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TIGSource ForumsPlayerGeneralNewbies: If you don't finish a game that's OK
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Author Topic: Newbies: If you don't finish a game that's OK  (Read 2438 times)
vikepic
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« on: October 09, 2018, 10:53:59 PM »

I find that it is no no way a good thing to force you to finish your games if you are just starting out.

1. If you do games for fun, forcing you to finish a game is going to suck the fun out of it. Therefore, you'll quit making games altogether.

2. A game can never be truly finished. It will always fall short of your expectations, and striving to achieve perfection will only alienate you more of your art and your game.

3. If a game is worthy of your time to finish it, yo will do it. If one of your ten projects obsesses you to the point where you want to really polish it up, it will happen, no matter what.

4. Not finishing games helps you understand yourself a lot more. What if you were meant to create cute visual novels and instead you're wasting away programming a lame first person shooter in Unreal because someone on the internet said to you that to be a Game Developer you must learn to program un C++ and finish all your games?

5. Usually, people who give this advice have not finished thousands of games. They offer this advice because they are in a stage of craftmanship where they feel comfortable enough with their skills to actually predict wether a game is feasible to finish, if they'll enjoy the process of doing it and if it wether it will have a warm reception in the community they are targeting or not. You can't expect the same out of somebody who's only experience is the Roll-a-Ball tutorial for Unity.

What do you guys think? Obviously, What i said does not apply if you make games for a living. You have to eat, after all.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2018, 12:26:58 AM by vikepic » Logged

litHermit
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« Reply #1 on: October 09, 2018, 11:35:35 PM »

Well said, but like most advice it really depends on the person, their personality and their goals.

I'm with you though. When acquiring a new skill, I find it way more valuable to just play around and leave projects to die guilt-free that I lost interest in them. But I don't like too much hard-boiled structure in my creative pursuits anyway, it stifles me.
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Cobralad
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« Reply #2 on: October 10, 2018, 12:28:53 AM »

have you ever shipped something?
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« Reply #3 on: October 10, 2018, 02:15:05 AM »

Disagree. Learning how to see projects through to the end is one of the most important things in any creative field.
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vikepic
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« Reply #4 on: October 10, 2018, 02:36:39 AM »

Disagree. Learning how to see projects through to the end is one of the most important things in any creative field.

Yes, i too think it is very important. But above all other things, having fun and experimenting i think is what keeps the community charming and active.

Also, i think is healthier and more effective in the long run to only finish the games you feel like finishing.

I think that starting ten projects and finishing none may be a more effective learning experience than finishing a doom clone you didn't even want to start on the first place.
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Cobralad
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« Reply #5 on: October 10, 2018, 02:41:23 AM »

or you can just end up with harddrive full of useless stuff and no job because you did not aquire the skill of critical decision making and actually interacting with end user feedback.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2018, 04:12:41 AM by Cobralad » Logged
NowSayPillow
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« Reply #6 on: October 10, 2018, 03:15:55 AM »

Disagree. Learning how to see projects through to the end is one of the most important things in any creative field.

Yes, i too think it is very important. But above all other things, having fun and experimenting i think is what keeps the community charming and active.

Also, i think is healthier and more effective in the long run to only finish the games you feel like finishing.

I think that starting ten projects and finishing none may be a more effective learning experience than finishing a doom clone you didn't even want to start on the first place.

Gonna have to disagree with you here, I think I've learned more forcing myself to try finish my game than I ever would have learned starting 100 projects and not seeing them through.
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litHermit
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« Reply #7 on: October 10, 2018, 03:28:06 AM »

Disagree. Learning how to see projects through to the end is one of the most important things in any creative field.
As is knowing when to drop/end something and stop beating your head against a wall that's obviously not going down.

or you can just end up with hardware of useless stuff and no job because you did not aquire the skill of critical decision making and actually interacting with end user feedback.

Or instead of seeking external validation/criticism prematurely you figure it out on your own "hey this thing is crap, but these pieces are well done, overall it's not worth salvaging" and move to a greener pasture.

Obviously never settling for anything and never finishing a project leads nowhere in the long run. Things aren't black and white, there's merit to both sides. It's only important to understand the probable outcome of an approach and live with the consequences.

Hey if you want to create for the sake of creating, carefree and not obsess over a finished product - why not. Sometimes it's all about the journey. "Art's never finished (anyway), only abandoned".

If you want to go commercial though, you have to buckle up and sweat.
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vikepic
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« Reply #8 on: October 10, 2018, 04:20:21 AM »

Gonna have to disagree with you here, I think I've learned more forcing myself to try finish my game than I ever would have learned starting 100 projects and not seeing them through.

I'm not really advocating for not finishing any project.

I am only saying that project completion should not be the main effort of creatives making videogames for fun.

It's obvious that there are some things that you'll only learn if you actually finish a game but, let me ask you one question: how many projects did you have to abandon before stumbling upon the one that motivated you enough to finish it? You cannot deny that part of the insight that you gained from actually finishing a project also comes from experimenting until you started building a project worthy of your time.

I am only saying that the current focus on "finishing the game at any cost, if not you're losing your time" only works if you are developing a commercial game with deadlines and stuff. I think is detrimental for newcomers to aspire to finish everything they start.

