What is Your Biggest Challenge?

When it comes to the art, science, and business of games, what is your biggest challenge?
Gigi

 

Can I say all of it?

 

Im with shadow. ALL THE THINGS

Staying focused/enthusiastic is a big one though. Especially the last 20%

Especially when you consider..
1. you might not get downloads. All that effort for nil
2. people give u shoddy ratings for the wrong reasons

 

Working a full time job while I wait for my residence visa in a new country, while my game launch is so close

I find this to be the most mentally challenging situation I've ever been in. It's really hard going into work every day, working on stuff I'm not really passionate about... while everything I am passionate about takes a back seat in the evenings and on weekends, when I'm supposed to be re-charging and resting my body and my eyes...

Other than that, I love everything about game dev, the challenge, the projects, my projects etc. And I love the industry. I see those all as good challenges, not the frustrating type.

 

Cutting through all the bullshit.

 

Time.

 

I fail at marketing. Hard.

 

Actually finishing anything.

 

At least you're working with games. I'm using visual stupid 2005 to work on old sh*t that is extremely complex (and frustrating) and being military, wrapped up in red tape and horrible documentation requirements.

Ever tried debugging software with dozens of threads on vs 2005? Of course you havnt because its freaking impossible (and who would be stupid enough to put such misery on themselves...)

 

Keeping off the forums.

But hey, I'm only a humble hobbyist. I have no obligation to actually ship another product. Ever.

 

I almost spit out my coffee laughing. God that must be a nightmare.

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There are so many challenges. If this is something related to a pod cast, here are some more general suggestions.

- Accepting "Good Enough"
- Knowing when something is actually "Good Enough"
- Telling the difference between something that just needs polish and something that needs to be axed.
(the confidence you need to push forward vs confidence leading to folly)
- Dealing with an absolutely overwhelming avalanche of stuff you need to do and the gears you need to switch.
- Approaching subjects that are weak spots in your skill set.

 

Often it's the hardest part, which will become the best and unique thing about the game.

 

Tell us more.
Gigi

 

What gets in the way of finishing?
Gigi

 

What has failed, succeeded, or been tried?
Gigi

 

^ This! OMG, this!
Gigi

 

For me, it's fully-realizing the potential of my designs.

I've had some interesting ones. Ignoring SHMUP: Orbital Combat (it was a cute first game to prove I could finish something, anything...), my two ties are Zombies vs. Knights and The Hero's Journey. THJ was a bit obvious - I duplicated, but did not go out of my way to solve, the problems of the swordfighting mechanics from Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link (the fact that my jumping was awful didn't help.) The worst part is, I had actually referred to a dissection of Zelda 2 that outlined the problems, and tried to solve them by good level and enemy design. As a result, I fell for every single problem of the original, and succeeded in having fewer enemies, powerups, and abilities.

ZvK is something I'd like to revisit at some point. I built the game in a month. The problem is, I built it as I designed it at the time. I wanted to take the 'standard' RTS formula of 'pwn the other dude's base' and reduce it down to the fundamentals. I think I succeeded on some level, because it's my most-played game - where my other games are hovering at about 10,000-15,000 plays, ZvK has over 80,000 across portals. So, I apparently did something engaging enough to notice. The problem is, I'm not sure how to improve that concept for a sequel/remake/extensive patching session.

 

What might it look like if you revisit Zombies V Knights? You've improved a lot, there's tons more you could do with this idea, and there's clearly a lot of improvements it could have. Here's some thoughts:

• Instead of choosing either Knights or Zombies, consider evolving the game by starting with Knights. You first have 1 or 2 units, and it's only a moderate challenge. Then, you begin unlocking others. At some point, you begin unlocking the Zombies - in a sort of parallel story, seeing how the zombie's perceive it (the entertainment term is 'Unreliable Narrator') - maybe they are fell like cast-off humans, trying to protect their new existence. Use the typical RPG style evolution.
• Apply what you've learned about Feedback. The acrual of goal/souls is not quite clear. The spending of currency assumes players already know this genre.
• Difficulty balance. The feedback, and structure of the game were a bit overwhelming at first. And, I never did win - though the challenge was actually kind of fun. I think people REPLAY your game, because they find it difficult - they want to see if they can win. So, perhaps keep the game quite difficult. That's something few games in this genre do - maybe that's a niche.
• Add upgrades. There's no reason you can't add elements of an RPG in here. Accrue points/gold - which you could use to unlock new units, upgrade existing units, and even add Heroes (unit units). You could add spells, cooldowns, and all sorts of things. So many ways to take this.
• Lighting - OMG, the game is so dark - I could barely make out the units. Even if you prefer a dark background, I think the units, the castle, and the buttons need to be VERY obviously visible.
• UI - 'nuff said.

