On creation for creation's sake
I want to make a game.
... is what I've been telling myself for the past few weeks. Honestly, I might have subconsciously had this thought for the past few months, if not years.
Strange as it sounds, I've gone on a weird mental journey in getting to the point where I'm able to acknowledge this desire. I've always had a vague, constant urge to be creative, but for the past few years, this urge has been tied to an outcome: "I want to write a JS library because it'll make for a cool product later"; something like that. Inevitably, having that outcome in mind makes me set a standard of perfection for what the thing is supposed to be, which makes me start planning every piece of the thing, which... tires me out, and then I just don't do it.
I'd say I've been better about this recently, in that I'll sometimes do one-off things because it seems like fun at the time. Small coding projects that serve no purpose at all. I randomly got into drawing for a week, so the day's drawing for that week. Rediscovering this process has been fun, and it's definitely been fulfilling to just marvel at my work without having to check off boxes for what the thing is supposed to do.
But now, I've got the idea that I want to make a game. A game isn't a small project, or at least not as small as what I've been working on recently. I'm pretty sure my motivation for wanting to do this is entirely intrinsic: I just want to do it, I don't want to sell it, I don't care if nobody plays it. And yet, I'm still finding it pretty hard to do anything.
Firstly, I don't have much time during the week to work on this game; I also work full-time. Second, when I do have time, I find it pretty hard to make any progress. A game isn't small, so I feel the need to plan stuff out, even just roughly. Which is what I do at work. So then it just feels like work. I tire of planning pretty quickly, and I think I've come to conflate this tired feeling with burnout at work, so I just stop and scroll on the internet.
Sometimes I'm able to focus and just write something without planning. It's nice when I'm able to do this, but inevitably I start thinking about the bigger picture... "Okay, the protagonist feels X because the theme I'm going for is Y, which..." and then the planning starts again.
Anyway, this is all a very long way to say that I struggle with creating for creation's sake, partly because budgeting my time as a full-time laborer is hard, and partly because I have trouble seeing the trees for the forest, so to speak. Have you all ever had to deal with this? I'm curious to know what's helped you, or just your thoughts on the topic/my situation.
Cheers!
I had/have the same thing. I like creating silly things for silly things' sake. I have kids and I have a full time job and do most of the cooking/grocery shopping, so that leaves very little time.
Like you, I also wanted to make a game and could not have cared less if anyone played.
My solution was to get into ROM hacking. The reason I wanted to try ROM hacks is that the base game was solved, I didn't need to roll my own collision system or my own physics or anything.
So I started by making my own custom tracks in Mario Kart 64. That was fun. I quickly ran into an issue where I wanted to implement a feature that the base game did not handle, so I had a very specific update to make to the base game to allow for my custom behavior. After that, I got bored of just custom tracks and worked on implementing a soccer mode to the game.
These all scratched the itch of making a playable thing, but very few people have checked them out and that is fine. I keep pushing updates as I make them, and I play them with friends sometimes, but they are almost entirely for me.
Oh, that sounds cool! I've only run into the topic of ROM hacking a few times, but it seems like a wacky mix of reverse engineering, low level programming, and game development. The idea of a base game already being there certainly makes the process seem less daunting.
How'd you get into this? And what idea did you have for a game originally that translated into a ROM hack? Sounds fun.
It is a wacky mix of all of the above. It also scratches the itch of wanting to throw out everything resembling good software development in favor of just making it work for your use case, expandability and readability be damned.
As for how, I just searched "Mario Kart 64 rom hack" or something and stumbled into a discord server with some people working on it already and they were willing to share all of their hard work. I am not smart enough to do it from scratch. I went in just wondering what the current state of the scene was, and found that there was a very small scene and hoped that I could contribute somehow. I had no real ideas initially.
I got into ROM hacking for Super Mario World, ended up making 2 games: https://smwc.me/s/30248
The site https://www.smwcentral.net/ is great as it has tutorials, tools, custom ASM, blocks, sprites, and thousands of songs to choose from. And the editor (“Lunar Magic”) is extremely powerful, but has a steep learning curve.
A game need not be complicated, friend! You could do some small game jams.
I can't recommend game development enough. It is so liberating. It is one of the few things that gives you total power. You have the ability to create your own little world with whatever rules you want. In fact, you can do anything that you want to do and the only limitation is your own mind.
In summary, you should totally give game dev a try. I think it will bring a lot of good thoughts to your heart.
I agree with this! I'm a new gamedev, I'm just about a year into learning it. I highly recommend small game jams because they are low-stakes and you get a supportive community that gives you advice during the process and then feedback on your finished game. It's really satisfying to release a game-- even a tiny one made over a couple days-- and have other people play it! I love making my own little worlds in games and then inviting people to experience them too :)
Hi fellow dev!
I tried out your "Reincarnated As An Adorable Walking Rock In A Peaceful Gardening Sim Game". Very cool! Your art looks super nice.
