3 ms·

Seems... deeply misleading to draw an equivalence to today. The market is vastly more competitive.

gumballindie 3y ago
But back then it was much smaller. Suppose some will always find an excuse as to why things may fail today vs yesterday, while others will find a way regardless.
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  That is not nearly the same thing as saying the strategies of yesterday are applicable to today
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    The strategy of refining your skills through extensive practice is as old as success itself.
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago
      And yet adapting and innovating is the, slightly younger, vastly more successful brother.
squeaky-clean 3y ago
All the more reason to spend time making small games without a goal of profiting from them in order to refine your skills. When things get more competitive, you need to practice more, not less.
- spywaregorilla 3y ago
  I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". "try harder, and suffer competition" is just bad advice. The real advice ought to be "don't work on games that don't have a legitimate reason to be successful besides being 'fun'", and have a strong consideration of market access, artistic hook, and value prop. Your ability to execute on a vision can be honed wherever the heck you want. But making the vision itself should come from studying games and what made them successful or not. Not grinding out business failures. My hot take would be online co-op, realistic graphics, first person games in a unique setting for about $25. Dicking around with your friends' avatars is fun regardless of game quality and the value prop is strong.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - wingerlang 3y ago
    Anyone starting out with a realistic graphics fps game, with co-op, will 100% guaranteed either stop at the most basic unity coop game tutorial, or be a forever project that never actually releases. It just doesn't happen. > I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". Out of curiosity, how many games have you made and finished?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - spywaregorilla 3y ago
      I've worked on several titles and completed none of them as a side hobby. I would like to finish one. I still work on it. My most important learning from this has been "don't do indie game dev for a living". Maybe you'll say "shut up then". But I disagree. Learning to execute on a game design vision is fun. But it is irrelevant if the vision is not viable. I've learned a lot through what I've done and it's vastly more fun to work on something you're interested in. If you chase the business side of actually releasing a game you're going to spend a lot of time doing things you're not interested in doing and it's potentially going to cost a lot of money. You have to figure out what you want to do. As for your dismissal of my comment, sure, it's a hot take. But I feel pretty strongly. Why? * Well for one almost every single game that people start does not get finished. So that's a misleading metric. * The amount of free 3D asset available are MASSIVELY better for 3D realistic assets. The lack of a specific art direction means you don't need to create everything from scratch. Which is bad if artistic design is your thing, but if it's not your thing, this is a lifesaver. Realistic 3D is the EASIEST art to acquire and prototype and even ship with unless you're interested in using very weirdly specific stuff from an asset store in a distinct style. * Co-op is intrinsically enticing and lowers the bar greatly for the game to be good. I think my ideal indie success story are games like The Forest and Green Hell. If you look under the hood, these games... pretty bad? Like it's mostly really dumb combat, basebuilding to basically no particularly well thought out game loop, and big maps with a small amount of unique content in them. But they're still pretty great to everyone who plays them. It's remarkably achievable. * Conversely, here's a game that was free on Epic a short while ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766750/Spelldrifter/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766750/Spelldrifter/ I thought this game was actually pretty solid. It's fighting system was interesting, the dialogue was decent even though I came into it knowing I wasn't going to care about the story, and the art was nice in my opinion. I liked playing this game. But there's now way I'm ever going to pay $20 for it. Standing out as a singleplayer game is extremely hard. Or comp multiplayer. Goofy co-op has a much lower bar because co-op is intrinsically fun when everyone's got an avatar.
LarsDu88 3y ago
Commander Keen was quality stuff. It was good enough to get Nintendo DS followup games.
fidotron 3y ago
Right. id rode (and ending up being a driving force for) the emergence and adoption of x86 PCs as the dominant home computer platform with near perfect timing. If you were gaming on a PC before they showed up you were a masochist. I tend to believe many of the problems with id productions up to Carmack going off to Oculus can be seen from this early mindset. They can do focused experiences, but their practices cannot scale up, and certainly not to enable the sort of level of variety players want in big titles today. Simply practicing making lots of small games is not enough. It's like that saying about going to space: you don't get there by climbing progressively taller trees.
- syntheweave 3y ago
  The full story of id really has a lot to do with the group being built around some extremely motivated people who converged on the same prospects in the same place. Like, the fact that Romero was doing work for Origin and New World, two of the biggest names in that era, working on some of the biggest projects, and then decided that he would drop that to do Softdisk's diskmag stuff, is only sensible in the eyes of someone who is extremely focused on being in the room for "next big things". And that's been a hallmark of Romero's career over the long run, really. When shareware games were new, he did shareware games. When mobile gaming was new, he did mobile games. When Facebook games were new, he did Facebook games. I have not checked to see if he did VR(maybe he was already satiated with that by the id experience, which did have some dabblings in that early VR tech) but it would not surprise me at all. So in certain ways, his advice can't help, because it's advice that's about blue ocean markets where all you have to do is be there first and put in a good, serious effort. It's not about cultivating long-term fans, even though that did happen to him by chance.

