the feeling that you are the only one who wants your game to be made and that you are wasting your life making a product that is never gonna be as good as the rest of the industry

3 hours ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

the feeling that you are the only one who wants your game to be made and that you are wasting your life making a product that is never gonna be as good as the rest of the industry

Go work in the industry for a while?  See how the professionals code?  Learn a bunch, either stay or leave and do your own thing after that.  Plenty of the successful indies out spent years honing their craft on AAA titles.

Realistically speaking it's nearly impossible to find people who will be as motivated and driven as yourself towards your own project. It does happen, but there's a reason why entry level positions are typically filled with people who provide crappy service. Think of it like this; the person who pumps gas likely doesn't want to do that forever, they likely would rather own the gas station. Therefore you get someone who is 'just doing a job' and likely isn't providing the best service possible. People who do provide the best service possible likely get promoted, and then someone else fills their spot at the bottom ensuring that quality service is always hard to find. Ultimately a really driven person would likely want to rise through the ranks and then start their own business in the field they rose up through. It's the same with any field of work. Finding someone who will give you 100% as an employee/team member is truly a diamond in the rough.

If you compare the above example to game development, you can't really expect everyone who might want to work with you to be as driven and dedicated as you are. When you do find someone as driven as you are it's likely that they will be using their position to gain experience to one day lead their own team. Some people are fine staying in the middle, and providing 100%, but it's tough to find those kinds of driven people.

The passion for your project has to come from you. As leader of a project you then work to inspire those on your team to work with you and be as passionate about the project as you are, lead by example. Most teams lead by two people are married, siblings or long time friends. There's a reason for this, it's because they share the same passions and work well together. Finding one person to work in perfect harmony with you is rare, having that with an entire team is nearly unheard of.

As for "wasting your life making a product that is never gonna be as good as the rest of the industry", your life is yours to do with as you please. If you enjoy the creation process, then to me, it's not a waste at all. A sense of purpose for ones life should come from many things, not just work, but social life, hobbies, recreation, etc, it's a balancing act. That way if any one thing doesn't work out it's not such a far fall from being content.

Comparing your work or the potential of your work to 'the rest of the industry' to me is counter productive if its uninspiring to you. Remember that there can only be one 'the best', and only a few 'top of the game'. There are billions of people on the planet, the odds are stacked against you. It's also important to remember that what you see as an end user is a polished product, not a prototype. So you're seeing the best that could be brought forward. Each individual on a team has their own respective portfolios of work that also represents their current best, and it's something they update as they get better. What we as end users rarely see is the crappy stuff that doesn't make release, the 'unpolished' work if you will. 

Think of a painter who has their work on exhibition at a gallery. Everything we see at the gallery is what they believe to be their best work. Now think of their studio, the stuff left behind wasn't good enough to make the cut at the gallery. On top of that they will have scores of work they didn't like and never completed, not the mention the work from X years before they were finished mastering their skill that they no longer show anyone.

Something I always remember is that it'll take you around 10,000 hours in each skill to get good enough to be professional. If you're trying to develop a game then whatever asset skill you have will take that same 10k hours. If you lead the team, then team leadership is another skill requiring 10k hours. Each skill you will use will take you 10k hours. Some skills will overlap and allow you to 'level up' at the same time, others wont. This is why most people work on one skill at a time, or join teams in order to only be in charge of one skill. They can then learn from each other and master other skills together.

If you've ever watched interviews or behind the scenes of some of your favorite productions, be it videos games, music, movies, stand-up comedy, etc, one thing you'll notice is most artists will be unhappy with work they were once happy with. This is a representation of their skills improving as an artist. Clerks by Kevin Smith is one of my favorite movies, he talks smack about it all the time, because he's evolved as a writer/director. Another good example of the things I've mentioned are some of the costume concepts for the superhero movies over the years. Some of them are super bad, and needed to be entirely reworked, but ultimately we as end users got something that looked really good on screen. Without looking behind the scenes, the average user never knows how much work went into making something perfect. Stand-up comedy is the same, we don't often get to see comedians in their early years bombing at 50 person bars, we see their 1 hour specials a decade into their career. Many assume that what we see came out perfect on the first try, when in reality it's far from that easy.

In the end it's important that you enjoy the creation process, and are truly dedicated to making your project/skill as perfect as possible within reason. If you don't enjoy it, then why bother? It doesn't matter what others think, art typically shines best when you make it for yourself and not for others.

6 hours ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

the feeling that you are the only one who wants your game

You started to big with your project (I have seen your posts on the forum). You should have made a small game first, you would have gotten to the reward faster. Then you should have made a small team project, 2-3 members and only after that should you have dived into your large project and assembling a large team.

It takes around 12 years for you to reach the point where you can make your "The Game" and only the possible parts.( I still can't make that talking AI I wanted.)

Making games is hard, it's expensive, the people you make it for will hate for it and others will tell you it isn't a real job.

Find some reason to make games, without it you will be crushed.

6 hours ago, ObjectivityGuy said:

wasting your life making a product that is never gonna be as good as the rest of the industry

I don't believe that a hobby team of around 12 people with random skills and around $500 000 budget, could match 250-500 dedicated professionals with a $40 000 000 budget. Even Big Indie developers spend millions on there games.

