Monday, February 9, 2015

Doing and learning - my plan so far

Well, I'm still fixing the laptop in which I have my games so I won't share a new game yet but I really don't want to stop posting here, so I will share what is my vision so far about what I want to do here, you might find it useful if you are starting in the game dev world.

When I was 13 (I think) I started my first game using RPG Maker 2003, working on it was wonderful and I was really trying to make the perfect game for me, there is a long story about that but I don't want to go that way now. The point is that I spent about 5 years working on it from time to time, then I stopped doing it for a while, and about two years later started another project, it was not exactly a game, it was not exactly a PC gadget... well, there a long story about that too, and for now I'm not going to go that way either, I will just say that I worked on this project for about 3 years.

So, I could say I have 8 years of experience creating games, but it would be inaccurate and pretentious. I definitely learnt a lot of things in those two projects, but there is a learning curve that indicates how much you can grow in a single project.


The more you learn, the more you can do, the more you repeat what you know to do you get better doing it, but you stop learning new stuff. As you can see in that simple graph at the beginning you are basically a poor useless baby guided by Google to make your first horrible drawings, flooding forums with newbie questions and experimenting with whatever you think would be useful. Time passes and you learn some stuff, that stuff can have you busy for a while, you start your journey with some drafts in your mind and create your first works. After a while you feel really comfortable doing what you learnt to do, but maybe you don't even bother in look again and find if there are new and more effective ways to do what you already know to do.
Chances are that by that time you will have a long term project in mind that needs a lot of work, if that is the case you can spend a lot of time doing things you already know to do, and not learning much.

Obviously this is a simplistic way to view it, probably you are learning less stuff, but the few things your learn are complex and difficult to conceive for a rookie... anyway, it's dangerous to take this way if you are not looking to become a very specialized person doing those very specific things you know to do.

Why am I explaining this? well, as I said at the beginning I wanted to explain what I'm trying to do with the projects in this site (I know I have uploaded just one so far xD, but promise I will upload some other game as soon as I fix my computer).

I want to make some fast projects, different styles, different types, different platforms. Then improve them based on your feedback and take each project as far as people ask, or at least as far as I feel proud of the result :P. I'm planning to take a Non-Zero Week approach, i.e. I will try to post some progress here at least once a week.

I already know I can fall in love with a single project and stick to it for years, it's time to take a different approach and experiment a little more. I'm specially interested in experimenting game design ideas, gameplays, how to make an appealing game, how to make them fun, how to teach the players to play the games, how to transmit the sensations I'm looking to transmit to the players, even how to explain some philosophic ideas. I'm not discarding experimenting different technologies too, but that is not my main learning objective for now.

Would be great to know what you think about this project, so please leave your comments below!

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