Thanks so much for the encouragement, fellow dev!! 💓
Hah yeah, I totally agree with you and @feanne. I've actually done game development before, but that was 7 or 8 years ago. I understand what you mean when you say it gives you the ability to explore whatever you want; in fact that's what drew me into it a long time ago, and that's why I'm thinking of doing it again.
Maybe a game jam would be nice. Haven't done one, but I've done hackathons for unrelated subjects, and it's been a positive experience.
I dunno, for me I think there's a divide between "small games can be fulfilling" and "I have an idea that means something to me, I want to make it happen" that I haven't learned how to cross. Maybe thinking of the smaller stuff as intermediate steps towards the larger project would help, but I can't help but become disinterested in the smaller stuff quickly... hence my post, haha.
Anyway, I appreciate the encouragement. How'd you stumble upon game development? You seem to be very passionate about it.
Taking a few steps in the right direction every day can lead you miles closer to achieving your ultimate goal. For me, I try my best to enjoy each small step along the way without getting too caught up in results. Gotta enjoy the process!
It's funny you should ask. I am a programmer by trade, but I started making games 4 years ago inside another game called "Dreams" for ps4. I spent many hours of my life making games that no one played on a platform that ultimately ended up dying a tragic demise (RIP). As I made these games I often wondered if I was wasting my time since no one played them and the platform had no future. I even made a post just like yours, asking others if I should switch to another game engine to make more viable games.
Ultimately, I did end up switching to godot but I don't regret a second I spent making games in Dreams because I learned so many valuable skills regarding game design, game logic, and how to make something fun. Most importantly though, Dreams taught me to love the process of creating, which I could have never learned anywhere else.
Don't get me wrong, I still struggle to create, I struggle with motivation at times, but all of these are natural aspects of creating any form of art.
Dreams was awesome, RIP indeed. I’m still disappointed they never released a PS5 upgrade with PSVR2 support.
For personal projects, I think the idea of making a "just good enough" version that gets better over time is pretty useful. Couple of benefits:
One of my side projects is my quote website. It has two purposes: 1) give me the ability to access/search/share/manage my quotes easily and 2) let me build a full-stack web app from scratch that was all my own work. But what didn't I do?
This philosophy shares some ideas with lean product management and agile development, both of which can be good or bad depending on the use case, but are primarily driven by increasing productivity and delivering value (whatever that means). For a personal project, I think the thinking should really be "it doesn't need to anything more than what I want it to be" and to let that idea be small enough to fit into the time you have available to you, rather than feeling like you never have enough time for your project.
What's funny is that this is how I think about things at work 😆. Your last paragraph resonates with me; the reason I can be "pragmatic" about it at work is because my job is to deliver value. But also, I think the reason I tend to over-plan for personal stuff is because high level system design (or its equivalent in game development land/whatever else I'm doing) is what I like doing most. Like, implementing sound features with sound paradigms is fun to me. Messy code makes me slightly uncomfortable when I'm in a position to do something about it, which is seldom at work for practical reasons, but 100% of the time when it's my own thing.
But yeah. Maybe this all means being a perfectionist is fun to me. 🤷
In writing (stories), I call that World Building Disease. It's super common with newcomers. They want to write, but (since they're new) don't know quite how to go about it. So what very often happens is they sit around building their world. They think up all the wiki entries for their factions and geography and then go about trying to stick characters in there.
When you say high level system design, that's what I think of; World Building Disease. They never leave that stage (99% of them) because they never bother to give themselves permission to fail.
Other than being new, I've found a key contributor to WBD is fear of failure. Of not being perfect. Of not having The Answer, the one that dazzles and satisfies everyone every time all the time.
Give yourself permission to fail. To noddle around. To just fuck off and slap stuff together. I don't code games, but design wise it really can't be that different. Not from a creative standpoint.
It's really common for newcomers to creativity to assume the pros, the big names, the ones they dream of being, just have it all figured out. That they'll sit down and some creation will spring fully formed out of their mind. Intact, whole, polished, ready to publish. Without flaw. Shiny and amazing.
That's not how it works. So let go of all the little voices in the back of your head that tell you it's not good, it's not ready, it's going to disappoint. I call it Fear of They. What will "they" say, what will "they" think.
Fuck Them. Fuck They. Write, or code, for yourself. Want your little game avatar to make a cute noise and raise his arm when he jumps? Do it. Why not? Did you enjoy it when after three hours at the keyboard you figured out how to get the arm to always raise at the right time, even when moving versus standing still or while being hit by a fireball from a Bad Guy? Then you succeeded.
If They don't like it They can go code their own damn game.
It really is that simple. People are their biggest obstacle. Confidence is the greatest advantage. Give yourself permission to fail, or at the very least convince yourself to not give a fuck.
"Why did you spend all weekend figuring out how to make the screen shake when green fruits are picked up?" Answer: because you wanted to. And it's just that easy. All the greats had that confidence. They wanted something, they went for it, they ignored the naysayers.
There are always naysayers. People who don't do have a ton of reasons why no one else should either.
Fuck Them. Fuck They. Are they doing? No. Then why listen to them? Exactly. Sit down and code your little games. They don't have to change the world. They just have to make you smile.