For indie developers the goal should be something like Minecraft or Five Nights At Freddy's; special games that isn't too expensive to make and breaks the mold.

On 1/4/2018 at 1:19 PM, Jon Bon said:

A sense of purpose for ones life should come from many things, not just work, but social life, hobbies, recreation, etc, it's a balancing act. That way if any one thing doesn't work out it's not such a far fall from being content.

Comparing your work or the potential of your work to 'the rest of the industry' to me is counter productive if its uninspiring to you. Remember that there can only be one 'the best', and only a few 'top of the game'. There are billions of people on the planet, the odds are stacked against you.

I totally second this man. This advice is golden, and I had to learn it the hard way.

Indeed, I once fell into this trap of comparing myself to others -- and occasionally I still do -- but it's always important to remind myself that there's no (productive) reason to shoot myself in the foot. By telling yourself "I'm not as good as all these other people." all you are REALLY doing is telling yourself you're not good enough to accomplish your own dreams. Then who is responsible if you fail? -- You are.

I don't want to be a downer like some other posters trying to give you the "real talk" -- but I have been following the state of the industry since well before the late 90's, and despite huge indie-hits like minecraft making it look easy, if you're making games in order to both make money AND follow your passion, then, in a lot of (very real) ways -- you're running a fool's errand.

When developing a game all alone -- especially a larger project -- it's easy to become inundated by it! It's natural to want to make a thing "worthy" enough to put out there, and for that, you probably tell yourself "I don't want to make an arcade shooter -- I want to make that huge FPS / MMORPG / etc. / etc. I've always dreamed of! I can code and draw and whatever! I just need some help to make this happen!" However, although some people can accomplish a project with that kind of scope -- most people can't -- and even if they /can/ do it, I still wouldn't recommend it without seasoning your skills in all other required aspects of game development first.

Why?

Imagine you somehow pushed through to make that awesome-looking perfect MMORPG -- all by your lonesome! -- and then when it comes time to publish it, you realize you didn't know a thing about server maintenance or have a plan about how to patch the game or some flaw in your marketing technique bombs the number of users who sign up to play your game -- which means your game fails due only to your failure to foresee these tiny-but-critical areas that you might have seen had you analyzed user behavior in a much smaller title with online capabilities. Years and years of your life down the toilet all because of a fatal design flaw or lack of a necessary skill-set a simple game artist or programmer didn't realize he needed before he needed it -- which is a LOT more common than you might imagine.

The absolute worst thing you can do as a budding game designer/developer is fail to respect the level of discipline and years of skill-development that goes into even the most 'simple' of projects.

Even ol' Notch had developed a few smaller games before Minecraft (which itself was sparked from another slightly smaller game idea that wasn't even his -- Infiniminer) -- and Shiggy-Miya-MARIO-san (Miyamoto for short) still develops tons of tiny little "arcade-style" prototypes that find their way into his larger and more epic games (Zelda, Mario, etc.) As such, none of that effort developing an easier or smaller prototype game HAS to be trashed or meaningless -- after all, you learn something from it, and that's worth it alone -- but, when you try to market it (something you consider a lesser product) too -- you learn a bit about sales and distribution in the process, plus you learn about customer behavior and expectations along the way! All stuff that WILL be valuable to you if you plan to ever do it for the money. After all, did you know Shigeru Miyamoto-san actually believed Super Mario 64 had FAILED when he compared it to Tamagotchii? -- Yeah, me neither -- but check out the last few minutes of his GDC talk if you don't believe me -- It is truly eye-opening.

So if the undisputed master of game design himself can learn a thing or two (despite his skill level) from a game that is considered to be one of his greatest masterpieces, I believe we owe it to ourselves to study the discipline (and customer behavior if you're making games for money) first, before just "diving-in" to make games just because we have the tools on our computer to do it.

After all, without a LOT of study and networking, you will never have ALL the tools you need to compete in the market. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure it really is naive to think you're going to make a mega-hit without studying game design and customer behavior across the years to various game designs. No matter the quality level of your game, it can always fail -- even for the tiniest reasons -- and if you indeed think you have a mega-hit on your hands with your game idea, then it's highly-likely that you will have no problem finding help making your game a reality. But if all you're looking for is a sustainable living in the games industry -- skills are the most important asset anyhow -- and you generally learn those types of valuable skillsets by working on a game that is NOT your own.

As you're probably seeing now, "passion" does tend to run out sometimes -- and unless you thoroughly enjoy the creation process and do game development because you just find it genuinely entertaining, you'll find that a smaller game can get you farther with passion alone. A smaller game, too, has the added ability to showcase (and help you learn) some skills you'll need for a larger project someday.

The important thing is to COMPLETE something -- no matter how crappy you feel it is.

