Buddy I have spent almost 4 years just learning every single aspect of game design and writing down all the ideas and every single thing I need to do with my own game and it's not even begun yet and I hate it and I want it to be better and yet it's not even a thing yet. I think the problem is sometimes we're so hard on ourselves instead of just having fun making something we're really passionate about that will help push out feelings that we want to express to the player. Just take your time and have fun and also don't hate your old creations honestly be proud of where you started and where you are now
That's true, I started my project as a very newbie at game development 8 months ago, you can see how it's going on my channel, you need to start making, perfect it at the end
It's like sculpting a perfect pot but in order to do it you have to fuck up like 20 times making the pot and then finally when you make the pot then you can add things into the pot. Wow that really does sum it up. Video game design is just making a pot and cooking perfect soup in it.
Not to mention, you making it perfect right away, means you put restrictions on everything else in the game and affects what you can and can't do in the future. So leaving things unfinished, unperfected, leaves you more flexibility in what you are doing. Only start perfecting once you have all core features made in some form and then tighten and polish it. Also, stop putting features in that don't enhance the core gameplay you want to deliver. If you can't find a good reason to add something into your game, don't add it in. It's very likely just a waste of time.
I hope this vid gets huge cause every single game dev needs to see this on their very first day. I feel like making multiple, small bad games is the only way to develop one the most important skills, seeing the game as a whole.
Yes. When i initially released “Animal Friends Adventure” i had hated it so much by them. Steam showed 2000+ hours of coding, testing, crying. I had quit my day job and buried myself in the office for 10 months of nothing but that game. Then another 2 years updating and localizing to different languages. It was a project of passion and learning. Now i’m working on another game, an RPG that’s gone through so many iterations. I’m stuck on dungeon crawl vs semi open world. Topdown vs 3rd person.
@@SoulEngineDev short answer: Yes. while i am not employed in the game industry, what I learned in C#, Python and AI development got me a career in Machine Learning. I still have lots of free time to continue my dreams to make games. I don’t see learning skills as a waste.
I had a huge existential crisis at the beginning of August, I went through this case in the video, I was hating my project because I didn't know what to do anymore and it seemed so basic... I sat down and wrote down everything that was missing, I played for 2 hours to identify things that I could change, and it worked, now I have a list of things to do. I keep a monthly changelog to keep me motivated too, I've been on this project for 8 months and I intend to launch it in 2026, it will be my entry as a game dev, and I want people to have the experience I want to pass on to its highest point.
there was one game that i hated because not only because of perfection but because i couldn't think of the coding very well, which is bob the blob, cause it is my first go of making my first actual game, i've ended struggling looking for tutorials after tutorials, but it's also me being a one man band wanting to learn everything as solo developer. just dang. like don't get me wrong i've always put the effort in to make new levels or the required mechanics for the game but you don't have that kind of fun when making it, and becomes a struggle to to get back in, then i go of making another project that are smaller and simpler. but yeah i think it comes time down to looking after yourself and your well being, and taking the time to have fun playing games that made you want to be a game developer.
thank you for your feedback. im making my first major project now and sometimes i get very frustrade how things are looking bad and those details that drives me crazy... ill stop caring that much for them from now on. i think that we must first make our games comes to reallity so then we start making them precise, prettier or whatever we want.
My writing teacher always makes sure to tell me and my classmates like every other week to *not* edit our works as we go. It’s a quick way to get burnt out and overwhelmed and, like you said, edits and fixes should only be done when the story is finished.
I totally get that, I actually had to start looking at them differently, and started looking at them as more of assignments, which allowed me to detach myself from them more. That sounds counterintuitive, but this really helped me to worry less about all the details, and just helped me get good a releasing content. It’s tough, But you got this! Thank you for being here!
Great video!! First project can be really hard as you can get stuck with something not knowing how to make it or you don't have clearly an idea of your game, but the best for me in that cases is to learn what you need when making the project and define your game idea and try to not change it during development
Totally get what you mean! It can be such a mess if you don’t have a plan. Just gotta keep it simple and stick to the game idea! Thank you for being here!
Okay! I wanna hear all about the games that gave you guys the most trouble! What about them tripped you up, what did you learn from them, and how have you moved forward? Can't wait to hear from you guys!
There is a problem that was much less like 10-15 years ago: there are just so many other Indy games out. Literally thousands. So while perfection should not be the goal, the game must still stand out from the crowd. Perfection in some area (mostly graphics, or a novel mechanic) can just do that. If the game appears lame or has been done 100 times similarly, it will just go under quickly.
