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I'd like to rant about my gamedev experience. (5 years+)

throwawaydev · 2020-04-11T00:23:01

tl;dr: Made a lot of shit, some finished, some not finished. Actual vision never implemented because it's a fantasy mmorpg and I'm just 1 person and not 50 people. Might have run out of energy. No this isn't a recruitment post. Just my story. Full post: I don't know why I have the sudden urge to type this out. This could become a depressing read, or an enlightening one. I'm not sure the last chapter of this story is over yet. If you're sipping your tea, bored, looking for something to read, maybe this is for you. I'm not going to make a specific point and it's not a recruitment post. I just want to post this maybe for therapeutical effect. The real history of my gamedeving began in 2013 if I remember correctly. Technically it began much earlier, in 2003 I first tried to code but being a 16 year old teenager at the time, I really lacked the discipline, and the education. I always looked up to programmers and gamedevs, they possessed a magical skill, they could make anything they wanted. A bit later I was getting the education but still lacked the discipline. Around 2006 I first looked at the Irrlicht Engine and Ogre3D. For a moment I got quite excited when I managed to spawn that dwarf from the Irrlicht demo and that beautiful light effect. But I didn't have the skills to really work with it yet. Later I'd find the Unity engine. I'll get back to this later. The games I loved the most when I was still young and impressionable were fantasy games. Gothic 1+2 and Realms of Arkania to be precise. The worlds were very immersive and alive. I had so much fun playing that. But it meant more to me than simple fun, it was maybe a form of escapism or being immersed into something beautiful. It was art, not just entertainment. They had a quite complete world with complete lore, wildlife, plants, geography… like myths come to digital reality. The other thing that fascinated me were MMORPGs. I played many. And around that time, making an MMORPG was the hot shit to do. Forums were full of people wanting to make a fantasy MMORPG. Like later everyone wanted to make a Minecraft clone, then I also noticed a fad about Rogue-likes. But back in the day, the hot shit was MMORPGs. World of Warcraft never fascinated me, it was just a levelling mill, after level 20 I only continued because a friend kept playing this crap. I finally quit around level 50. I was into the ones that had more life in them. Social and pvp. Ashen Empires, Mortal Online, Diaspora, WW2 Online, to name a few. Sad to say that I also stepped with my toes into Eve Online. Terrible game mostly. Actually you didn't need to go into gamedev forums at all to find willing (but useless) team members, being in a game fan / player forum was enough. A lot of people were enthusiastic, “I can't do shit but I'm willing to learn”. Of course it never really led anywhere. Though I'm very impressed nowadays how much time and effort people are willing to put into modding existing games that they love instead of making their own. A lot of people seemed to have the idea that MMOs were never ‘done right’. Even before WoW. WoW was the most successful levelling mill but it lacked the depth, it was a superficial levelling mill. I think up to this day, the genre “mmorpg” was never done right. Like there should have been something for those who didn't like WoW, but it never really happened. But that's an uncertain feeling and one that probably bit me later. Around the year 2012 I began neglecting the rest of my life in favour of gamedev. In fact I didn't have much of a life, so I figured, might as well go back to your childhood dreams, work on something that I loved. That was when I first started programming for real on my own “serious gamedev projects”. I thought I was doing fine. I'm going to spoiler a bit: I wasn't doing fine. I'm actually not a great programmer. Not terrible either, I can get the job done, it just takes much too long. During the next couple of years I would learn to make everything that I wanted to make, I somewhat improved in programming. I can do what I want to do but it takes ages and basically, I'm a bad coder. I looked up what makes a coder bad and all the lists I found online were basically describing me for the most part. What I had going for myself were endurance and enthusiasm (and mental illness). I was constantly fighting against my own shortcomings, I was producing a lot of bugs and fixing them felt like progress - it wasn't. That's like throwing sticks into your bicycle wheel, then removing them and claiming it's progress. I also didn't work straight towards goals. One disease that my coding and design always had was, that I would make convoluted, bloated systems that seemed very “smart" to me but actually just added weeks or months of work for no real gain as far as the game went. Like many, many people in gamedev, I had mental issues. This has always hindered me. Only my last project had a proper scope. More about that later. So, the first game I began to make was a browser mmorpg written in php in a fantasy universe. It had a 2d map, it was turnbased, you could travel around, build towns, claim mines, get resources, build more buildings like taverns, town halls, there were mayor elections, laws…, in short, it was horrible. I quit after spending maybe half a year on it. Then I reorientated myself when someone told me about the Unity engine. 