I worked on my "dream" game years ago (a small smash-bros-style platforming fighter), and although I was following my own advice on size/scope and thought I had everything figured out, it still turned out to be the game's DESIGN that kept kicking my tail (the ONE thing I thought I had nailed!) No matter how much I thought it was nailed before I announced it and started working on it, I could never find a way to balance the gameplay design without compromising the core objectives I had for the game (and therefore what I thought was fun about it) because I had later decided that, since I was already making the game, I could implement a good way of making money from it too, and thus became a core objective. However, in the end, it was the very idea of trying to make the design fit my ambitions of making it make money that caused me to back-burner the project indefinitely due to my passion for the project burning out. Once that goes, it is very hard -- and probably, really, impossible -- to ever truly and properly rekindle it. 

I think the major problem you're having above all with your "feeling" is that you're creating a "product" and not that one thing you feel the world really needs to have above all else in a game -- that one thing you yourself really want -- but, as hinted at before, you might want to step back while the "passion" still exists.

Hone your skills. Get to be a badass at two or three important things in game development. Yes, this is possible simply with exposure and a LOT of homework and research. After all, everyone started somewhere. If you're still alive and kicking in a few years in this industry and have done the requisite amount of work, you'll have something to show for it. THEN put together a prototype and a team and start the project a LOT smaller than you'd be comfortable with now that you have a team. Not only will you likely have accomplished your goal, it will be more satisfying that your goal was accomplished than it would be to simply have accomplished the goal exactly the way you had dreamed it. Now not only will your dreams will be bigger -- but your courage and motivation will have grown exponentially as well. This is because your ambitions will have been made concrete. You will now know exactly what you are (and are not) capable of. -- You will never have to question your abilities or your project's worth ever again.

You will be able to do stuff you never dreamed was possible only a few years before.

Trust me if you will -- it's totally worth it.

5 hours ago, awesomedata said:

I think the major problem you're having above all with your "feeling" is that you're creating a "product" and not that one thing you feel the world really needs to have above all else in a game -- that one thing you yourself really want -- but, as hinted at before, you might want to step back while the "passion" still exists.

Hone your skills. Get to be a badass at two or three important things in game development. Yes, this is possible simply with exposure and a LOT of homework and research. After all, everyone started somewhere. If you're still alive and kicking in a few years in this industry and have done the requisite amount of work, you'll have something to show for it. THEN put together a prototype and a team and start the project a LOT smaller than you'd be comfortable with now that you have a team.

100% agree with this. And everything else you posted. You said everything else I wanted to add, but felt my post was long enough already

Don't be too discouraged ObjectivityGuy. You've received some great advice on this thread. Joining another project you don't have to lead will allow you to focus on the skills you want to increase the most, and you can use that project to observe what works and doesn't work from a team management, marketing/release, etc, perspective.

In the mean time there is nothing stopping you from working on your own design documentation in the mean time as you help others get their vision completed.

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the feeling that you are the only one who wants your game to be made and that you are wasting your life making a product that is never gonna be as good as the rest of the industry

Well of course you are. Someone must have forgotten to explain to you that's how it works. You're probably right about being the only one that wants your game made and wasting your life. I mean at least on your first few projects. I'm under no illusion that the next few things I crank out are going to be well received. It's all about whether you want this to be your life or not. If you want this to be your life than not succeeding is okay because you are doing what you love.

One thing you need to keep in mind is that no one's first project is a success. I'm certain John Carmack will tell you that he built numerous games no one else wanted to play. I've heard him say he copied games for a long time just making stuff that had already been made and no one was going to buy from him because the original idea wasn't even his.

In order to succeed in life, you need to learn. And you learn from your failures. That means you need to fail a LOT. A WHOLE lot. Fail, fail, fail, fail, fail. Every time you do, learn from it and move on. You'll accumulate an enormous amount of knowledge by failing a LOT. Failing once, not so much. Failing a million times can teach you a million things and knowing a million things is a LOT.

Your first several projects should be "throw away projects". They're going to be disasters on one level or another. But you'll learn from it and know how to do it better the next time. Of course that will be a disaster too. But you'll learn from that one and be even better than on the first two for the third try. And it just keeps on going this way forever until one day you've failed so many times that you know thousands of ways NOT to make a game and somehow that ends up making a successful game.

Lots of good advice was given in this thread. It really is a thankless endeavor. Those that are successful are those that feel the need to "have" to do it even when no one wants their game to be made and they ARE wasting their lives making a product that is never gonna be as good as the rest of the industry. All of your initial projects are going to fail to be anywhere near what the top developers are cranking out. Fail enough and you might eventually put together something worthy of notice that has some success and who knows where that can lead, whether it's a job or your own company. But if you fail enough, people will want to play your games, it just may be a lot more failure than most people are comfortable with.

I've been trying to learn how to do this for far more than a decade and still feel I'm not "there" yet. But I've failed a lot and know a whole lot because of it. But this is what I want to do with my life. In a "former life" I was a musician. I gave that up because I discovered I didn't really want to do it when no one else was interested in what I was creating. Game development is something I discovered I want to do even if everyone else on the planet hates my stuff. It doesn't matter; it's how I want to spend my time and people liking it and sharing in it is just a bonus on top of that if it happens at all. Then again, that's why I choose to have a day job instead of working in the game industry. I can do this because I enjoy doing it and my day job pays the bills regardless.