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What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

dylanwilson.net

21–30 of 128 posts

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#21
post #9

It's only a failure if you judge success by monthly income. I'm not saying that's not a good way to measure success, just pointing out that it doesn't have to be the only measure. A therapist told me this recently when I was struggling to find meaning in life. Success can be tons of stars on GitHub - I would feel very good if I had positively benefited that many people. I think a major downside of capitalism is how i…

Backyard gardening is riddled with inefficiencies in every imaginable way, and is not for everyone. The only tangible benefits I see are for people who receive positive benefits from the actual experience of doing the hard work and somehow use it to benefit others (directly or indirectly). If you're not sure that applies to you, stay away.

Same goes for a lot of other things. Sometimes you have no choice but to do stuff that sucks and really isn't helping anyone, yes. Try to keep it to a minimum.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#22
post #9

It's only a failure if you judge success by monthly income. I'm not saying that's not a good way to measure success, just pointing out that it doesn't have to be the only measure. A therapist told me this recently when I was struggling to find meaning in life. Success can be tons of stars on GitHub - I would feel very good if I had positively benefited that many people. I think a major downside of capitalism is how i…

Backyard gardening is riddled with inefficiencies in every imaginable way, and is not for everyone. The only tangible benefits I see are for people who receive positive benefits from the actual experience of doing the hard work and somehow use it to benefit others (directly or indirectly). If you're not sure that applies to you, stay away. Same goes for a lot of other things. Sometimes you have no choice but to do st…

I think this doesn't cover all the positives of gardening.

Getting sun (vitamin D, a tan, mood stabilizing effects of sun, sleep cycle stabilizing effects)

Fresh air (dopamine)

Increased backyard beauty (every time you look out your window you get to enjoy it)

Sense of accomplishment

Potentially fresh vegetables

A little bit more post-apocalypse skills lol

Contributing to local bee health

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#24

Failing is hard. I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often.

It is true that helping a child learn about resiliency is important. As Carol Dweck says, the brain is like a muscle and effort can eventually be rewarded with skill. So it is good to praise effort and persistence. And failure is part of life and needs to be dealt with.

That said, consider Alfie Kohn's writing, such as "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": https://www.alfiekohn.org/contest/

    "No Contest, which has been stirring up controversy since its publication in 1986, stands as the definitive critique of competition. Drawing from hundreds of studies, Alfie Kohn eloquently argues that our struggle to defeat each other -- at work, at school, at play, and at home -- turns all of us into losers. ... No Contest makes a powerful case that "healthy competition" is a contradiction in terms. Because any win/lose arrangement is undesirable, we will have to restructure our institutions for the benefit of ourselves, our children, and our society. For this [1992] revised edition, Kohn adds a comprehensive account of how students can learn more effectively by working cooperatively in the classroom instead of struggling to be Number One. He also offers a pointed and personal afterword, assessing shifts in American thinking on competition and describing reactions to his provocative message."
From the book:

    "If competitiveness is inherently compensatory, if it is an effort to prove oneself and stave off feelings of worthlessness, it follows that the healthier the individual (in the sense of having a more solid, unconditional sense of self-esteem), the less need there is to compete. The implication, we might say, is that the real alternative to being number one is not being number two but being psychologically free enough to dispense with rankings altogether. Interestingly, two sports psychologists have found a number of excellent athletes with "immense character strengths who don't make it in sports. They seem to be so well put together emotionally that there is no neurotic tie to sport." Since recreation almost always involves competition in our culture, those who are healthy enough not to need to compete may simply end up turning down those activities. ... Each culture provides its own mechanisms for dealing with self-doubt. ... Low self-esteem, then, is a necessary but not sufficient cause of competition. The ingredients include an aching need to prove oneself and the approved mechanism for doing so at other people's expense. ... I do not want to shy away from the incendiary implications of all of this. To suggest in effect that many of our heroes (entrepreneurs and athletes, movie stars and politicians) may be motivated by low self-esteem, to argue that our "state religion" is a sign of psychological ill-health -- this will not sit well with many people.(Page 103)"

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#25
Game engines is a really tough market to compete in given Unity and Unreal are now basically free. When I built the game that I launched on Steam I made my own game engine with the idea that I would open source it. The engine is now open source but when people ask about it I recommend they just use Unity instead.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#26

Game engines is a really tough market to compete in given Unity and Unreal are now basically free. When I built the game that I launched on Steam I made my own game engine with the idea that I would open source it. The engine is now open source but when people ask about it I recommend they just use Unity instead.

Do you have a link to your engine?

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'd definitely try to get my kid into sports so he can learn to lose early and often. So nobody, kid or not, wants to fail/lose all the time but after watching my three kids play lots of different sports the pain they feel after a loss is very fleeting and minor. The parents hold onto it for much longer; the kids just want to know if they can get ice cream.

I wish I could have figured out if I was good at Football. There were 120 people on the team and unless you were friends with the coaches kid, you never played. I was always first pick when doing 5th grade football because I could catch and was fast. Defense had 0 tryouts. There was literally 2 attempts at being a wide receiver. 0 attempts at being QB or lineman. I remember catching both passes, but maybe I wasn't fa…

You needed to join a real team to find out.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#28

Game engines is a really tough market to compete in given Unity and Unreal are now basically free. When I built the game that I launched on Steam I made my own game engine with the idea that I would open source it. The engine is now open source but when people ask about it I recommend they just use Unity instead.

Also Godot being 100% free, and while I haven't used it crazy extensively the 2d portion I have used it for was amazing.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#29

How did you get married and afford rent?

It was a side project. OP mentions he has a full-time job ... also, is marriage contingent on an income level?

If you want a quality partner then yes.

Re: What I Learned About Failing from My 5 Year Indie Game Dev Project

#30

My experience is that anything that spending significant amounts of your time on anything that assists others with building their thing is a total waste of time. Tech or otherwise. Those people are mainly doing it with the goal of making money for no one but themselves. The fact that they don't have money already proves that they likely are not good at making money. One of those primary early ways to make money is th…

I wouldn't say it's a waste a time, just that in tech industry people have a tendency to overrate "selling shovels in a gold rush" when they have about the same odds of success. ie. Making a successful game vs successful game engine
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