3d didn't seem so big and unachievable anymore. I spent a lot of time (sometimes 16 hours a day, 25 days a month, I had burnout episodes every now and then that kept getting longer, my productivity has decreased all the time) on making map generators, chat servers, login servers, sharded game servers, UI. I ran out of steam eventually. I was lacking art when I started. Much later, in another attempt to make that ‘never done right’ fantasy mmorpg, I learned learn modelling and even the basics of animation. But at the time, I stepped back again and made something smaller instead, a remake of a 2d space mmorpg that I played as a kid. To wrap this up, I finished that project. It took 7 months and was finished. But the gameplay… It was interesting in the year 2000. 15 years later, it didn't work anymore. I got good feedback on it by some people on reddit but it had some technical shortcomings which I didn't want to fix, I also had depression or something like that, so I took it down again relatively quickly. Another 7 months down the drain. After that I'm losing track of the order of events. What happened was that I worked on another interesting project, an MMORTS (yep, I'm flexible) in which everyone was one unit. This seemed easy to make, but again it was too big for me by myself. Up to this day I think that might be an interesting concept, especially if it's about tactics. It was basically a remake of WW2 Online but in 2d, made with Unity. I spent several months on that as well, then quit. When you make an online game, testing and debugging is a nightmare. Especially in the way that I did it at the time. I'd do shit like implementing registration and login before anything else, so every time I wanted to test something, I had to login. It made me ‘feel’ smart, but it was really dumb. There was one project that was going to be a certain hit I think, something way more casual and fun, it was a co-production with someone else and a singleplayer game, but sadly mental issues took over and I dropped out of that project. I think I may have been afraid of success even. I wanted to make something ‘smart’ all the time, that always got in my way. Well then there followed a period where I worked on ‘that fantasy game’ again. That MMO that was never done right. I did the best I could, as I said, learned modelling, animation, all while the burnout phases got worse. Eventually I suffered a back injury irl. After that, I couldn't take gamedev serious anymore, I couldn't concentrate on such tasks anymore. I thought to myself, why am I wasting all this time on gamedev. My life was a mess. It wasn't leading anywhere. I met a lot of people in gamedev with mental issues thanks to reddit. Gamedev seems to attract escapist personalities like cow dung attracts flies, to be blunt. I took a long break after that back injury. Eventually I made a browser game. It's a fantasy mmo, turnbased. It's very simple. I cut everything down as simple as possible. You can go to work daily and get some exp, money, you can buy stuff at the store or learn skills from a trainer. You can travel and rob each other. It took over half a year again, but it's done, I haven't published it yet. But it plays in the same world that I wanted to tell with the Unity game. It's a really cut down version of what I wanted to make and I really didn't care about the graphics, fully intentional. I'm getting exhausted from typing this. It must be horrible for you to read this. Let me wrap it up really. I don't even have a proper design. The stuff that I wanted to make, that fantasy mmo that was never done right, probably wouldn't even work today because players aren't willing to put that much time into an online game anymore. Actually the pvp fantasy mmo genre was never very popular, whenever people had the choice, they picked non-pvp servers. I have only this diffuse idea of what the ideal mmorpg should be like, and if that idea was actually verbalised to the dot of the i, I think it might not be so special anymore. Dreams don't make sense when they're actually told. Only when you dream them. Mostly everything has been made already, it would only be a new composition of things plus some extras. For example I always wanted to make a druid class that would pick herbs and some of them only grow during certain moon intervals in certain places. I want to get daylight done right, moonlight too of course. That's one thing that my previous attempts already had, great daylight. It needs to turn redder towards the end of the day. I want to make pvp combat where the level gap is artificially diminished so that 5 noobs could beat up a vet. I want to make magic weapons extremely rare and people mostly use realistic rustic weapons. Neat, modest graphics like in Gothic. Climbing rocks like in Gothic. Climbing was very important in older games and disappeared in the newer ones. I want these light effects done right. Modest and neat. I wanted to make a coherrent gameworld, a mix of a peaceful idyll and dangerous places and optical beauty. So you get a sense of safety when you come back from a quest. This might not translate well to a game where people log in to find action. I have only these diffuse ideas, a mood to create, a world to tell, but then to sit down and make it - I know how. Every step of it. Just to actually do it, it would take 200 years to even get to the beta if I work by myself. I'm not a great coder, not a great modeller, a terrible animator, and I lost most of my energy. I think my next slow steps will be to slowly publish the browser game. Maybe I'll try to produce extremely rudimentary demo content for yet another fantasy mmorpg project that plays in the same universe as this browser game. More a mood demo than a gameplay demo really. Sadly it's the genre that requires the most assets. Maybe I'll have to resort to Minecraft-like figures. I really don't know. Maybe I'll never do anything again, or I'll run a crowdfunding campaign. At least I won't spend another 5 years blindly chasing the dragon. And that's the story of how I have very little to show for my years in gamedev. I'm 32. At least I tried? Don't let these last words depress you, I'm just too good at finding fucked up puns. Ok, I had to get this out.