This was your biggest success. You may consider revisiting it - adding everything you've learned, and release Zombies v Knights 2, still keeping a modest timeline. Maybe 12 weeks.

Gigi

 

Reminds me of the time in AIT we were students were trying to learn our MOS and I had some 100 or more lb piece of military equipment fall off the wall onto my back because it wasn't bolted onto the wall while I was troubleshooting equipment as part of a test. And they gave me a dropped bug because I told them to get that air conditioner off my back rather than finish troubleshooting the bug.

 

Hardest thing is to stop reading stuff online.

 

At least you're not on a celebrity or political gossip site reading things online.

 

I may well do just that. Particularly on the UI stuff - ZvK was the game that pretty much set my old Unity GUI framework into motion in the first place. If I do, I'll be sure to post in the WIP thread, and maybe contact you for pointers on rare occasions.

Still, there's the Game Mechanics Pokedex, which is my current Gauntlet. This gives me a few things to think about, though.

 

Well, I'm not very interested in marketing to begin with. So I didn't try too much.
The only things I was doing to market my first two apps was putting the news on 3 (?, I guess) forums and sending out some promotional codes before the release to some random youtubers. Of course, mostly using copy and paste text. In the end, the apps didn't get very much attention. So this procedure doesn't seem very promising.

 

I ported Android and iOS games to Windows Store/WP8 the first 18 months I was in NZ. Let me tell you, its horrible, unrewarding work. You're essentially fixing bugs all the time, with zero creativity involved, you just come into work, fix bugs, and you go home. And I felt helpless, many times in my job, as either there was a Unity bug, or a hardware issue you could do nothing about, yet you still had to 'fix' the problem.

I've moved onto another job now, and its no longer in games, I'm still working with Unity, but at least I get to be a bit creative. But still, nowhere near where I want to be. But with my residence coming very soon, I can go back to being self-employed full time very soon, can't wait Round of beers for everyone on the forums when that day comes!

 

Not quite sure what you mean by this, but I'm constantly reading about the games industry, monetisation, analytics, publishers, post-mortems, lessons learnt etc. And doing this continuously over the years has made me a much better game developer and a businessman.

 

Finding other people who share my vision of a game, to work on it with me. Solo is slow going.

I've setup slack channels, google groups and other communication channels to try to recruit likeminded gamer friends into helping but inevitably they die shortly after creation once they realize how much work it is.

 

I didn't mean its counter productive to research, read or interact online. I meant that its easy to get carried away with so much of that so you aren't productive because of it.

A lot of people over-research or over-plan something and never get around to learning how to actually do it... I learn way more when I stop reading about it and just try to do it and see what happens.

 

There's a real term for it too: Analysis Paralysis.

Though, I think @LaneFox might've been referring to reading interesting threads on the Unity Forums and getting so into discussions that it seriously hurts productivity. I have that problem too.

 

Yup, I did. It's basically the same thing imho.

 

Ah, I get you. I can attest to this exact scenario with my racing game. It's continuously evolved as I've evolved as a game developer, instead of just having released 2 versions of it already (which I could have). Fortunately I'm at the point now where I'm content with my evolution and finally ready to release.

The game was originally going to be a premium title on PC, then it turned into a free to play title for mobile. Then the monetisation evolved as I realised it lacked social features, and all the monetisation features that one requires today in a good F2P game.

 

Mostly myself. I'll just get another (apparently better) idea and start on that instead. So I end up constantly tinkering with different ideas but never really finishing anything. I'm trying to change that, but we'll see what happens.

