fluoxetine has done a lot in the last two weeks to kill off my ideation; a lot more than i’d expect, anyway, for a hilariously conservative 10 mg/day combined with the delayed (and limited) effectiveness of SSRIs. impossible to say whether that’s down to the placebo effect or my brain chemistry just needed whatever the hell SSRIs do that badly.
1 Like
so those 4 things:
SPORTS
TVTVTV
RIIIIDGE RACER
Giant Enemy Crab(s)
~~~ remember that one ~~~
it seems such a long, long time ago. Was a great time for gaming ~~~
Kojima-san
Miyamoto-san
Iitagaki-san
Dearly departed Iwata-san
everything in this post but especially this
[quote=“BustedAstromech, post:32, topic:2686, full:true”]If you can collaborate with folks and put out some cool games you’re better off having spent your classes learning literature and math and history; the industry both AAA and indie is woefully under-knowledged about culture that ain’t pop. My years spent bumming around my local community college taking liberal arts courses have served me well.
[/quote]
I remember reading this thread, and yet apparently I never got around to linking this? Essentially,
-a goal or goals
-rules/“mechanics”
-interactivity
-a catch-up feature/recovery from mistakes
-inertia; a finite ending
-surprise/hidden information
-strategy
-“fun”
-""“flavor”""
-fishhooks
Like, I dunno. This list is obviously aimed at mutiplayer games, based on the description of interactivity above, and the posts in this thread pointed out the absurdity of list-making in the first place, but I still find myself thinking about this list a lot.
i did it lol
rereading this thread is making me a little sad because i haven’t made as many steps forward with game dev or making connections as i would’ve liked but i’m probably taking the wrong thing away here given i made this thread a month before i ended up in a psychiatric institution and now the scariest thing in my life is meeting my gf’s parents for dinner tomorrow; background stressors are where they belong, in the background, instead of crushing me at all hours
69th post im hilarious
i worry maybe even more than i used to about the arbitrary and many-kinds-of-awful nature of success under capitalism, both as a larger societal problem but also justifying putting time and mental energy and money into stuff like my rpg.
im finally retaking this class in a couple weeks, along with a couple others i had to complete a medical withdraw from, so maybe this time around i will try harder to get excited about the game dev program and getting involved on campus and meeting Cool People etc idk i sure am still a leftist trans girl going into an environment that uhhh
welllll
something something male engineers gamer-bro-culture etc
i would be more passionate about doing artsier tech stuff but im scared of becoming untouchable in the eyes of the corporate world and i probably don’t have enough energy to split between the two idk idk
Anxiety
2 Likes
about halfway through retaking this class and slowly weighing down my soul with choice lines like
“knowing how to sell things is important. you’ll be selling things your whole life, mainly yourself”
“original ideas aren’t worth anything on their own…everyone in the ‘game industry’ is very creative”
“you shouldn’t be making the game you want to play, you should be making the game lots of people want to play”
“you need to figure out everything that’s going to be in your game before you start working on it and put it in your game design document…” spends 10 minutes googling for a flash version of smb2 to demonstrate how characters have different jump heights and, you know, that’s the kind of thing you want to put in your document
same professor is the only one teaching the next class im required to take in this program (unity) along with like half of my programming classes. nice enough guy but oof
im leading a team of seven people for the semester-long project which is one of very few things keeping this from being a complete waste of time or worse
it’s still really, really depressing though
a lot of those sound like statements that aren’t exactly true, but near enough to serve the primary purpose of knocking out rockstar dreams from students. A big function of an intro game design course (or any art course) should be demystifying it; it’s not special, it’s work; it’s not essential to your nature, now let’s make things.