GDNet Lounge Community mmorpg fantasy programming

Started by throwawaydev March 23, 2020 08:26 PM

40 comments, last by Simitus 4 years, 2 months ago

throwawaydev

Author

March 25, 2020 09:21 AM

Juliean said:
So you are saying that you are fine with being a subpar programmer, just because you can get away with it.

This is one of the things that make me a “bad programmer” according to lists I found. You can get away with it but there's a bit more attached to this behaviour. My current verdict on my own coding standards is: I was trying to apply OOP, but OOP is probably useless for me. I was instead doing data orientated pogramming all along and trying to shove OOP standards into it and judging it by that. From a data oriented programming point of view, I'm less terrible. ?‍♂️

@green.B3457

That's all very true.

@wurstbrot

So true, yes. There's nothing specifically dramatic about my journey, it's not worse than many other gamedev stories. There's a whole army of “not much to show” people out there, some are very talented. Like I knew an artist who started over and over again and I thought everything he modelled was pure gold.

I'm not particularly frustrated either, especially not after some months break. But certainly lower on energy than I used to be. Had I not spent time in gamedev I would forever wonder if I could have done it, probably.

I'm probably going back to gamedev soon. I did the first step, and cleaned up here. Somewhere is a backup harddisk with the projects.

But this time I'll be very organised, I might have to evolve to being a leader. My first steps will be to publish the thing I made before, to get feedback, maybe people even like it. Then move on to an online shooter. I'll write a full game design document so that it can be presented to others. I'll cut down all the steps into children's portions. I will skip on unnecessary things like cheat-protection for the start. And I'm going to accept minecraft-tier graphics. I will be fine using only 5 different types of trees. I'm going to take “minimum viable product” very serious and shrink the project so much that I could finish it alone, and still try to get help from different people. No milestone of this project should ever take longer than 2 weeks to reach.

My time estimation / actual time spent ratio is 1:3. Maybe 2 weeks for a milestone is still too long, as they'd turn into 6. Maybe I should go for 1 week. And planning the entire project to take 3 months, not 6.

Yes, everything needs to be cut into ant portions. No more smart solving of self-created problems, only solutions now. And no more frustration, only for fun. Will see how it goes.

My first step would be to make a new map generator (old one was way too slow), that's actually not very much fun already. ?

green.B3457

March 25, 2020 12:29 PM

Suffering the mind is nowhere in your To Do list.

As soon as your expectation is not what you desire, you are losing frequency. This results in lack of motivation and more. I know this all seems sublime but the results are dramatic.

Line up your expectation with your desire and you will have more energy- you will move faster.

None

organicpencil

182

March 25, 2020 05:54 PM

@throwawaydev I enjoyed reading that. NEED MORE. Also: Link me up with that turnbased browser game when you're ready for some testers, or even if you're not. I've played some real sh**ty WIPs in my time so the bar is pretty low

Launcher111

March 26, 2020 03:51 PM

I've worked in more than a few dev groups… yeah these are common issues, you have the people wanting to call the shots that make no contribution. You have people that work 10 minutes a week, or an hour a year. Its unrealistic to build all aspects of a game on your own, at a high level. At the end of the day you need a group, which is harder to build than a game, to find half a dozen people that want to work on a similar project. Or you find a group and they do something crazy like get married and have kids, and leave the group. Its a lot of fun, you make a realistic knight age type game as an example, as the stated plan… sure enough the artist makes a unicorn with talking mushrooms… the coder wants to make a castle lemonade stand. With the music some sort of death metal… with animations of a knight on horse back killing orcs…. its like none of these things go together… no coherent story can form, and some how pointing out the issues is bad… that somehow me pointing these issues out is what destroyed the project…

