Watching Tim’s GDC speech on failure got me thinking. A while ago someone asked me to make my game with them. Of course I said “Hell Yes!”. No, wait, I said “Nah, thank you.”, for numerous reasons, chief of which was probably that I had no idea what I was supposed to do. (Let’s disregard for a moment that the outlook of human interaction wasn’t what actually terrified me most.)
What can I contribute, if I can’t program, draw, compose, or write? All I could do is tell people about the things in my head and hope that they are somehow willing and able to create them for me. That makes me feel kinda useless.
The truth is that the number of people who can be productive without directly creating tangible output – be it art, code, writing, music, whatever – is tiny, and they generally need a whole career worth of connections to back them up on top of that. If you really want to make games, it’s at the least unwise to not practice prototyping something.
this doesn’t mean “you have to learn to code” but it might mean that you eventually end up half-learning if your chosen prototyping medium/method keeps circling around that.
Everybody has ideas but they are not all equally good. If you think about a certain thing exhaustively, with curiosity and dedication, your ideas about it are likely different from those of people who haven’t and people who have but have a different background. Having complex, detailed ideas about any subject is inherently valuable. Simply talking to other people -irl or not-; sharing a nuanced appreciation of something, that’s also inherently valuable.
I guess the way it goes is you get tired of just having ideas and start looking for ways of turning them into something tangible. Or your ideas are so different from what everyone else is making that you figure it’s on you to prove them right. Making is a categorically different process than thinking about. So yeah, if you want to make stuff, you’re gonna have to learn a bunch more stuff, and that’s okay.
if it helps any, I never considered myself a “programmer” or “writer” or “artist” or “musician”, it was just something I did in the pursuit of the VIDCON DESIGNER MASTERY and eventually I ended up being considered by other people a “programmer” and a “musician” somehow and I still can’t program really
it’s actually pretty fun to learn how to use tools though!
You’ll learn a lot just looking up techniques to accomplish your limited goals, from falling flat on your face.
If you have fun, keep doing it! If you want to get better at it, begin a process of self-examination and seeking out knowledge (like GDC talks).
90% of gamemaking is gruntwork; you figure out a solution in ten minutes and then apply it over the next ten hours. Hooking up audio files to animations to characters to trigger events is nearly brainless but a huge, huge part of making games; you don’t get good at that by learning to program but by making games.
These rightists falling facefirst into the capitalist system they claim to love and failing miserably and being bailed out by the state they claim to hate never gets old
sometimes i wonder if i got the skills necessary to work on games in exchange for the motivation to want to
this is probably outside stressors talking and not a good motivational post
i want to say it was emerging from social and dating chrysali that got me off the track but in reality it was probably a years-long erosion of my confidence and excitement a while before that
most of my sapped vidcon energy goes to tabletop campaigns at this point instead i guess; before that it was the ARG. maybe i only really care about games as vehicles for collaboration and social interaction at this point? i could write a pretentious longpost about how singleplayer games are a relatively modern corruption of that that’s inadvertantly responsible for a lot of the subculture’s terribadness but lol
Trust me, you’re easily empathetic and smart enough to do very well in the world of people who get paid money to call themselves game designers (I wouldn’t spend so much time here if I could get conversation as deep and layered amongst the 30+ designers I work with). Makin’ it as an indie is harder because you need to cultivate a fanbase yourself, but who’s the blood queen around here anyway?
i have a huge backlog of stuff i’m genuinely interested in but i have played four(?) singleplayer games for more than like a couple hours since starting college and one of them (probability 0) i had been playing for years before that and stopped a couple months in, the second was undertale and the rest were obsessive-compulsively completioning dungeon crawlers against my better judgement so uhhh yeah
i do think sometimes about that whole thing with games being primarily a social event for most of human history and Space War and Pong being two-player and even single-player arcade games being a thing you’d play drunk in arcades with your friends in this Ur Before-Time when i was not yet alive and that the Modern Vidcon Experience being about holing up for hours alone being kind of a perversion with a lot of artistic potential but even more skeeviness potential
these thoughts are not fully formed and are probably super-cynical even for a chronically depressed haley but i mean basically i’ve gone from vidcons -> ARGs -> tabletop games -> looking at designing interactive art installations (which i’m basically already paid to do) and each time i’ve felt better about what it is that i’m bringing into this big gay earth
It’s different, for sure, but I don’t see what’s perverse about it. Literature is a mostly personal and solitary experience and it rules (even though stories are an originally oral tradition). Art of the staring-at-alone-in-the-dark kind is also an act of communication and community and love among humans, it’s not like banging your head against a brick wall or something.
studying things and determining ways of applying their methodology is useful
it’s true that you don’t need to be good at anything to make a game. but you probably need to be good at a lot of things to make the games you have as ideas in your head
which is a problem of approach, not of the ideas themselves; 90% of gamedev is knowing and understanding your limitations.
