building a bunch of tiny projects as an initial learning step before attempting their massive dream project.

 

i think the most important is not really to show people WHAT they have to learn but HOW and WHERE they can learn

 

You wouldn't break down a large project, you'd start from core components common to pretty much any 3D game. Then add as your skill improves and the fundamentals become clear.. In terms of core design, there's little difference in how any of them are approached, it's what's added to the fundamentals which make it what it is..

Learning advanced design in the beginning (for such things as performance and camera placement) shouldn't be a thing until you can at least get your cube to be controlled.

 

Read the first few posts. That may be as far as the OP got before he just logged out and never came back. Maybe he did come back...but how many would not.

Yes, there is always valuable stuff in any of those threads. But you know what? It is the nasty ones that people remember.

 

There is a very good reason why so many developers recommend starting off with a small, manageable project for learning purposes.

Finishing projects improves morale.

This is always true. When you "finish" something, or get something working, it feels good. It feels really good. And it helps to encourage you to continue. It improves your morale, and it builds your confidence.

If you want to jump right into a big project, especially for your first project, you may never get to that important milestone. You may never feel the rush of getting your project into a playable state. Not everyone has the patience and perseverance to keep going without a little pick-me-up. Starting with a much smaller-scale project helps significantly with the learning process.

And the reason Pong gets tossed around so often is because it is so basic, and so easy. Everything you need to make a working version of Pong exists in Unity in one form or another. You can do it in 2D, or you can do it in 3D, it's up to you.

 

Am I the only one who has never used tutorials? But rather, dives in, try to do it myself as much as I can, use the documentation if i cant, then google, then forums?

 

I generally do the same. I dive in and start trying to build. When I hit a wall I then start searching or look at the documentation. But certainly not before. Be a waste of time especially considering the massive amount of information to go through in modern dev tools. By jumping in first I have a frame of reference so the documentation makes more sense. "ah yes I see so that is why I keep getting that error".

 

The problem with this approach is that when the first-time user fails, they do NOT learn that the task is not impossible. Quite the opposite. What they often take away from the experience is that their dream will never be realized, and they quit altogether. They never come back to game development, and remain disillusioned.

Sometimes this can be for the best, especially when an MMO is the goal. It is physically impossible for most individuals to create a full-on MMO. Not from a technical standpoint, mind you, but from a practical one. While Unity does provide all of the tools you would need for such a project, what it doesn't provide is manpower. And as many technical hurdles as there are in the development of an MMO, a huge swath of the work that has to be done on such a project is content-related. And content takes manpower, a LOT of manpower.

I have most of the technical skills I would need to produce an MMO. I even have a healthy degree of the necessary talent. I can make my own custom 3D models, animations, textures, audio samples, music, scripts, and even the engine programming. An MMO is within the range of the skill set I have built up. But I don't have the time. Producing something with content on that scale would take me more than a decade to do on my own, and probably no less than 5 years if I put together a small team to help me. And even after all that time I would still have something not even a fraction as large as the average MMO that is out today. There's simply too much content in such a project for small teams or individuals to realistically tackle.

Very tiny starter projects like Pong will likely never be passion projects. But they can be done in less than a day. One day. A simple play field, two goals, two paddles, and a ball. That's all you need. Who cares if it's not your dream game? When you can have something playable finished in under 8 hours, it doesn't matter whether or not you love it. You'll still get the satisfaction and sense of accomplishment of having finished a project, instead of beating your head against the wall for years before finding out that you'll never succeed at your dream.

 

And let's not forget the fact that MMOs need players. Even ignoring the technical hurdles, it's still physically impossible for everyone to make an MMO.

 

Never said it was a good way to do it and recommend, just how I work

 

This is a good point, it's worth mentioning that in most of the "I want to build an mmo" threads the op isn't actually trying to learn. Very, very often, their first step is "recruit a team to do all the work".

The process is:
* Have an idea for a game
* Watch a couple tutorials or check out some "kits" on the asset store
* Recruit a team to make an MMO for them because it's clearly super easy