 

I fail at art/sound design. I'm sort of ok on getting something reasonably fun, if short to play, from 1 core mechanic but once I get it working with placeholder art & text gui I'm stuck on how to make it look & sound amazing (since they do make a game way more enjoyable to play if done well) so I give up & prototype a new mechanic. This means I pretty much show no one except family & friends what I've done & have never published anything.
When I'm trying a bigger game I usually give up after the main mechanics are working, usually way before gui & interfaces. Again, just because I have no idea what I'm doing.

 

Constantly learning - constantly!
Keeping up with the light speed of tech evolution - which includes playing others games to review implementation.

Convincing myself anything I create (non-art content) is "good enough" to show others.

Stopping at the established ceiling for graphics quality I want to create. Moving onto other development tasks when the current graphic can be tweaked/improved.

 

Time.

 

yeah bug fixing/porting life isnt ideal. Good luck with the visa and going self employed then. I keep hoping that ill release some small game that makes enough to get me out of the rat race, but im going to have to actually release some things for that to happen.

 

Everyone goes through a stage of being pissy about 1-star reviews. I did that time. Don't care anymore, but I still go and look at them. Here's a selection of some of the newer ones.

Perhaps a legit concern, although 25,000 other people figured it out. I can only assume this was some random hardware issue. Hard to know. The entire left/right side of the screen is treated as a button.

Yeah I would like to increase my 16 sales. IM SO GREEDY! lol.

This one makes me laugh. Not even sure wtf was going on with this person.


Its not all doom and gloom. Obviously there are plenty of good reviews too, but the shoddy ratings for the wrong reason still rings true and is annoying.

 

I like those reviews you see where people are to stupid to understand the star rating system. They give a game 1 star & rave how good it is or give it 5 stars & absolutely trash the game & say not to buy it it is crap etc etc

 

Thanks, on the other hand I do hear you about the massive legacy codebase you have to work with, and with VS 2005. The only thing worse than doing horrible work, is having horrible tools to work with.

For me, the worst feeling I can have in my job is feeling 'helpless', i.e how do you fix something you can't really fix?
I'm sure you've had this problem a few times.

Have you ever thought about changing jobs? C# is a pretty diverse language.

 

Did I mention I'm also disconnected from the internet? (And getting files from the internet to my dev machine is a painful task).

I've had a few situations where I cant fix the problem (one that springs to mind is programming a flight management computer). Hard to do when you don't have the $20,000 interface document that tells you how to talk to the magical black box that is full of magic (and possibly unicorns).

Im always looking at the job market, but I will only change for more money or a job I want. Mostly looking for jobs I want rather than money though. I loath web development though, and that's where a lot of it is going /sigh

 

Web development isn't half bad. I do it, converting old VB6 apps to the current-generation MVC in C#. I like it, because you get to take old, possibly WTF, code, and revise it in very good ways. Sometimes we'll have to write an internal iPhone app, or a C# desktop app (usually using XAML), but web development gives a really diverse set of challenges to overcome. It's also taught me a few neat architectures for managing data that I've been working into my game projects, which is also helpful.

 

You're not supposed to show Auron, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Willis on-screen at the same time, how many times have I told you? He's lucky his iPad didn't rewrite time such that he's his own uncle.

 

If there was one web browser, I would be less likely to hate web dev, but the fact that i can create a beautiful page in one browser and have it look completely broken in another is the main reason I hate it.

IE6? that browser can go **** itself (granted this probably is less of a problem now). Anyone still using it doesn't deserve to browse the net.

 

Here's one I got.

It was the very first review I got when I released Tap Happy, even before my friends had time to write anything. Why people would download, play, and then expend time to write such a harsh review is beyond me. I thought that would completely crush me. Instead, I found myself laughing as some weird meta-realization hit me about the irony of it all.

Gigi

 

You're assuming they played it; sometimes people skip straight to the trolling. Other times they do it because they're going for a quick laugh in a crappy way.

I have to agree with @JamesLeeNZ - I think the best thing to do with obvious troll comments is ignore them, there is no victory in chasing trolls. Luckily, I've found that more people give feedback, not due to being willingly unhelpful, but because they just don't articulate what they see is wrong; they suffer from what I like to think of as "Reverse Confirmation Bias!" Some of it is training - as problem solvers, we're used to giving each other reasonably detailed feedback. Some of it is role - our consumers are not our testers. Some of it is time - our consumers have better things to do than analyze what exactly needs improvement on our works, even if it's of immeasurable help to us.