It would be interesting to know what you all think it is that let people down when it comes to unfinished game projects.
Im sure alot of us have fallen into this awful feeling bottomless hole! Well I sure have.
My initial ideas are:
lack of determination - given up, cant go on, stuck on something
---------------------------------- seek help, google alot of stuff, or learn more before next attempt
loss of passion - shown themselves they can do it, and lose interest
-------------------------- pretend that its challenging and interesting
-------------------------- pretend theres someone watching you, this is super effective
Normally some aspect of real life getting in the way. I guess some people just don’t get the amount of work that goes into the most basic of games. Then they hit that ‘reality’, give up because:
It’s to hard, too much work, not enough free time, are working on there real ‘job’ for 40-60 hours, etc…
Plus, I guess the bigger the development team. The more likely the project might go in a direction that one of the people doesn’t like and then they leave. Which can lead directly to the downfall of the project.
Making games takes a lot more time and skill than most people think.
One of the big reasons why I see a lot of projects fail is because the coders are not skilled enough to actually make a good game, and can take a long time to even get to the point where sprites can be rendered to the screen. That can make the artists disinterested with the project quickly even if they’ve been spending the intervening time working on concept art. In our case, even when you have a good programmer, they might be stuck rewriting the core of the engine over and over again because he keeps on thinking of better ways of doing it.
When it comes to finding people to work on a game project, I’ve found plenty of artists, and aside from the awesome programmer that I already know I’ve only found one other, and I haven’t found another musician that can replace me. It’s really a barrier of entry problem to make games at all and especially in a timely manner. You need a lot of skill and experience to become a programmer that’s good enough to make a game. If you don’t have that then the project has nothing, no matter how great the idea or skilled the art team is.
So why is it that we have everyone we need but no post-prototype quality game yet? Because it takes a lot of time! That and we keep switching around to different platforms that interest us at the time (so many changing trends so we’ve decided to just buckle down and make one).
The only thing we’ve managed to finish is this interactive exhibit called Touch the Table, which I think is way cooler than a video game. We where able to finish it with about a months worth of coding and a few months worth of design and construction work. The funny thing is that we actually wanted to create games with it, but we ran short of time so it’s just visualizations that people control with their hands.
My reason is just pure loss of interest. Its not that I can’ finish my projects, because I’ve done jsut about everything I would need to in order to finish, but I tend to lose interest in everything I do. For example out of the countless games I’ve played and own I’ve only actually taken maybe 3 to the complete end of the game. With one I’ve found out that I was actually about 15 min away from the ending…but did that make me go back and finish it? Nope. But this is a personal issue I’ve been aware of for awhile now (bipolar) and its something I try to work at, usually that just means trying to work as fast as I can before I lose interest lol. The upside to this lack of interest in everything is that I have no bias towards learning anything. lol.
I’d have to disagree with that. I was writing games after less than 2 months of programming. But I will state that those things will help you develop your idea into working code alot faster than you would without them
I guess it depends on what type of game you want to make. The first programs I made when learning C++ and TI-BASIC were also games. In fact I can’t recall ever programming anything except games. But they were all very primitive and no one really wanted to play them, except for a Lights Out clone that I made, but that’s because it was based on an already simple and successful game.
Today when I talk about making games I’m talking about at least indie-quality games, things like Armadillo Run, Aquaria, and Audiosurf: games that people will want to download or pay small amounts of money for.
But yeah, if you don’t already have the skills you’ll have to learn as you go, and that can take a long time.
Lack of maturity in project approach and management of resources. approach in that you guys try to do it all, when in fact you need to accomplish a large project in very small steps over a long period of time. Within your point of reference (your life) you achieve awareness (teenage) and walk into a life where much has already been accomplished (parents have career and stable income, you are living in a home, you have a closet full of clothes) and so you think it is all there in other things. In Game, there is none of this. you have to build it all - (analogy to career, home, clothes) - heck, you even have to build the closet to put the clothes in. And that takes time, lots of time, just to build a foundation from which you can grow. Only when you get older do you realize all the work that has gone into what you take for granted, but which does not exist in computer.
hey, i gave up a lot of games before, but now i just fight myself to keep going on the game I’m doing, thats how i got my daxter game up and running,:yes:
I’ve never tried to make a 3D game but I think my “Want to make an open movie” comments apply to making games too. Just read it and substitute “Game” for “Movie”. Most other stuff will apply, especially for collaborative projects.
The only thing ive ever finished is an animation called “the thing,” because i was determined for everyone at school to know that i could do it, by showing it at assembly.
Also, my ragdoll game, which is more of a mini-game.
My current project, Ghost tracker, i have been working on for about a month. With my bitter experiences, i have simply given up on loss of interest, and it really helps me with that mentality. You know that loss of interest is coming, but you bypass that by telling yourself that the next and next and next project will die, and this one is really good idea.
my last game project kind of died when I couldn’t get the character’s motion quite right. Characters in the game engine tend to move in a “physics simulation” kind of way, instead of what you might expect from a platformer.
there always seems to be some kind of technical hurdle in the way too, like a deprecated function in the ge api. It’s just a little more work than I have time for.
In college, people from other areas like education, history, health, etc, usually say that people from Computer Sciences lack social skills and don’t know how to live in the “real” world.
Actually, I think its the opposite. Students from Medicine hide books in the library so that other students can find them. They are really competitive. This is just one example. While in Computer Sciences and other so called “non-social” areas, we have to learn to work with other people and to plan what you’re going to do.
People have a wrong idea that programmers work alone, in a dark room and can do everything by themselves. During college, if we didn’t work in groups, most professors would fail the students, because just as important is knowing the subject (data structures, compilers, whatever), we should know how to work with other people (even if we didn’t like them) and run projects.
The thing is that, kids don’t have access to medical instruments, a kidney and a sick people to try to perform a transplant at home. But they have access to computers, programming languages, manuals, etc. Add to that the idea we get from movies and books that programmers can sit in front of any computer and enhance a low resolution surveillance camera picture to the point where you can see tiny details, and you will get lots of frustrated kids.
@papasmurf: Very true and insightfull comments.
I have to add, having worked on open source projects for five years now. That there is a lot of good that comes out of these failures.
Such as: Blender, Gimp, Eternal Lands, BZflag, etc…
For those of you struggle to maintain interest in your own projects. I say this: A change is as good as a rest.
I’ve wanted to give up countless times when working on END or CellZenith. When that time comes, you need to just walk away and go do something else for a few days, then come back to it. I’ve heard and said this a million times, but if you don’t feel like working on something, it will suffer. I think a lot of people don’t realize HOW much work it really is. For example, I have been working on small feature demos for END. 1 level I did was a warehouse with some breakable stuff in it, nothing special (created it to show our melee ideas). Well I’m a good 3 months into that level and still not finished. Granted I’m doing most of the work myself, but there was no enemies in it, so I don’t have to worry about major projects like AI. (just punching bags and those combo dumby things).
You just have to suck it up, and push on. We have just recently completed CellZenith and it will be released sometime in mid-summer. Once you finish 1 game (even a smaller scale arcade game like CZ) you realize how much your work really pays off and it does make the next project easier to work on.