I wouldn't care about others opinions… people that never built a game, or an internet troll… they live to inflict pain upon others. What a sad existence… not that they deserve sympathy…

The older styles of games in an updated format would kick these new games teeth in… the pay to win games, and EA makes a copy the last game and update the graphics… they have money, but no vision or creativity. The start of the process is so important, of what will the game look like, what is the plan. They often have no answers… anyways if you guys need a writer for the crazy concept of stories…

Possibly post a project you want to work on? See if anyone wants to join.

If you have a fun project in mind, with nontraditional and obscene characters, probably save time and message me.

green.B3457

March 26, 2020 06:20 PM

Right on @launcher111

This is how you end up with a messy world like Azeroth.

(1) Someone smokes a spliff and then decides it’s a steam punk game.

(2) Someone has a great idea and then rapes it to death (forgets the original vision they had because they put so much glitter and cream on it).

(3) The leader lets people start to walk all over his plan. As soon as that happens it’s too late. Gnomes and robots are going to crop up quicker than a DMT trip.

None

Launcher111

March 26, 2020 07:38 PM

It's extremely difficult to get a functional developer group together. You work on a project that everyone agrees on and they are to busy building pong 2.0… along with a lemonade stand game thinking this is how they will become famous… that pong and a kids game would be the key to success. They had to be smoking Jefferies… Which the groups don't say up front.

So many groups want to build a game that is slightly different but almost none want to travel uncharted territory. Warhammer shadow of the horned rat, warzone 2100, xcom ufo defense, dungeons and dragons type games, strong hold type games, port royal, these are solid games, can update the format, change things around but the core concept is proven. The pay to win games are disgusting, inevitably the oldest players of the game have such powerful bonuses they are invincible by design. Which you may milk that game to death, but once its dead… its really gone. Like wise the sports games that come out year after year for a cash grab… they will always have fans… but the gimmick nature of it hurts the long term growth. People will get fed up with minor changes for 50-60 dollars a year… i did.. I know others have…

I enjoy when you have a group and they want to be paid 14-20 hourly… it's like… its a group…. They are not able to comprehend that it would cost tens of thousands of dollars… at that point they are employees, and it isnt a group. They want all the reward and none of the risk… which yeah… what a team….

If you have a fun project in mind, with nontraditional and obscene characters, probably save time and message me.

throwawaydev

Author

March 27, 2020 11:29 AM

@organicpencil I will probably post the browser game here soon. ? Need to scrape together some change first. Webservers are cheap but not free. I mean it's not much but it adds up anyway. ? Blessed are those who have no running costs.

Jolanxbl

March 29, 2020 12:03 PM

That sounds like an awesome mmo! Something less ‘Arcade’ and more casual, but hopefully easier to get into than what's put out now. How about just a single or 2-player adventure for now, then develop the rest in the background? This is an excellent thread to read.

Spencer Lockhart

March 29, 2020 02:14 PM

@throwawaydev Yeah, I can relate a lot to what you're going through here. Congrats on completing a few games. I've never made anything to show for my nearly 20 years of indie development. I feel like a competent programmer, but my graphics skills are trash.

I used to be full of inspiration and an endless supply of ideas, to the point where that guy with an idea over there who thought he had some big huge game idea with 0 skills and was gonna get rich off of my programming experience, well that guy had nothing. I still kinda feel that way, but I can't even get inspired enough to have an original idea anymore. Idk what happened to me.. I turned 30?

Anyway, if you want any help, I'd love to pitch in where I can. I've got a full time job and all, even through all the craziness going around, but yeah.. I'll help where I can.

totesmagotes

180

March 31, 2020 12:06 AM

You should check out "Yahtzee's Dev Diary" on Youtube. He constantly had projects he left unfinished, so he decided to build 12 games in 12 months using game maker. I'm not saying you should necessarily do exactly that, but it's worth a look at. The point is to build a small scope project within a small amount of time and then leave it alone.

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I'd like to rant about my gamedev experience. (5 years+)

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I'd like to rant about my gamedev experience. (5 years+)

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