A New Approach to GameDev

 

This post is about reflecting on where I am today and how I plan to progress with trying to make games.  It's a bit long and includes a description of why I want to make the games I want to make, and why I want to make them.  I also mention a few things I've learned along the way that might be helpful.

Over the last few years my ambition has been to try and figure out how to make games that people can enjoy, but more than that, to figure out how to create games of a quality that I feel is sufficient for me to be willing to charge people some money for providing games that I hope they will enjoy playing.  These days, in the world of AI, Influencers and the never ending need to chase the latest trends, I personally feel that many games released today do not reflect what I enjoy in a video game.  This is not to suggest that all of the games made today are bad, just that most of them are not the sort of games I enjoy playing.

The games I grew up with didn't have online multiplayer, photorealistic graphics, or even three dimensions, but the games I enjoyed all had one thing in common, they had interesting stories that captivated you with every twist and turn.  At the time, most of the capabilities of modern gaming were only pipe dreams for the developers of the day, so instead of relying on tools like social media, influencers and online multiplayer to sell their games, developers relied on story driven content.  Every world was a hand crafted work of art without the need for procedural generation to pad out the content of the games.  Granted, most of the games were small by today's standards, and the stories could normally be completed in about 20 hours of gameplay, or less, but the limitations of the day meant that this was how games were made.  As technology has advanced, the tools and techniques have quite rightly changed to reflect the capabilities of current tech, and the way games are made is likely to continue to evolve as new advancements in technology come about.  I don't think this is wrong or bad in any way, but for me, with the majority of new games being online multiplayer, and relying on a core mechanic or system, or even just relying on influencers making your game popular, they're not the games I want to play.

I don't have the time or consistency to play with friends online, making most modern games either boring to play solo, or even entirely unplayable.  The simple idea of picking up and playing a game, just to play the game, seems to have been lost.  There are still a couple of good single player focussed games released each year, but those games made by large publishers focussed on the single player market now have insane hardware requirements far outside of what I could reasonably afford (have you tried looking for RAM at a reasonable price lately), not to mention the prices now attached to modern big name gaming.

So, to return to the point I was trying to make, the games I enjoy are games that can be played as a single player and hopefully come with a story that can be played through.  With the market for these games seemingly being forgotten about, and growing frustrated by this, I decided I wanted to try making games myself.

Initially, when I started forging ahead with this ambition, I had in mind a certain expectation of how someone in my position should be viewed, and tried, possibly a bit too hard, to present myself in a way to fit that expectation.  As time went on, aside from personal issues distracting my focus, I found that the quality of what I could create, the focus I could give a project, and the desire to try and push things through with either an incomplete idea, or attempting to operate on my own expectations of how to proceed never really advanced me in the way I expected.  On the one hand this is normal for someone trying to figure things out and trying to learn from the practical experience, on the other, failing to generate the expected reception, or even to consistently produce the games I was wanting to would often be demoralising.  Now that isn't to say that I didn't find the last few years of trying make games to be a waste of time and effort, on the contrary, I found it both educational and rewarding; by participating in game jams, working on my creative skills and actually making a few games here and there I have grown more aware of my own capabilities, and confident that if I really want to continue to try to make games, that I can do, and might even make a success of it one day.

On the negatives of the last couple of years however, I have learned a few lessons about trying to give things a go that have held me back in some respects, and reshaped my own expectations in others.

I've learned for example, that making games is all well and good, but if people don't know they exist, they'll never see them or play them.  This is one of the most important areas to get right, and as much as I have not really tried to work on this area, I am well aware that it is what makes the difference between a successful game and a quiet hobby project.  Without raising awareness of my games, they will never gain traction, beat algorithms or get the opportunity to be played by others regardless of which platform is used to host the game.  So this is an area I intend to work on in the future.

Separate to marketing, I also learned that the difference between a good game and a bad one from a gameplay perspective is about consistency and depth.  While I try to make games by myself, which is a lot of work in itself, there is a massive difference between making a throw away game jam game and publishing it on Itch.io, and making an actual "good" game that I might intend to just put a price tag on.  Over the last few years I have had more than a few game ideas that I felt really could have been at least half decent, but the amount of work involved in making them, coupled with my normal job and the previously mentioned personal issues, made the amount of work required to make those ideas a reality seem insurmountable.  What I was severely lacking over the last few years was the consistency to be able to focus on them and really try to progress with them.

