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Should I pursue game Development?

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19 comments, last by Tom Sloper 7 years, 8 months ago

So I realized that I left out something extremely relevant in my OP. The biggest thing that launched me into game development was actually an online course. It is a great crowdfunded course with dozens of hours of video tutorials. It is a complete Unity Development class and I completed five separate game projects during that course. It was incredibly cheap at the time and seemed like a no brainier just to get my feet wet. Having said that I would still say even though I've spent a few hundred hours learning to code and creating half a dozen games, I am definitely still a huge newb. The games I made in order were: a simple number guessing game, a text adventure, a brick breaker, a top down shooter, and a plants vs zombies clone.


Doesn't change my replies.

-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

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Honestly,

The only relevant thing in the new info that would effect our positions would be how long was the course, and how long did it take you to make each game?

I love online interaction, I do, It's part of my passion, but online education has a long way to go, before I'd consider it anywhere near the quality of results compared to in person instruction.

If yall really knew me, you'd know how deeply ironic this is...

With the quality of communication with gaming, online education has loads to learn.

I'm not paying a couple K a year for forum communications, and maybe once a week on skype.

It's just a huge waste....

Anyways.

You might want to update this thread with what you PMed me, since from the time you responded to me above, it looked like you were embarrassed at our positions, and on the defensive.

Our company homepage:

https://honorgames.co/

My New Book!:

https://booklocker.com/books/13011.html

My PM to GeneralJist: I actually really appreciated your post. Being so honest and forthright is definitely what I was and am looking for. I am going ahead for now developing my game. I am having a good time as of now, so I don't see much reason not to keep at it. Who knows how far I will take it, but I certainly feel more comfortable with c# every day and have been loving all the logic puzzles. I have definitely realized how much I enjoy the development side of game design. The struggle I have experienced is just with getting a handle of the language and syntax of c# itself. Everyday I get a bit more comfortable with different parts of c# and thus have more and more fun, and spend less time debugging.

How long was the Course? 45 hours of video instruction. I spent well over 100 hours completing the 2D portion of the course twice. I really don't know how many hours I actually spent because I did it in my free time over the course of about 6 months. I took a few breaks in the course due to a hospitalization and other life issues. It was a blast to create the projects and they really challenged me.

Update on my project. I have been spending 4-6 hours a day working on it the last few weeks and it is really coming along. I just yesterday built my first rudimentary procedural generation engine. It loads the destructible objects into the scene and every time there is a random number of them I can control based on a variable chance, their rotation and position are also randomized to give the levels an organic looks. I am emboldened by my progress lately and will definitely continue full steam ahead. I have a pretty good grasp of bug fixing now and am never stuck on one bug for more than a half hour or so. Every day I implement a new feature or two and am getting excited to be able to have my friends and family sit down to my first reasonable alpha to start getting feedback. That includes the artist and musicians I intend to collaborate with. I will update this post as I make meaningful steps towards finishing the project. Thank you all very much for your help.

Sorry about the sporadic nature of my posts, I definitely was not feeling defensive or hurt by anyone's post. You have all been realistic and honest. I absolutely appreciate that.

It sounds like idle fantasy at this point for you, honestly. Would you be ok if you spent 3 years working on a solo game as a beginner, and it netted you maybe $1,000 a year after release?

That's a realistic estimate of something that could completely throw your life off track.

Get a stable job and treat game development as a hobby until you produce things worth selling.

I have a full-time job. And I am not intending to work any less or change jobs unless I can find something better. Game development is a long term dream, not a short term job change.

Every day I implement a new feature or two and am getting excited to be able to have my friends and family sit down to my first reasonable alpha to start getting feedback.

I would consider using people you don't know to get 'true' feedback as friends and families are less likely to be critical. At such early stage, it's crucial to get true feedback as you don't want to find out later when you've spent more time fleshing out features that you thought were 'fine'.

I have been spending 4-6 hours a day working on it the last few weeks and it is really coming along

Be careful of burn out. With a full time job + 4-6 hours every day, that is a pretty large load of work.

Steven Yau
[Blog] [Portfolio]

@Bosor,

I would not update this thread with your progress.

Unless you want to continue the discussion of if you should pursue game development, updating us on your progress from time to time that your still going at it honestly proves little. (It makes it sound like your telling us, just to hope to change our minds, seeing you've stuck to it for X time, or accomplished X benchmark, looking for our approval.)

I'd suggest you to create an account and project page on:

http://www.indiedb.com/

(that integrates with all of indiedb and moddb)

Grants you access to a huge community of devs and modders.

As said, unless you want to continue the discussion, and ask for advice, just do what you do, and see how far you get.

Our company homepage:

https://honorgames.co/

My New Book!:

https://booklocker.com/books/13011.html

Well I must say, thanks again GeneralJist. You are ever helpful. I will definitely check out that link. And as it happens, I do have a question for you folks.

I have started the process of creating a procedural level generating engine and ran into the problem where when you use the typical random method it creates the same sequence because its always the same base seed from your system clock. I have looked online for some ways to create my own custom random number generator and it seems like it may be best to use the cryptography based random number generator. I have read that the downside to that method is that its very slow, would that slow down or impede the performance of my game too much? It seems like it may be overkill but the more simple fixes I have come across have not seemed to work. Most of the info is very outdated and does not work with the current Unity version. I am using c#. Thanks guys!

.... Post links to that information, because it's wrong.

Using a random seed based on system time will cause it to generate a different result set as long as the system clock's changed.

This isn't unity specific.

I guess I didn't explain my problem very well. Sorry. I didn't even realize it was a thing until I noticed that my level structures seemed very non-random. I generate 30 different objects inside a script in the start function. They are a random object from 3 choices, which seems to work well or at least I don't notice a repeating pattern. It also gives them a semi random position offset from the position parent object, also seems to work fine.

The issue is that the pattern that appears on the screen when the level is loaded is the same every time the level is loaded. It was quite random the first time, but upon subsequent attempts at the same level, the objects are in the same pattern. Basically the function loops and asks if a position has an object or not, if it doesn't it tries to make one. Or rather, if it hasn't attempted to make one.

Relvlent code:

private int RNG()
{
return Random.Range(1, 100);
}
void SpawnUntilFull()
{
Transform freePosition = NextFreePosition();
if (freePosition)
{
MoveRandomly();
RandomAngleGen();
if (RNG() <= chance30hp)
{
chosenGameObject = asteroid30hp;
}
else if (RNG() <= chance20hp)
{
chosenGameObject = asteroid20hp;
}
else if (RNG() <= chance10hp)
{
chosenGameObject = asteroid10hp;
}
if (RNG() <= spawnChance)
{
GameObject destructible = Instantiate(chosenGameObject, (freePosition.position + moved), Quaternion.Euler(0, 0, angle)) as GameObject;
destructible.transform.parent = freePosition;
}
}
if (NextFreePosition())
{
Invoke("SpawnUntilFull", spawnDelay);
}
}
Transform NextFreePosition()
{
foreach (Transform childPositionGameObject in transform)
{
if ((childPositionGameObject.childCount == 0) & (!childPositionGameObject.CompareTag("Attempted")))
{
childPositionGameObject.tag = "Attempted";
return childPositionGameObject;
}
}
return null;
}

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