Do you want to develop games for the soul? By approaching this process as a serious project, you will get quick results and can capitalize on your hobby. Not a bad prospect? Then learn from the mistakes of others and use our advice from game animation company – Whimsy.
Table of Contents
1. Don’t make games without passion
Being passionate about the project you are working on is a clear advantage. It will take you through difficult trials, when development becomes more difficult, when you feel recessionary and even reluctant to work on a project. No one is immune from burnout, and without being passionate about your project, you cannot overcome this barrier.
Passion and excitement are needed in development as well as in logistics, management and completion of tasks.
2. Start small
When it comes to your own play, fun can be compared to a child’s delight! Don’t be a kid and make big plans.
MMOs, dragons, robots and big games are cool when there is a lot of experience. Do you have little idea about serious gaming? Then you will not be able to estimate the time it takes to realize everything that your violent imagination has given birth to. So, you run the risk of taking a deliberately impossible project, for a period of ten or twenty years of work alone.
Imagine that these ten, five, or even two years of development will lead to nothing. You will be greatly disappointed. That’s why it’s important to start small. This does not mean that you cannot add something “such” to the game. This means starting with a playable version, a stripped-down prototype, or just a small game.
3. Grow constantly
Speaking of correct self-esteem: constant growth will help you understand the level of your knowledge.
The developer must constantly grow
Honing skills non-stop is the key to professional growth. Feelings of complacency are deceiving, as has been said. Happy with what you have? Be careful – you are not progressing! In other words, there is always room to grow, what to learn and improve in yourself.
For comparison, let’s take a typical employee who goes to work every day and does a good job. You can be content with this position and not upgrade.
4. Consider the target audience
Are you ignoring marketing? A huge mistake!
You won’t please everyone, so you need a target audience. You need the average player that the game is aimed at. Otherwise, you will come across opposing opinions, even from testers.
The target audience will help to abandon what is not needed, to form a specific product from a set of vague requirements and desires. Take care of this early in development.
Ideally, the role of testers should be played by people associated with the game market or with an understanding of how to develop games. They are able to provide useful feedback on deeper aspects of the game, such as mechanics, physics, etc.
Marketing is another skill to be learned. You won’t be able to “just throw” your product on the Google Play / Apple Store and get millions of downloads. This is another illusion that must be abandoned. Successful apps are backed by equally successful marketing campaigns.
5. Don’t build the engine – build the game
If you want to develop games, develop games, not technology. There is nothing wrong with a native engine when you remember that your ultimate goal is the game. If you get carried away with the engine and related technologies seriously, you may never get to the game.
A 2D platformer engine can take up to two years of continuous development. Of course, you can build it; write a system of entities, tools and burn out.
Remember that engines and technologies were in demand before. Today there are many engines, tools and resources available for your own purposes.
6. All in good time
Refactoring and optimization are the final stages of development, at which you can afford detailed edits to the code, functions and shortcomings of the game. In theory, maybe. In practice, code improvements often start early in development, and this is a big mistake.
By the end of development, the project undergoes so many changes that there is no trace of early optimization, and you are forced to optimize again. Already realized that this is a waste of time and effort?
Don’t get caught up in a cycle of endless improvements – this robs the project of progress, forces you to redo what you already have.
7. Just start developing games
To conclude, we will get by with a short piece of advice that sounds like this: Don’t delay the development of the game. Turn to game development studio. Surely you often hear that it takes practice to learn programming, and this is true. Through the practice of programming, the barriers of uncertainty in one’s own:
- skills;
- complexity of development;
- lack of time are overcome.
By putting off ideas until later, you are delaying your progress.