‘ideas aren’t valuable’ is only less important than ‘keep reducing scope–and do it again’ as a student lesson. On the other hand, design docs are a '90s anachronism that anyone paid for this should really back away from.
sympathy for feeling like the professor is a waste, reminds me why I dropped out of high school
Hopefully you can use the power of a team over the next few months (equivalent to roughly 50-100k in Real World developer labor, if they’re student-competent)
well i mean it’s more like 4.5 people actually committed to putting in a few hours a week for like six or seven weeks but it’s useful experience for me and i guess it looks good on paper or w/e
this dude has something like one degree of separation from my dream job which might be contributing to my frustration but idk every time he tries to say “game development is a lot of work!” he says “dehumanize yourself and face to capitalism” instead
the easiest way to deliver that message to rockstar-types would be to give assignments that are, y’know, actual work and not Fruit Clicker: Revengeance
3 Likes
i definitely need to work on my scope-reduction skills though if THE LEGEND OF THE TOWERFUCKER and its exponentially expanding stupidity are any indication
on the other hand, contrary to every single thing this professor’s said, iterative design is…good
i think i only really have this problem with RPGs since the coolest ones trip all over their own ambition and maximalism
1 Like
I preach it but I’m as bad as anyone on my hobby projects
This gets tougher on a roughly logarithmic scale as team size increases; under 15 you’re probably good with the history of the whiteboard, but at 40+ you have departments that need responsibilities in writing so they can schedule work put upon them by other disciplines, and months in advance. It’s specifically bad but there’s no better way around it (best way: scope games to less than 20 people of work)
He could have said, ‘documentation system’ because some zombie of wikis, email, and task scheduling software are what I’ve always seen and even then my secret desire is to reuse assets so I don’t need to ask FX for help for sekrit cool things
Please force your team to make LEGEND OF TOWERFUCKER HD
2 Likes
maybe the most frustrating thing at the moment other than the lectures being trash garbage is the person in the group who’s super nice but is not as good as they think they are at the thing they originally elected to take on
the person who knows their shit is technically working under them and is being given a lot of very questionable guidance and i feel bad for letting this happen just to avoid risking being a jerk
god but i just want to feel like this semester hasn’t been a massive waste of time
Perfect project for the game dev 2 class next semester
Also one of the biggest problems with the Prof that Haley hasnt really mentioned is that he’s kinda bad at his job ie being a programming teacher? Like the guy teaches up to like second year programming classes iirc and he wrote out all the math for making a sprite face the mouse when the engine has built in functions that let you do the same thing in a two lines. He’s not new to gamemaker either
1 Like
I don’t know if my experience will help, but I’ll share:
My first semester long game class in college (my school was kind of focused on these classes) was only ostensibly about learning how to make a game; the real value came from juggling differently-performing teammates, overscope, and shipping something reasonable on time despite everything.
That first team of five ended up being as one lazy boaster (and ecchi fiend…), an incompetent lead engineer, one crippled by other class loads and available for less than two hours work across the whole semester, and two overachievers. Roles were assigned before anyone understood our capabilities or dedication.
But as weeks rolled on and we kept reassigning work, we started naturally digging unfinished tasks put from where it wasn’t getting done to where it was. When core engine classes went unfinished we worked around them; when due dates came we worked on other bits under the shared excuse – it was for the game.
We shipped and the game was good but the production of it was a fantastic disaster. Luckily as a 1-semester project we had the capability to work around non-performing teammates. Later year-round projects benefited from deeper social webs, mapping skill and interest levels tighter between teams, and support for production/personal friction months-in (literally, 4-hour long 'get everyone on the same page & say everything going u said" meetings under guidance of the teacher known as the ‘team psychiatrist’).
If it feels like more than a typical school group project, more than apathy externalized to few shoulders – probably the best outcome is an interesting disaster of a team, and something tangible at the end. Get one and that’s still not bad for 1/6 of 3.5 months.
3 Likes
Sounds like he used to use the old free game maker lol. You used to have to pay for it to get sprite rotation
It’s really frustrating that they lock exporting executables, shader support, and source control behind the paid version in GM2 but having basic engine functions like that locked… Just why ?
School team projects should just not be a thing. It’s a parody of teamwork that just creates bad habits and bitter feelings. The chaos of throwing some random students together and then not monitoring them individually bears very little resemblance to how stuff plays out in functioning teams in the real world.
1 Like
my master’s program wasn’t much different, the only reason we managed to leave with pretty ok projects was that we were a cohort of like 25 or so and we were all INCREDIBLY enthusiastic about it
1 Like
You’re right in all of my experience except these game classes; I think it’s extremely dependent upon interest in subject matter.
However, my school was atypically focused on these project classes; the first-year group project may not have been seen as a single class but as a dry-run for the much more important year-long projects sophomores and juniors would undertake, shaping expectations.