But back then it was much smaller. Suppose some will always find an excuse as to why things may fail today vs yesterday, while others will find a way regardless.

spywaregorilla 3y ago
That is not nearly the same thing as saying the strategies of yesterday are applicable to today
- gumballindie 3y ago
  The strategy of refining your skills through extensive practice is as old as success itself.
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    And yet adapting and innovating is the, slightly younger, vastly more successful brother.

squeaky-clean 3y ago

All the more reason to spend time making small games without a goal of profiting from them in order to refine your skills. When things get more competitive, you need to practice more, not less.

spywaregorilla 3y ago
I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". "try harder, and suffer competition" is just bad advice. The real advice ought to be "don't work on games that don't have a legitimate reason to be successful besides being 'fun'", and have a strong consideration of market access, artistic hook, and value prop. Your ability to execute on a vision can be honed wherever the heck you want. But making the vision itself should come from studying games and what made them successful or not. Not grinding out business failures. My hot take would be online co-op, realistic graphics, first person games in a unique setting for about $25. Dicking around with your friends' avatars is fun regardless of game quality and the value prop is strong.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wingerlang 3y ago
  Anyone starting out with a realistic graphics fps game, with co-op, will 100% guaranteed either stop at the most basic unity coop game tutorial, or be a forever project that never actually releases. It just doesn't happen. > I don't really agree that making and releasing unprofitable games is at all beneficial as "practice". Out of curiosity, how many games have you made and finished?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - spywaregorilla 3y ago
    I've worked on several titles and completed none of them as a side hobby. I would like to finish one. I still work on it. My most important learning from this has been "don't do indie game dev for a living". Maybe you'll say "shut up then". But I disagree. Learning to execute on a game design vision is fun. But it is irrelevant if the vision is not viable. I've learned a lot through what I've done and it's vastly more fun to work on something you're interested in. If you chase the business side of actually releasing a game you're going to spend a lot of time doing things you're not interested in doing and it's potentially going to cost a lot of money. You have to figure out what you want to do. As for your dismissal of my comment, sure, it's a hot take. But I feel pretty strongly. Why? * Well for one almost every single game that people start does not get finished. So that's a misleading metric. * The amount of free 3D asset available are MASSIVELY better for 3D realistic assets. The lack of a specific art direction means you don't need to create everything from scratch. Which is bad if artistic design is your thing, but if it's not your thing, this is a lifesaver. Realistic 3D is the EASIEST art to acquire and prototype and even ship with unless you're interested in using very weirdly specific stuff from an asset store in a distinct style. * Co-op is intrinsically enticing and lowers the bar greatly for the game to be good. I think my ideal indie success story are games like The Forest and Green Hell. If you look under the hood, these games... pretty bad? Like it's mostly really dumb combat, basebuilding to basically no particularly well thought out game loop, and big maps with a small amount of unique content in them. But they're still pretty great to everyone who plays them. It's remarkably achievable. * Conversely, here's a game that was free on Epic a short while ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766750/Spelldrifter/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1766750/Spelldrifter/ I thought this game was actually pretty solid. It's fighting system was interesting, the dialogue was decent even though I came into it knowing I wasn't going to care about the story, and the art was nice in my opinion. I liked playing this game. But there's now way I'm ever going to pay $20 for it. Standing out as a singleplayer game is extremely hard. Or comp multiplayer. Goofy co-op has a much lower bar because co-op is intrinsically fun when everyone's got an avatar.

LarsDu88 3y ago

Commander Keen was quality stuff. It was good enough to get Nintendo DS followup games.

fidotron 3y ago

Right. id rode (and ending up being a driving force for) the emergence and adoption of x86 PCs as the dominant home computer platform with near perfect timing. If you were gaming on a PC before they showed up you were a masochist. I tend to believe many of the problems with id productions up to Carmack going off to Oculus can be seen from this early mindset. They can do focused experiences, but their practices cannot scale up, and certainly not to enable the sort of level of variety players want in big titles today. Simply practicing making lots of small games is not enough. It's like that saying about going to space: you don't get there by climbing progressively taller trees.

syntheweave 3y ago
The full story of id really has a lot to do with the group being built around some extremely motivated people who converged on the same prospects in the same place. Like, the fact that Romero was doing work for Origin and New World, two of the biggest names in that era, working on some of the biggest projects, and then decided that he would drop that to do Softdisk's diskmag stuff, is only sensible in the eyes of someone who is extremely focused on being in the room for "next big things". And that's been a hallmark of Romero's career over the long run, really. When shareware games were new, he did shareware games. When mobile gaming was new, he did mobile games. When Facebook games were new, he did Facebook games. I have not checked to see if he did VR(maybe he was already satiated with that by the id experience, which did have some dabblings in that early VR tech) but it would not surprise me at all. So in certain ways, his advice can't help, because it's advice that's about blue ocean markets where all you have to do is be there first and put in a good, serious effort. It's not about cultivating long-term fans, even though that did happen to him by chance.