Finally, I learned that when it comes to the skills required to make a game, especially when you're on your own, that you not only need to have the right skills to make a game on your own, but that those skills need to be refined to a certain standard themselves.  For myself, that standard is what I personally feel comfortable with, I don't exactly try to chase perfection, but I at least want to reach a standard where I feel that the resulting product is something I would feel comfortable in paying for myself.  Over the last few years, this meant that I had the opportunity to learn what standard my own skills are now, and where I would like to get them to.  For example, when I first started making games, I found that my musical skills were severely lacking, and while they're still not brilliant, by focussing on improving them, the music I make for my games is getting better and I'm beginning to feel more confident in being able to produce music for my games that both fit the game and the mood I wish to emulate at the time.  This has only been accomplished through actually making music and learning bits and pieces along the way about how music and songs are structured and put together.  The approach of actually making the music and learning about about music, practicing and learning more not only applies to this skill, but also to any of the other skills needed for making a game.  I've learned that if I put in the effort in the right way, I can improve the skills I need, and that this applies to just about anything else as well.

During my downtime since last winter, I have had a lot of time to reflect while adjusting to the changes in my life.  After almost being made homeless, I've ended up in a new home that thankfully isn't likely to change any time soon.  In the last year or so, I have also come to the realisation that I am most likely neurodivergent (likely Autistic with a bit of ADHD thrown in).  Since childhood I have never really felt like I fit in, I have quite a few textbook traits that would be categorised as Autistic if anyone cared to look, but I was always considered to be academically gifted and, when I grew up, you weren't considered Autistic if you were smart.  This has meant that following the events at the start of the year, I'm only now beginning to feel comfortable enough with my new setup to try and get back into a routine of working on my ambition, and I'm going to try and give it a new approach.

What started this new approach was a game idea I thought of about a month or so ago.  The game is set in a world somewhat like the setting of the anime Sword Art Online's first season, Aincrad the floating dungeon in the sky.  In the anime, the floating dungeon is a game world for a death game where the players, trapped at the start of the series, must fight their through and beat the game to escape.  I don't plan on making a game that traps people and puts them in a death game, but the setting of the floating dungeon, to me seemed like an interesting starting point for a game idea.  The individual levels of the the floating dungeon give understandable limitations to the size of the game world, while also allowing for a variety of biomes and regions to be represented on the different levels of the dungeon.  From this starting point, I then decided to start thinking about how the dungeon might have come about, what lives on it, what caused it to exist, and started "world building" from there.  So far I've documented about 80 pages (when sized to A5, 1.5 spaced lines like a book) about my fictional world, from the history about the floating dungeon, to the people and factions living in the dungeon.  I started this exercise chasing after the idea of depth, creating a world that exists for a reason, with events that have a purpose, so that I have a reference to use to keep the project, and other projects, consistent.  Also, as a whole world is being created, I could set any number of games or stories in that world, further expanding it beyond the ideas I have today.  As an example, I also thought of a second game idea set in that world, and trading card game set at a different point in that world's history that would play through a key moment in the world's history.  The idea was sound, the only problem I could foresee in making it was that I don't think my art skills are up to the task of making around 160 (to start with) decent quality graphics for the individual cards - so that's another skill to work on.

All of this has lead me to today, where I now plan to focus on improving my own skills, and aiming for the consistency and depth that will hopefully improve the quality of the games I can make.

As a result of this new approach, as my own skills develop I will still be making and releasing games, but they won't be throw away projects for jams and, at least until I feel the quality is sufficient, they might not go beyond releases on Itch.io or Google Play.  I also plan to spend time on developing my skills each week so that I can become consistent in my own development.  Part of this will be making blog posts to share my progress, what I've learned, or what I'm working on.  As such I have changed my blog theme to a more neutral theme, allowing me to add my own images to differentiate the different types of post I will be making in future.

If you're still with me, thanks for giving it a read and following along.  I currently plan to make at least two blog posts a week for the foreseeable future.  This week there will be a few more, there will be a Schedule Post as well as a few others already lined up to kick off the different series of posts I have planned.

The following is a rough breakdown of key skills and my aims at this time.

• Game Development (i.e. Coding) - Maintain and Improve
• Music - Maintain and Improve
• Art - Improve
• 3D Modelling - To Improve after improving Art (improving my Art skills will help, somewhat, with improving my 3D modelling)
• Marketing - Learn and Develop a Strategy for advertising my games, and or other projects/media.