Hi im sitting here not knowing what todo and look at my game projects and noticed i made to many. Wasted alot of time on them. I mostly get stuck middle of the project and figure out a new idea that i think it better and much more fun and start on that.
Today im sit and want to continue on a game but motivation and insperation low.
Thinking is this a unique problem for me or does many here have the same problem starting on to many projects.
I have 6 projects i worked hard on and several started. Complete games are 4.
I uploaded on my artwork site my first game and noticed i lost alot of followers.
Noticed that game making is hard.
You didn't waste any time working on them. Realize that even when you don't finish projects the experience you gained working on them will help you on future projects!
Plus sometimes it's good to give a project a break when you aren't feeling inspired. You don't want to force it. You can always come back to it later when you have new ideas, or perhaps a better method of doing things. It happens to me all the time. I sometimes come back to projects that I had started years earlier and then finish them.
Don't worry about starting too many projects. If this is your hobby remember the important thing is to have fun while you do it. It shouldn't be a chore. Thankfully Clickteam's software does make it fun since it's so simple to get something started.
Don't let your followers dictate what you do. Do what you want, and followers that appreciate it will come, and even if they don't who cares!
Anyway I just checked out one of your games and you do great work! Is all the artwork yours?
Originally Posted by -UrbanMonk- You didn't waste any time working on them. Realize that even when you don't finish projects the experience you gained working on them will help you on future projects!
Plus sometimes it's good to give a project a break when you aren't feeling inspired. You don't want to force it. You can always come back to it later when you have new ideas, or perhaps a better method of doing things. It happens to me all the time. I sometimes come back to projects that I had started years earlier and then finish them.
Don't worry about starting too many projects. If this is your hobby remember the important thing is to have fun while you do it. It shouldn't be a chore. Thankfully Clickteam's software does make it fun since it's so simple to get something started.
Don't let your followers dictate what you do. Do what you want, and followers that appreciate it will come, and even if they don't who cares!
Anyway I just checked out one of your games and you do great work! Is all the artwork yours?
Thanks. Got inspired today again Thanks. yeah its a hobby just like my drawing. artworks is all by me.
See if i can make something cool for my game today.
yeah i really liked making undeadslayer. im a second one comming. I need to learn the arrey object dont understand that one. got a friend who helped me but then it got buggy, something happened. see if i can fix that.
I think it's important to try out new things. Sure, you may not "finish" a game, or one of the projects you complete may not be everything you've envisioned. However, you can't deny that it's usually a great learning experience. The next time you pick up one of those old projects, you'll look at one of your event groups and say to yourself, "Oh! I can't believe I did it THAT way! It would be so much easier to do this..." Fifteen minutes later you've cut about two dozen lines of events down to a lean, efficient six.
Something like that usually happens when I look at my old projects. Beyond what I've documented here at TDC, I likely have a dozen others in various states of completion. As it stands, I usually have the patience to finish only the tiniest of projects anyway.
But as Urban Monk has already stated: don't worry about it so much. Unless you're using game-making to pay the bills, then treat yourself gently. That's not to say that making games - even as a hobby - isn't hard work. It takes a LOT of hard work, and discipline, and creativity, and a thick skin to deal with illiterates who report back "YR GAEM SUX0RZ" or something like that.
For what it's worth, I've been immensely entertained by your finished projects, LordHannu. Black Knight is straight out of the retro beat-em-up playbook. And Undead Slayer helped me appreciate action platformers again. Zodiac Ninja came in second place in the competition I ran last year. The atmosphere you've created with your games is THICK, and that's not easy to do at all.
Keep up the fine work, even if positive feedback from others is hard to come by.
While working on one of the main projects I tend to spin off a large number of side projects (delaying the main projects and the side projects). However some of them do get finished, not just released them all yet.
But even from unfinished projects lessons can be learned, where the best lesson probably has something to do with the drive to keep on working on your project.
You might have seen plenty of members joking about having never finished a game on TDC in the past.
I don't even start projects thinking i'll finish them anymore and more often than not i'll reuse stuff anyway.
The numbers of unfinished projects will decrease as you get more experienced and find out what workload you can actually handle. Most people have full-time jobs and making games is just a hobby to them.
Playing around with game dev stuff is fun, even if you don't finish a game. I learned much about MMF 1 and 2 that way, and also about AS3/Flash, C++ & Java, Unity3d and now GameMaker. They're all a lot of fun to use. There are underlying aspects about programming that generally appeal to me.
You can even make little pixel games in Microsoft Excel. Make the grid small and use it like a pixel display thru its Visual Basic editor. It's slow, but it works well enough.
I started maybe one project since 2006 and switching to MMF2. Clickteam without any reason removed all of MMF1.5's great drawing tools so I suddenly couldn't even make my graphics barely passable anymore. I gave up and over the years the rudimentary drawing talent I built up in 2005 and 2006 dwindled back to nothing. I definitely would like to make a game for mobile devices and HTML5 but the drawing talent just isn't there at all.
Discarded pizza boxes are an indispensable source of cheese.
I have had 4 games on the cooker for about 3 or 4 years now. Whenever I have spare time (happens about twice a year) I pick one of them up. I used to nearly abandon all my games when I was younger, I still have about 30 unfinished K&P and TGF games here.
I think a lot of us up here have lots of games started but were never finished.
In more recent years, I've been able to complete more of them than not, but oh yeah especially when I was first learning everything I think my eyes were too big for my stomach and maybe only completed half at best.
I've started a game that went pretty far along this year (RPG where a cleric is the main character) however I've since stopped work on it and will probably not go back to it. Now what I CAN take away from that is experience and some (perhaps) better ways to create things for current and future projects.
In fact the only thing I ended up using from that game at all is one static background picture for this with the church and blacksmith:
So if you don't think about the experiences I had, essentially I worked on a side project for 4-5 months and all I got was a single bitmap.
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I started too many. Later on learned that I needed to learn the skill of finishing, rather than drafting up elaborate plans that fall apart after a month of unforeseen trouble.
Disclaimer: Any sarcasm in my posts will not be mentioned as that would ruin the purpose. It is assumed that the reader is intelligent enough to tell the difference between what is sarcasm and what is not.
best I've been able to create is a bunch of small demos. I hope one day i'll be able to pull them all into one game. But so far no luck with my approach
I must have made 100s of .gam files which was just ideas, try outs or demos. I think its all part of the process of learning.
That said, I am always jealous of people that can actually finish making a game and publish it . I now suffer from Big Game fever and a severe love of isometric games. The click and indie world would have a lot more content if people focused on small fun games, just for the fun of making a game!