INSPIRATION AND WORK ETHIC

Yeah. That totally didn't come out the way I intended it to, hehe >.<

When I say "fun" I didn't mean no work. One of the most exhaustive and challenging things I have done is build a video game. If you're not going to have fun doing it then don't even bother doing it at all- don't force yourself to finish something if you just don't care anymore.

As for the "being fun to make might be fun to play" sort of thing. This is something some of the real developers have told me, you know the ones that make big title games. Have fun with your work whenever you can, ect.

I wish I had your ability to find the fun in things.

Exactly, I didn't read tough textbooks and do hard practice for nothing. Like I'm saying. If

I would like to also reiterate that this is very false.

is true for you. You may or may not want to make games. There might be some fun in it, but I honestly think you should find something else you find always fun to do. Or if you like doing specific parts of a game and not others, try focusing on that. Or whatever.

I can honestly tell you I've even had fun writing Excel spreadsheets for games once. I'll write mathematical formulas for fun when I'm bored in class if it's for a game.

Or perhaps. It is because the way you do the particular thing you don't like is not the way you should do it. There might be a way to do it such that you do have fun. Being creative helps in finding out just what that is.

Generally speaking, the parts that I hate doing the most are the parts that players have the most fun with.

If you can come up with a way, you might want to rethink those parts such that they are fun to make. An easier way is to write tools that do it for you or abstract it in such a way that makes it fun.

Case in point, I got sick of writing documentation for code. No. I didn't sit there and do it anyway, I wrote something that did it for me. More challenging and more fun to do, and really rewarding too. But then, I sometimes have fun writing documentation- depends on many things really. The JAVA documentation was done this way.

Game design is something that's really close to my being (existence), and I've been doing it like it's a religion for.. 7 years or so. I'm beginning to lose count. Sometimes, I'll design games I never make because it was just fun to write on paper.

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Hey, not every aspect of creating a project will be fun. Sometimes you do just need to push through it. (Some strength training and endurance helps - I pump 10 chapsets a day, 30 reps)

It sounds like you are actually having fun. Are you sure? Personally I would rather pump 1 charset I had fun making and actually wanted to take my time in making (also resulting in higher quality, ideally of course) than me just gluing and hacking up tens of charsets. Or perhaps I just don't feel challenged. Making charsets still is kind of hard for me to do, but when it becomes easy to where I can just roll them out, I can think of additional things I can do to make them better and make it hard to do again.


I've also noticed that I tend to enjoy games where the person said "I made this for myself, really" versus the games where the designer tried to satisfy every whim of their players. Even games like The Most Stupidest Game Ever had some enjoyment value because it was something the designer made to be silly and stupid on purpose.

Despite this is a view shared by some real developers I look up to, there's many things I can attribute to myself. I'll state again that this isn't for everyone (as that's the general thing). I remember someone said "you know. Perhaps making games isn't for me". Actually you might remember that quote because it was on a game listed on the front page of RMN at one point.



What if the game I had fun making isn't enjoyed by someone and they tell me they don't like it? I think Shigeru Miyamoto's reponse to a situation like that very wise. He said he would simply tell them "I'm sorry" -Game Design Secrets of the Sages (2003 i think).

Why not have both?


Personally, I actually like just making things. I'll make things just to make things. I have finished things before, and to me it actually feels somewhat down because now I have to find something else to make. Sometimes I don't want to finish because I want to keep making. I think this is a true heart of an engineer.

Sometimes finishing is the opposite of rewarding to me. Of course it will annoy a ton of people if they manage to actually like one of my games. Or if I'm engineering for a job, I'm pretty sure the employer might want me to finish the product once it's reached a certain point of perfection.

But! Perhaps there is also a joy of finding something else to make, something new. Haaa! It's really exhilarating sometimes. I can talk about this forever, but really it would be great if you just understand the difference between doing work and doing a hobby. And what wondrous creations result when both are in perfect harmony- you work is your hobby. You will glady exhaust every bit of yourself to near collapsing but enjoy every moment of it!

I have to agree with the others here

to make a great game you're eventually going to have to work on somthing that you'd rather not .

Especially if you're one of those people who is:

1. not gifted in scripting, and thus has to rely on time consuming and tedious eventing work to get complex things (that will be fun for the player) completed, since you're unable to just write code that'll streamline things

2. does not find programming to be fun

the trick is to balance out what you're working on, mixing the things you enjoy with the things you find tedious, and keep in mind that the sense of satisfaction in seeing everything come togather is well worth it

also I think what those title developers meant is that if you are working on a game just because you have to, and not because you enjoy working on it, thehn you will get a mediocre product and the player can always sort of tell if the people enjoyed working on this or just went through the motions. That is never any danger with us amatuers because this is basically a hobby that we do in our spare time because we want to, if we aren't getting satisfaction out of what we're doing and aren't enjoying the process overall, then we will just stop and do somthing else. I'm certain every completed project here was a labor of love, how else did the makers possibly manage to finish it, they certainly weren't getting paid to do it

When I was in college, my Classroom Management teacher had a saying: "Find the joy. Find the joy in whatever you're going through, and find a way to be happy with that."

Maybe that's the difference here? Wolf, do you like everything about RPG making because you did from the womb (in which case, you lucky bastard) or did you decide you were going to like some of it, because there was no point in doing things you don't like? (In which case, how'd you manage it?)

Wolf, do you like everything about RPG making because you did from the womb

Actually, it's general game design I liked, but I find RPGs fun too. My first cognitive memory I can recall is my sister teaching me how to play Super Mario World (my family got into the games later than the regular NES). Still, I like to say I was born with a controller in my hand.

you basically claimed that any part of the game that was boring to make will be boring to play and that is just plain false

I did say it's a good indicator, but I didn't quite mean the statements to have complete strength. However, if it's a hobby, you have all the time you ever need to make the game, and you also can do anything you want. Making a game as fun as you can in all aspects from creation to play is the ideal thing.

You should pursue making the game fun, and having fun making the game. But you have to remember the person telling you this is someone who stopped caring about recognition or fame for completing something huge ever since they grew up. Now they care about placing the spirit of enjoyment into something.

I don't want to get into a stupid thing with you where we fill this whole topic with an endless string of asinine posts where we pick each other's giant essays apart, quote a million little sentences from them, with things like "read what I posted" written under them in response. This site has way too much of that as it is.

I absolutely love those, there's this forum section where I came from where almost every thread is like this. I love these kinds of threads because people actually think and learn stuff. They spend time to write posts and learn how to explain their ideas better. I find nothing asinine about it. In fact, it's one of the times where a forum truly shines and you don't see a chain ROFLCOPTER brain sludge posts.

I think this would be a good time to play "pass the hash".
because this is gonna turn into Forum War II pretty soon.

I don't see how theres a debate here, WolfCoder is making no sense.

I for one don't really much like starting new maps (especially exterior ones) because I find getting the layout
done pretty tedious. Once that's done however, I have loads of fun detailing the maps and adding lighting effects and all that jazz. So yeah, some bits are boring, but it's worth doing them to get to the fun stuff.