Journal Brainboy's Journal: Making games ain't like making other stuff 2
I'm an aspiring game designer and making games is my hobby, and it's a fun one. It can be anyways. When its finally done, you can smile with some accomplishment, even if it sucks. However, my point here today is to point out in one subtle, important way how making games is different from making a movie, making a sculpture, or writing a novel. That way is that, the form of the product is not there until much later in the process.
Let me explain, say you're writing a novel, you write a few chapters. From those chapters, you can get a feel for your novel. What was once abstract in your mind as the final product has begun to take form. You began to know what your novel is actually going to BE. Say your writing a song, you write a baseline, some of the basic melody, from that you get the gist of what your song is going to sound like.
However, writing games is a much different animal. Because I'm writing a lot of my games from scratch, (using Python and Pygame usually, for the curious), I have to write a lot of the graphic stuff, if that's too complex, I get bogged down in that. On top of that, even if I'm writing the game logic, as I'm doing on my current project, I don't get a FEEL for what my final product is going to be. I know I'm letting it discourage me too much, but goddamn. I barely have a hint as to whether this is fun or not. I've only written about 400 lines of code in several WEEKS, and that's essentially just game logic. I have no idea whether my game sucks or not right now.
If I was making a film, I'd have at least some footage, I'd be starting to get an idea of how my film is going to look like and where I can go from there. If I have to discard the footage, or keep it, I could make a decision like that, because I can see the form start to take shape. Right now, I have bunch of code, and I'm starting to debug it, but I'm starting to get more easily discouraged. I'm working on it in shorter and shorter bursts. I'm almost done with game logic now, and summer vacation is almost here, so maybe I'll be able to work on it more.
I dunno, I'm afraid it'll become under folder of half finished code in my python directory. There's only two finished games in there, and one is a Space Invaders clone (my first game in python). I don't want the game I'm working to become just another incompleted game though. I have this weird feeling that if I don't finish THIS game, I'll never be able to finish anything ever again. But despite that, it's still hard for me to just do it.
Guess I'll have to put the proverbial nose to the grindstone, and quit my bitching.
It's all fun and games until... (Score:2)
I can understand some of the frustration that you are dealing with, but not all of it.
First and foremost - as you are writing a game, you need to design some flexability into your back-end. Yes, it's first pseudo-version may suck, but then you should be able to dive back in and fix it.
Second... planning. You should have drawings or at least sketches before you start. Something that basically shows what you want to see on the screen. Decide the objectives, and basically what control flow you
Re:It's all fun and games until... (Score:1)
I've tried tackling the graphics first to try and build a flexible backend. I was building a 2-d brawler type engine, nothing too fancy. However, I simply got bogged down for some reason, or bored perhaps. Whatever it was I didn'