Life is very complex - it's rarely just one thing or the other -... that said, this video I think hits the major points that "Perfect is the enemy of good" really well. I think it's a complicate thing though, and the realities take some effort to explain. My hot take is: there are three perspectives on working too hard on your games... 1) you're a perfectionist and getting bogged down 2) you're unhappy with the game (or more likely unhappy with you) so you have to add more and more and more 3) you're doing development of your game wrong by "finding the fun" by winging it inside the codebase for the shipped game For 1, this was well covered in this video really well. SOMETIMES it's okay to just let things not be perfect. Solution is to get outside of your comfort zone, do some game jams where perfection is not an option. Learn that it's going to be okay if it's not perfect, if the strive for perfection is lowering your productivity and killing your ability to ship. That said however, I think... it could be a little bit of a problem to rely on this, as I don't think that you should take a gamejam game and run with it into prod - but I'll cover that more in 3 below. For 2, this is something that every creative struggles with, and it's one of two things: you either have a garbage game, or you're not in the right headspace to enjoy it. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO DISTINGUISH as a developer or creative, hence why you need playtesters and independent feedback (or we wouldn't need those). This video is from a writer (found in my studies to improve my game narratives) /watch?v=uL0atQFZzL8&t=454s BUT it's something all creative types struggle with - that we can't separate the constant stress of development from the product itself... it will ALWAYS be a cruddy garbage game TO US WHILE WE ARE WORKING ON IT, and more so if in addition to the hell of development (that some of us masochists enjoy). That's just the world we live in and how it works... I've been in the games industry for multiple decades in AAA and indie... that's just how it works - it always feels like you're a failure and that you made hot garbage that should have been better.... So in games, what happens is, we have something great, but we think it's garbage (likely due to being worn out from the act of creation, and not actually having a bad game), so we just piling more and more on top, because "just that one new feature" will turn it magically into a good game... but it's important to get that feedback to see if what you have is actually good or not, as adding new features also does not mean that the game is actually better... might have taken something really special (that people really really like) and bloated it with convolution needlessly - ruining it. Getting your head on straight while engaging a creative product is really important: Make sure you are happy when developing and that you take the breaks you need to be a healthy individual. For 3, In my youth, I thought this is what the best game developers did... you just noodle around and see where the game takes you... you don't plan anything because you might skip past something amazing if you do. I can tell you - I was wrong. If you are trying to 'find the fun' in a codebase for a game that you intend on shipping: you're not making games right; You will get locked into multi-year long development cycles which actually go like: "I think it would be better if we tried X", "X takes a tremendous amount of work because of technical debt", "X is implemented... but isn't great... " and you repeat that over and over again, until you have a half baked buggy game after 5-10 years that never ships. The solution I found to mitigate this type of development hell is: Never start making the game until you have: 1) all the features in standalone prototypes (use prototypes, aka single purpose projects, to test new features and toss out the duds), and 2) a vertical slice with all the prototypes working together and see if they actually work. If you know EXACTLY what you're going to be building at the start (after ~6 months of noodling around quickly belting out prototypes once every couple of days or at most a couple of weeks then having a vertical slice you're sold on making into a full game) then actual development of the game will go soooooo smoothly. Like the old saying goes: "Failing to plan, is planning to fail"... best part is you learn all the potential pitfalls before you start and you can know where optimizations could and should happen from day 1. The stress of making one off prototypes is almost nothing and really enjoyable... zero technical debt... and when you lay down the foundation in the actual codebase for the game, it isn't just making it up as you go and instead you'll have a really great understanding of what needs to be where and why. You can cleanly and coherently do 'tool driven development' where the tools for designers are build into the foundations of the game making the 'design' part of the game go super smoothly and fun and performant (in contrast to constantly maintaining and adding tools and features because 'it would be cool if X was in it' and so on... never deal with that, and just 'feature lock' tell the designers to work with what they got, and the tools are exactly what the tools are going to be)... I've used this method to great success and it's where I have had the most fun developing games and ship them the quickest with the least amount of frustration and anguish. Oh also prototypes means you get feedback from day 1... have people try them and get that feedback early... that helps with 2 above... So... it's a large and complicated subject... Hope that wall of text helps with engagement scores :p good video dude and looking forward to the next one
Thanks, I needed to hear this. I've been getting bogged by trying to get my prototype perfect, but I'm also lacking time due to applying for jobs and other things that are keeping me busy. I need to just get my prototype working and move forward.
Super helpful video! Noticed I was doing this recently but then when I went to play some games I liked in a similar genre I noticed that things I'd waste ages on trying to perfect were kept simple and nicely working in those games I like. So that made me realise sometimes it just needs to smoothly work, not be perfect.
I can give you a persepective from a Uni student. It's our first major group project. All lecturers/tutors made a huge point to get students focusing on the prototype and level layout + systems. Yet being one of the only groups that decided to tackle a 3D game in unity and needing to sort of write the logic completely from scratch.... when we had our first playtest a lot of people really criticized the lack of feedback and visual cues. I think that was the point I realised when it comes to 3D vs 2D for some reason people are just more critical. given the 5 week period of working on it I think I spent 3-4 weeks just honing the how the player character moved and provided feedback, camera and respawn to getting it look right, as well as how abilities appeared, selected etc and almost became a detriment to the goal of the project which is funny enough is meant to be about level design.
