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[InVogue]

Kind of inspired by the obstacles thread, but sorry if this is in the wrong sub-forum 

My general stance is to try and salvage a good idea and scale back as much as I can while still retaining the original spirit of what I wanted. Here's an example:

I graduated a game course this year, armed with C++ and OpenGL knowledge but no real portfolio pieces. I'm trying a couple of ideas out for my first real "go" at a full workable game, one is a basic breakout style arcade game that I'm putting on the back-burner for now, and another is a spaceship combat game that I plan to include some complicated damage mechanics in.

I was inspired by Star Trek: Wrath of Khan and the newer Star Trek Enterprise series and I noticed that combat damage to starships was something a lot of games glossed over or barely acknowledged. So I planned on making a game where the player ship has a reactor that can be targeted, relays and components that can blow out due to hits, components and cargo that can be stolen by boarding parties (or even beamed out if the shields drop!) and internal fires and radiation leaks that must be combatted.

Obviously, this is all stuff I'll work on as time goes by, but when I realised I had basically forgotten all the advanced graphics programming stuff I had learned, I suddenly found myself trying to shoehorn my fancy-shmancy ideas into a more limited setting, such as making it strictly 2D, sprite based etc.

Not only that, but trying to fit all the above damage mechanics into the game plan, coming up with classes, combat rules and damage effects suddenly seemed to overwhelm me. I was at a point where I was deciding to ditch the idea and it felt horrible because it was something I really wanted to try.

I'm now working on trying the idea out in Ogre3D, and I feel a lot more confident now that I no longer have to worry about the truly bare-bones graphics engine coding and such like. I've also canned a lot of the more exotic ideas in favour of getting classes, components, equipment and such like designed and then figure out the interactions later, once the stuff I want to work with is already in place.

When some obstacle, such as lack of knowledge or an idea is seemingly too vast for you to try, do you give up and try something else, or do you modify your plan? Do you move onto something you feel more confident about, or try and work around your existing ones?

I can already see a dozen or so obstacles in my path: I have no musical or sound editing skills and no artistic skill so I can anticipate some materials I'll be lacking later when I need to start seeing things in action, but I feel I can conquer them when I arrive at those issues.

How do you cope with obstacles?

[Triplefox]

If I think it will take too long, I don't do it.

If I don't understand it, I do something related and smaller to learn.

Increasingly, it's the first problem, not the second. Regardless of the field or the task.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

When some obstacle, such as lack of knowledge or an idea is seemingly too vast for you to try, do you give up and try something else, or do you modify your plan? Do you move onto something you feel more confident about, or try and work around your existing ones?

i think this is part illusion. it's a mental block rather than a physical block. things are a lot less vast if you take them one step at a time. you might be surprised how fast it goes as long as you keep doing it. everything seems impossible until you've done something like it, then it seems easy. so my answer is that i don't have obstacles in that sense when it comes to game design -- because i've created big complex games before, big complex games don't seem too hard to do anymore. once you do one, the rest are easy.

an analogy can be made with learning a foreign language. when you're first starting out it seems way too much to learn, too hard, so much to remember, etc. but after you learn a second language, you find that learning a third or fourth is far easier than learning the second was.

[Alec S.]

I used to often scale back my ideas quite a bit to make them more manageable.  I was making the games I could make rather than the games I wanted to make.  This changed for me earlier this summer when I started working on larger games, and I learned so much about how to use Game Maker, that I was no longer limited by lack of knowledge.  And anything I didn't know how to do, I now knew how to find out.  I realized I could make the games I wanted to make.  The only major limit now is the amount of time I'm willing to invest in a project.

However, in Flash, I still have the same limitations that I have in Game Maker.  I think the key is to work on something that pushes yourself quite a bit (For me that was switching from making SHMUPs to other genres such as Platformers).

[Ammiddeon]

Hmm, i cannot blame you here, as you told you draw for yourself. But the thing is just that i still cant understand how someone can feel pleasure just copying.
Look at the real orange better and you will understand that if you try you can see the difference and draw it another way than copy.

[FishyBoy]

A team of able men, and a good battering ram.

[ChevyRay]

When some obstacle, such as lack of knowledge or an idea is seemingly too vast for you to try, do you give up and try something else, or do you modify your plan? Do you move onto something you feel more confident about, or try and work around your existing ones?

i think this is part illusion. it's a mental block rather than a physical block. things are a lot less vast if you take them one step at a time. you might be surprised how fast it goes as long as you keep doing it.

Paul is spot on here. At least how I see it, anyways. Breaking things into smaller goals is not only a good way to stay motivated, but a good way to improve the overall quality of a project!

I actually wrote a very detailed article about it.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i hadn't read that article before, it's pretty good. that's also the approach i take towards saturated dreamers, although i don't respect myself to only one thing a day (sometimes i do more). but i always at least do one thing every day, and keep a checklist of things to do. the checklist is rather large (hundreds of items), but i haven't missed a day for the last two months or so.

another thing is don't be afraid of spending 2-3 years on a single game. some games are worth it. iji, cave story, glum buster, and braid all took around 3-5 years of work each, remember? it's not the best idea to *only* do 3-year long games, but the occasional one is great.

[Alehandro]

just fucking smash it. fuck that's obstacle's shit up. bend the obstacle over and fuck it. rape the obstacle. i dont let obstacles get the best of me. i fuck the obstacles. i fuck everything.

[weasello]

For me, it depends on the scale of the problem.

If it's something small, like ... I just can't get a mouseOver to work on one particular object, and I have no idea why... I'll scour my code for typos, I'll rewrite it a few different ways, and do a barrage of testing and debug-tracing and figure the hell out of it. I try to nail problems like that within a few hours, at worst.

But sometimes I'll run into a big problem. The kind of coding puzzle that fills you with dread, not because it's made up of intricate parts - but it's made up of foreign parts. It's as if you are a BASIC programmer and the President rushes up and says if only you can Debug this Assembler program you'll save humanity. Hyperbolically, of course. Maybe it's just dealing with functions or syntax you've never encountered before, but usually it's a new way of thinking. I went through a long period of this when I encountered OOP for the first time, for example.

I hate those problems.

I find I end up trying really hard.. Googling the bejeezus out of things.. and then having to give up and walk away as I've broken more than I started with. I usually leave it for a time (usually a day, sometimes weeks or months if there's a temporary workaround) and come back and tackle it with fresh eyes. Usually on my second try I fix it in a few minutes and proceed to bang my head against the wall. 

Some problems end up being my nemesis - like the Mascot of Evil on your To-Do list. But the feeling of triumph when you finally defeat him is intoxicating.