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[Gagege]

...the games that I'm interested in making are way above my current ability to program/draw/compose/design.

Discuss/Sympathise.

[moi]

You don't want to learn?

[RCIX]

I ddefinitely feel your pain. The main game i want to make is an RTS but i haven't anywhere near the skills to do so. That's why i'm starting with simpler ideas.

I'd think about what sort of games that are fun for you (shmups? strategy games? adventures? ...), then pick the simplest genre and build a small game in that genre with some innovative fun mechanic.

[Landshark RAWR]

I have a few game ideas im trying to keep simple enough that I could possibly actually do them. I have pretty terrible programming skills to begin with anyways. I would probably consider the fairly generic tower I am making with the SC2 editor my first real game project (Still probably dosnt count), but I hope that lets me get a handle enough for something bigger I have in mind.

[deathtotheweird]

...the games that I'm interested in making are way above my current ability to program/draw/compose/design.

Discuss/Sympathise.

What's there to discuss? Sounds like laziness to me.

Looking through your posts I see you are starting off with C++. Why is that? Why not do use something easier? If your goal is to make games, give Construct/MMF2/GM/Unity a try. In 5 minutes in any of these programs you can build something that would take a beginner many months to do in C++.

[Montoli]

...the games that I'm interested in making are way above my current ability to program/draw/compose/design.

Discuss/Sympathise.

Cool!  happens to everyone, I think.

So any thoughts on what you'll make while you wait for your abilities to catch up to your aspirations?

[man of doom]

Perhaps you could boil down your complex ideas into something simpler, and make that, gaining you experience in making what sort of thing you want to make and helping you work towards it.

Also as mentioned by others, use a game making program or something if you want to make the work easier to handle.

[J. R. Hill]

Not interesting to make or not interesting to play?

At least for me it seems like the two are somewhat opposed, the games I really like to play would be really boring to program, do the art for, compose the calming music for, etc, and the games I'd really like to program would be really boring for me to play lol.

So basically I try to pick something that's somewhere in the middle.  It's important for me to find something I can both enjoy making and playing because anything you make you're going to have to play a million times over, haha.

But yeah, start small and start immediately.  You reap what you sow, but if you don't sow you don't reap anything lol.

[Pishtaco]

Make a small easy game (Tetris or whatever) and then see if you can incorporate some of the mechanics from the games you want to make into it.

[Nix]

After reading http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/08/visualizing-creative-process.html I got to thinking how you could use some of Danc's design processes to break free from this "genre" problem in which people feel constrained to create games in well-established genres because they "will be more fun to make/play". I think you can use genres as a catalyst to develop your ideas without letting them limit your creative process. When you sit down and think, "I want to make this super awesome RTS," what is it that makes your RTS idea unique and better or different than what is already out there? Then take this "uniqueness" and boil it down to its "essence", start again from the beginning of the design process (i.e. without a genre to structure your ideas) and think about how you can get the player to experience this "essence" in the simplest way possible. Simple != boring. Some of my favorite games are ridiculously simple. And if the simple you think of is too simple? Then you have a nice idea that is likely more robust than your original (to use Danc's brilliant terminology) and will give you a solid foundation on which to build a unique game. Anyway, take a look at the article and my rampant babbling might make a bit more sense...

[Gagege]

Thanks for all the inspiration (and kicks in the pants).
There is definitely some laziness involved.
As to why I'm not using Game Maker or AGS or something, I love writing C++ code and I'm a little scared to try Game Maker because I know there'll be a learning curve. I've already gotten over the initial C++/SDL curve; so that's why I stick with it. Plus, for me it's less of a programming skills problem than a game design skills problem. Game design is the most interesting part and the hardest part for some reason.
I guess there's no other way to learn it though.

Time to get back to work.
Thanks again!

[tesselode]

Maybe it would help you to practice making games by taking some simple genres, and making simple games out of them with one special element or mechanic. Then you can work your way up!

[voidSkipper]

I ddefinitely feel your pain. The main game i want to make is an RTS but i haven't anywhere near the skills to do so. That's why i'm starting with simpler ideas.

You can start small without resorting to my-first-tetris, y'know?

Make an RTS with one unit, a top view map, some jukespots and a simple combat mechanic.

You can keep adding to that as you go and you might eventually get the RTS you want!

[moonmagic]

I ddefinitely feel your pain. The main game i want to make is an RTS but i haven't anywhere near the skills to do so. That's why i'm starting with simpler ideas.

You can start small without resorting to my-first-tetris, y'know?

Make an RTS with one unit, a top view map, some jukespots and a simple combat mechanic.