Unfinished games are beautiful! And rather than teaching you mainly about the nitty gritty technicalities and project management that finishing a game might give you, it teaches you about yourself, about what you're comfortable doing and what can you make on your own.
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« Reply #9 on: October 10, 2018, 08:15:05 AM »

I feel like telling people to give up their project might be a bit harsh on top of preventing them from learning from their mistake. Maybe a better piece of advice would be "don’t be afraid of downscaling". Sometimes a project’s too ambitious to realistically finish, but by re-evaluating what it should be and working towards a more attainable goal you learn more about development than you would have if you had canned it.

Plus you have something to show for it at the end of the day as opposed to a project file rotting on your hard drive.
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« Reply #10 on: October 10, 2018, 08:25:30 AM »

Plus you have something to show for it at the end of the day as opposed to a project file rotting on your hard drive.

I have piles and piles of unfinished projects and even though they have cool things in them or some great tech I've written, they ultimately all feel pointless and a waste of time and are largely forgotten.  The projects that have given me the most satisfaction and continue to give me drive to do other projects are the ones I completed, even if they didn't turn out brilliant or I cut features and rushed them at the end to get them finished.  Trust me that in the long run you'll feel much better about that one imperfect but finished project than the three sexy new projects you could have started and abandonned in the time it took to finish that one.
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vikepic
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« Reply #11 on: October 10, 2018, 09:48:48 AM »

I have piles and piles of unfinished projects and even though they have cool things in them or some great tech I've written, they ultimately all feel pointless and a waste of time and are largely forgotten.  The projects that have given me the most satisfaction and continue to give me drive to do other projects are the ones I completed, even if they didn't turn out brilliant or I cut features and rushed them at the end to get them finished.  Trust me that in the long run you'll feel much better about that one imperfect but finished project than the three sexy new projects you could have started and abandonned in the time it took to finish that one.

I too have piles of unfinished stuff, and piles of finished games too. For me, it is more about the journey. About being excitedly thinking about going back to your game when you get home, and swapping projects whenever I feel like I could be doing something more valuable.

Plus you have something to show for it at the end of the day as opposed to a project file rotting on your hard drive.

If you approach your games in a more modular way, you still can show stuff at the end of the day. Especially if you follow agile directives, you can always show something to someone, if that sails your ship.

For example, I'm creating a procedurally generated game about trading. The map creator is a completely separated module and I can run it separately from the game and boast about >Smiley
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« Reply #12 on: October 10, 2018, 10:10:29 AM »

I'm not really advocating for not finishing any project.

Titling the thread "don't finish your games" sure makes it look that way.

Finishing a game for the first time when I was 18 probably taught me more about game development than the prior lifetime of development experience up to that point. It's an incredibly important thing to do in order to gain perspective. Not every project is suitable for finishing, but it's crucial to at least finish *a project* sometime if you really want to understand what it means to be a game developer.

A common bit of advice I used to hear was for beginners to pick a project of a much, much smaller scope than they think is appropriate for the first thing they'll finish. It's an extremely common pattern for beginners to choose a first project far beyond the scope of what they'd be capable of finishing. Finishing a project reveals just how much more work everything ends up being than what it looks like it will be in the planning and early development stages. Once you've gained that perspective from finishing something small, you have more of an ability to gauge whether something larger is feasible to finish or not.
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« Reply #13 on: October 10, 2018, 11:03:34 AM »

Newbies don't finish the tutorial game like "click the clown" and "push the ball". But go finish a tiny game made by yourself with a white piece of paper.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2018, 01:13:53 PM by woodsmoke » Logged

Schoq
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« Reply #14 on: October 10, 2018, 12:28:48 PM »

it was a ploy to reduce competition in the field all along
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« Reply #15 on: October 10, 2018, 12:36:58 PM »

Alternatively, keep start working on new, infinitely ambitious, projects.
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homeTIGSourceitch.io
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« Reply #16 on: October 10, 2018, 10:39:04 PM »

ok, i won't
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vikepic
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« Reply #17 on: October 11, 2018, 12:17:30 AM »

I'm not really advocating for not finishing any project.
Titling the thread "don't finish your games" sure makes it look that way.

Changed the title because it was misleading.

I feel like telling people to give up their project might be a bit harsh on top of preventing them from learning from their mistake.

I find it equally harsh, if not more, to tell people to finish their games no matter what.

Maybe a better piece of advice would be "don’t be afraid of downscaling". Sometimes a project’s too ambitious to realistically finish, but by re-evaluating what it should be and working towards a more attainable goal you learn more about development than you would have if you had canned it.

Very good advice too. But it's equally as valid to say "don't be afraid of not finishing your games". After all, why bother bringing a game you don't really like making up to a "shippable" state when you could be experimenting with other genres/engines/programming languages/artstyles?

At the end of the day, there's no scoreboard with the amount of games you've finished, but the gamedev community acts like there is.
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Cobralad
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« Reply #18 on: October 11, 2018, 01:28:27 AM »

At the end of the day, there's no scoreboard with the amount of games you've finished, but the gamedev community acts like there is.
There is actually a scoreboard thats measured in years you stay in your parents house with no income.
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litHermit
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« Reply #19 on: October 11, 2018, 05:02:59 AM »

There is actually a scoreboard thats measured in years you stay in your parents house with no income.
not everyone lives your cynical existence, there's plenty of gamedev beginners doing this as a side hobby
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