Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer
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For many years one of my favorite talks about indie games development was Jonathan Blow's speech at UC Berkeley CSUA (2011) (http://the-witness.net/news/2011/06/how-to-program-independe...)

Initially I loved his main message during the talk: "You have to be brutally effective to finish a project in a reasonable amount of time."

But there's a part in the Q&A that later grew to be even more poignant to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjDsP5n2kSM#t=1h13m8s

> Q: You said you worked on many projects before Braid which didn't quite get completed. What was special about Braid which made you complete it?

> A: What was special was it had been a long time since I'd finished anything on my own, and I sat down and decided that "Dammit I'm going to finish something this time". And, "To that end, so I can finish this, I'm gonna make something that is technically pretty simple"...

For some of us, it's REALLY HARD to complete a side-project while working full-time job. For most of my career I had completed a real game only when it was for a job (or for a client) and I worked on it full-time.

The single reason I hadn't made a game as a side project was because I'd quit before I finished. I finally figured out something that worked for me, and it was counter to all the advice I'd heard. I'm sure this is different for other people, but for me the key to working day after day consistently (not quitting) on a project while working full-time was to eliminate all the "shoulds".

When my conscious brain is always telling myself that I should do the project a certain way, my subconscious rebels and suddenly I become unproductive. There's a ton of great advice out there such as: "Don't reinvent the wheel, build your game not a game engine." The problem is sometimes my subconscious wants to build the game engine, not the game. I can coerce it to do the right thing when it's for an employer, but it's a different story for a side project.

Ever since I stopped "should-ing" myself, I've become much more consistent and productive on side projects. If you want to make games on your own as an engineer, but are having trouble forcing yourself to spend a couple hours every day on it, then I'd suggest that you try to just code whatever the hell you want to code instead of the thing you're supposed to code. You may find, like I did, that it's better to gain some coding velocity, because this velocity gives you the momentum fly over humps that you weren't able to overcome back when you were trying to start working on your game from a standstill.

- Say, I know what I want to build exactly where do I start? a.k.a -- What's the equivalent to starting at the DAO / API layer and building the integration later, in the gamedev world?

- I know I'd like to make games, where do I start coding?

I focused a lot in the article about that first question (and only briefly alluded to prototyping, etc.) -- mostly because I was interested in the theoretical question of engineering practices.