You can keep adding to that as you go and you might eventually get the RTS you want!

This. My first game ideas were so ridiculous and baroque that I'm not sure they'll ever get made, even thought I consider them to be projects "on hold."

Honestly, I've found the TIG competitions to be immensely helpful in focusing me on boiling a game concept down to that one idea that I want to try. It helps me get started to have the initial framework for having-the-idea out of the way, and I often start making a game I wouldn't have decided to make otherwise.

[iffi]

I ddefinitely feel your pain. The main game i want to make is an RTS but i haven't anywhere near the skills to do so. That's why i'm starting with simpler ideas.

You can start small without resorting to my-first-tetris, y'know?

Make an RTS with one unit, a top view map, some jukespots and a simple combat mechanic.

You can keep adding to that as you go and you might eventually get the RTS you want!

This reminds me of the various times I try to make a small program but end up spending a lot more time adding random cool features I want to implement. It's a whole lot of fun seeing your simple program grow more and more.

That said, I also face the issue of not being able to create any of the games I actually want to make (the games I want to make the most as of now are an FPS and a bullet hell shmup, both of which are out of my current ability, especially the FPS). It's probably the main reason I haven't completed anything in the past year and a half. That's why I'm learning Unity, so I can make 3D games without the trouble of learning 3D programming (I plan on learning that later), and meanwhile I'm continuing to program in Java and learning C++. It's slow progress, but I'll get there eventually.

[voidSkipper]

A bullet hell SHMUP isn't actually as hard as you might think. Once you have the basic engine sorted and a way of scripting your bullet/enemy patterns, the rest is just down to your creativity.

[Melly]

Don't wanna make simple games? Go ahead and make complex ones.

Fail miserably.

Get up.

Try again.

Fail less miserably.

Eventually you'll get there. Just get to work.

[moi]

Start an existentialist thread on Tigsource. That's what they all do.

[Alistair Aitcheson]

Don't wanna make simple games? Go ahead and make complex ones.

Fail miserably.

Get up.

Try again.

Fail less miserably.

Eventually you'll get there. Just get to work.

Agree 100%.

You never achieve anything without pushing yourself beyond your limits. If you make something you know you can make then you're not going to learn nearly as much. If you push yourself to achieve something great you'll gain a lot of great skills. If you make something you already know you can do then you'll marginally improve skills you already have.

I say go for it, make the game you want to make. You'll learn that nothing is as scary as it seems at first. So you want to make an RTS? What makes an RTS more complicated than, say Tetris? Is it because there's a lot of unit types and variables like that? Those are just one extension of the same concept, so once you've made one working unit you can make them all. And in doing so you'll probably learn that the fact that all these units are essentially the same is important for your program. I.e. they can all be derived from the same object-oriented design. You'd never have learnt how to do that if you never made something that needed it.

Fundamentally, there's no reason an RTS is more complicated than Tetris anyway.

What about drawing all these jeeps and spaceship units? Well, you'll never learn how to make good animated jeep sprites unless you go out there and make them for a game. You could sketch all the jeeps you want, but that'll never help you actually create an animated image, let alone one that you can actually use in a game. I know a lot of very talented artists who can't make a decent animation for a game. Why? Because they don't know what it needs to be like to work in a game. You could spend ages trying to "learn the skills" you need to create your dream game, but the only way to actually gain these skills is to make the game.

So make the game you want to make. It will probably be rubbish. But you'll learn so much from making that rubbish game that you'll be able to alleviate those problems when you make the sequel. Because you made that first rubbish game, you'll know what you need to do to make one that's infinitely better. But without that first failure, you'd never have learned what you actually needed to do to execute the project, let alone the necessary skills. You'll probably realise that that one idea you've been holding on a pedestal isn't actually that great after all, and you'll have even better ideas.

Go and make your big dream game. Do it now! Because if you don't jump in and do it now then you never will.

This video always speaks to me in that respect. I am always so vulnerable to what this guy is talking about!
http://lifehacker.com/5142776/ze-frank-on-executing-ideas-vs-brain-crack

[RCIX]

I ddefinitely feel your pain. The main game i want to make is an RTS but i haven't anywhere near the skills to do so. That's why i'm starting with simpler ideas.

You can start small without resorting to my-first-tetris, y'know?

Make an RTS with one unit, a top view map, some jukespots and a simple combat mechanic.

You can keep adding to that as you go and you might eventually get the RTS you want!

That... might not actually be a bad idea! The thing is, i eventually will want several specific mechanics, as well as quite a lot of flexibility, which means that even the 1 topdown unit thing will need a metric tonne of code to be expandable in the direction i want.