Making A Game is easy but Making a Good Game is HARD!

Today I have a confession to make to you. It’s not easy it to say, but I think you all need to hear the truth…

I suck…

I am bad at making games.

Man it feels good to get that off my chest.

I’ve been at this for 4 years now and after 2 years of messing around I made my first game and published it on the play store. And it’s pretty average… that’s probably fairly generous.

It’s basically what every new game dev makes, a simple platformer. No real story, or point. Just get to the end of the level to progress to the next. No puzzles or enemies, I wasn’t good enough to put those kinds of things in. But I knew at the core of it, it was what I needed to do. Just make games. It’s what every one says. And I would agree, I’ve gone to university, got a masters degree with a total of 6 years of education and I learn’t more doing my job in real life than I can ever learnt in a classroom. You can learn the theory but if you’re not activley practicing you’re not going to be getting any better. And this translates to almost everything. So even if it’s bad you just gotta keep making games. You need to keep creating games to get better at making games, in my opinion it’s the only way to keep going.

There’s a quote by Radio Presenter Ira Glass that talks about the gap between your taste as a person who consumes media and a creater of that media. In this case games. Most of us get into making games because we love playing games, it’s probably what sparked that passion inside of you but the games you’re making don’t live up to those same standards. So it’s your taste that leads to dissapointment in yourself and it’s maybe why sometimes you feel like giving up, or that it’s not worth persuing. You don’t feel you can live up to those standards. But this is a totally normal thing to go through, it’s what I’m going through, and the only way to start to bridge that gap is to do a lot of work.

Ira Says, “Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.”

At the start of this year around February. I made a game for BrackeysJam. It was just a simple First Person Platformer, collect a thon. Nothing too impressive. But I phoned it in when it comes to the creativity side of things. I’ve made platformer collect a thons before. It’s the first kind of game that most people learn to make. The theme was “it’s not real” and I called my coins “Crypto” and that was how I was fitting my game into the theme. And the development was mostly on the level design as the player controller came from my FPS template (which you can download from my website). Most people thought it that was a pretty lazy move on my part and the rating in that Jam, reflected that. I’ve since hidden that game on itch. And Instead of making a devlog on that game, I made a twenty minute video essay on crypto which also did very poorly. So all round a big L at the start of the year.

I felt as if I was in a bit of spiral at that point. I had reached a point in my game dev journey where my coding skills aren’t really a barrier anymore. That’s not to say I’m an expert or to puff my self up in anyway. I just know enough to do almost any thing I want. And there’s also a big enough community around Game dev, so if I don’t know how to do something, I’m only one video or blog away from finding out.

So now the only barrier is being able to actually make a game. Or as I joked on stream last week, draw the rest of the owl.

The excuse used to be, “if I only, I knew how to code that mechanic, then I would be able to make the great game.” and now it’s “How do I even make a great game?”

So I press to press on. Like I said before, the only way through this gap between what you like and what you can make, is by making more stuff. I joined a knew game jam, this time just going through and cherry picking a theme that inspired me. I landed one with the theme “stronger together”. Which inspired my to make a friend finder game. But this is where I really struck an issue.

I had no issues getting the game up and running, finding friends and taking them to location to win the level.

This is where I ran into trouble though. I couldn’t figure out how to make the game fun and engaging. There was maybe three combinations I could thing of. And three levels isn’t really much fun.

So I gave up.

It sucks and I feel bad about giving up but I just couldn’t crack it.

I couldn’t find the fun.

And I took a bit of a break. It might have been the first time I’ve truly doubted the path I was on. I had always known that in my early days it was going to be hard to make a game. I never thought it would be the design side of game development. I had sort of assumed that once I was good at the technical side of things, the design side would come naturally. I think most gamers assume that because they like games so much designing a game would be easy. You see people comment this kind of thing all the time.

So I spent a bit of time reflecting. I wasn’t sure if my assumptions about what I needed to do were correct. I don’t have any formal education in this field but from other experiences, education isn’t always the answer. Especially for creative things like this. You can’t teach someone how to be creative.

I took a look at some books, watched a few videos. But at the end of the day I came back to the same conclusion that I had when I first started this journey. I need to make more games.

Around 2016-17 I got really into making music. I was determined to write an album. I’ve been playing guitar a lot longer than I’ve been making games and as a part of that two year process I wrote a new song almost every time I was sitting down to play. I was always jamming out something new. And this is because I knew it’s only way to create music. You just take the pressure out of it and see what you come up with. And you do this as much as you can for as long as you can. Then you come back and pick out the best bits and turn them into something more fleshed out. The key aspect of this stage is that It doesn’t have to be good. I’ve got plenty of 30 second riffs sitting on my computer that will never see the light of day but by creating those I also made other bits that I really liked and was able to turn into something much more substantial.

And this is exactly what I think I need to be doing for my game dev development. I need to be constantly trying to make something new, with out the pressure of it having to be good every time.

So for the Next game I decided to take some of this inspiration even further. I took the player controller I had done for the jam I quit. Modified the gameplay to be something a little different. Instead of finding friends, you need to use colors to activate doorways. Something simple that I should be able to make some levels around. And the challenge was, no coding, no features. Just level design. Make a level or two every day until the jam ends. Keep the assets simple and keep the rules of the game simple. And don’t worry if it’s good or not. Just create.
And I’m pretty happy with how things turned out. Even if it’s not the best game, I got valuable experience in designing. The game certainly has it floors, but I succeeded in that challenge.

I think I ended up with 17 levels which is way more than I’ve put in into any other jam.

And that’s what I need to keep doing. Keep creating. Keep growing that game design muscle so that when I’m ready to make something more commercial, it will have a chance of actually being good.

I know that a lot of game dev youtubers don’t always talk about these kinds of challenges. Everyone is talking about making there dream game and building hype for the release. I don’t have anything against people doing this. But I also feel it’s necessary to talk about the difficulty and the challenges that surround the hobbiest, indie dev space. It’s likely that we all have different backgrounds. A lot of us don’t have formal education in this field and we’re sharing tips and tricks on how to best we can be to forfill our dreams and passions, but I hate the idea of pretending that it’s easy. Because it’s not.

If you’re struggeling like me, don’t worry. It’s gonna suck sometimes. You’re gonna have highs and you’re gonna have lows. It’s going to be a long journey, but eventually, we’ll get to the place we want to be. The most important thing is that we keep going and don’t give up.

That’s all this week, if you’re feeling extra generous, maybe you can check out that failure of a video essay I made on crypto in game dev.

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