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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.