And one day, probably after lots and lots of days because nothing easy is really worth a lot to do, you might find someone else smiles at one of your games too. Now you'll have two reasons to smile.
Any asshat can make people cry, or angry. It takes true genius to make someone smile. That'd make you a genius. Good job.
I’m in a similar situation to yours. I’ve been coding professionally for 17 years and I’m still riddled with feelings of inadequacy, imposter syndrome, lack of motivation, and burnout. I was laid off last month and I’m just completely uninterested in doing the tech interview thing yet again, especially with how the deck is stacked in 2024, and working my tail off just to find another engineering job that makes me miserable again.
So I decided to go out on a limb and make a game instead! Never done anything like this before. Partly I just want to see if I can, because I’ve never taken on a project at that scale, all by myself. Just solo devving. Of course my spouse and kids are depending on me earning a living so I’m hoping to crowdfund this thing and sell it on Steam or something.
It’s actually pretty terrifying, not knowing how long it will take to build, if I’m capable of doing it alone, if the final product will be interesting to people or even fun. But here in these early stages (2 weeks in) I’m at least feeling light and excited about something, which I’m considering a good thing. I don’t love the tightrope-walking-without-a-net aspect of this but I’d never realistically be able to take on this project while holding a day job, and at least I have unemployment benefits and some severance. It was a “now or never” decision I made impulsively. I’m really hoping it doesn’t blow up in my face…
I may share more about it on Tildes as my plan comes together or when I start to run up against the hard parts of the process. I know there are other game devs in this community whose advice I’d really appreciate. At the moment I’m not even sure what questions I’d ask.
I’m contemplating bringing others in with me for playtesting, brainstorming, and general accountability. I think I probably work harder if I know someone’s going to be checking up on my progress. Of course I can’t afford to pay anybody so it would have to be a hobby thing for folks — I wouldn’t feel great about that. I’m thinking I should try to get enough of the game’s foundations together to assemble the crowdfunding pitch and secure some backers first, then maybe I can do some community building with them through discord or something. I have no idea what I’m doing, haha. But at least then I’d be interacting with interested parties and not spamming strangers. I have no experience with marketing, or asking for money or help. I don’t even use social media. The more I think about it, the more important that aspect of this project seems if it’s going to have any success.
I don’t know if any of this is relevant to your ask, OP, but it’s all I’m thinking about these days so I figured I’d write it out.
Sorry to hear about the layoff. Props to you for taking the leap into full time game dev... best of luck to you.
There's the nail on the head. We spend so much of our waking lives producing for others we have no time to produce for ourselves.
I personally think we could solve a lot of problems by driving the stake through the heart of marketting. It artificially creates demand where there was none, which creates the illusion of needing to perpetually be creating more.
I have a tendency to overplan creative projects as well, which takes the fun out of things. For long creative projects, my solution to this was leaving room for improvisation. For example, I plan the rough overall outline of the project. Then I create a rough outline of the near future steps. But I don't plan each step down to every detail. I let myself get lost in the moment, so to speak. This provides me with both some sort of structure and the freedom to enjoy the moment.
On a related topic, in schema therapy, what you describe is (at least from what I gather) called high standards schema. It's a pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior that repeats in one's life. Unreasonably high standards can and do create unnecessary stress for a person. If you're open to the idea, there's a book called "Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthrough Program to End Negative Behavior and Feel Great Again", which sounds like bullshit but is written by mental health professionals. It was recommended to me by my psychiatrist, and helped me a lot. Schemas rarely affect only one area of a person's life, so I suspect it might help you.
Edit: My intention isn't to throw around a diagnosis or something like that. The process you described felt extremely familiar to me, so I think you might benefit from what I described. I might, of course, be wrong.
Here's a great resource.
Thor Hall, aka PirateSoftware, also often says two things:
You don't need to be skilled to make a game.
Your first game will suck.
I make music for its own sake and the hardest thing is to just do it. But that's what you have to do. Set a goal of some sort and execute as it is comfortable to do so. Walk away if you're stressing out about planning, but be sure to chill and come back to it as well.
All day, every day, with literally everything I do (send help).
Lately I've been toying with the idea of building a website for my art, and I'd really love it to be a tourable digital space/ a pseudo point-&-click game type thing. So, naturally, I spent all of yesterday and most of today deep cleaning the area of my house where I decided to set up my art pieces as a walk-through labyrinth that I could then take panoramas of and use with one of the 3d tour widgets on Word Press. I moved all the furniture, figured out how to contain the pets, cobbled together a rotating phone stand, set everything up the way I wanted.... And then remembered how much I hate/am terrible at photography, and realized that panoramas are harder than single photos (duh). So I took it all down and am no closer to my website than I was 3 days ago.
I'm exhausted, a little annoyed at myself, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that I kinda have to do it this way. I have to actually try the thing to get it out of my head so I can move on.
Anyway, that was more tangent-y than intended, but hopefully it's relevant enough. Wanna build me a point-&-click digital gallery thing that looks like an abandoned nuclear bunker, and has colorful little gremlins running around? Lol