Jul 10 (edited) in Consystency!
The Pressure to Deliver Bigger & Better
When game development students graduate, one of three things happen:
A) they immediately get hired at a game studio.
B) they take a break to recover from college burnout, and then they start applying to jobs
C) they take a break, and the break never ends.
Chances are that most of you here fell into either B or C, and if you did that's okay, I did too.
I didn't try to make a new game until the temp job I landed reminded me that it was, well, a TEMP job.
Suddenly I found myself scrambling for a job with no new skills or projects to show since my graduating.
I even tried making my own games, but it had already been so long since my last project that I made many of the same mistakes that beginners make that prevent anything from truly getting finished.
It wasn't until after 6 months of unemployment, and 15 months after I graduated that I learned what was causing me to struggle.
I wasn't consistent with starting and finishing games.
Believe me, I was working on something every day of the week for those 6 months, but the problem is that I was trying to make games that were too big for me to complete.
You could even say I had a scoping problem, and you'd be correct.
In my second year of college my professors had us make 14 games in 7 weeks, and in my third year we made 10 in 15 weeks!
But in my final year we had to create 1 game in 10 months. Just. One. Game.
So adding 10 months to work on one game alone with the 15 months I'd spend trying to create another game on my own, you bet I felt the pressure to produce something PERFECT after all this time.
" The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. "
Even being unemployed and not in school, I had a completely empty schedule, yet not one game would be finished.
That is, until I entered into my first game jam. With the help of two teammates, we made a game from start to finish in just 2 weeks.
There were many things about the game I wanted to be better, but after seeing people enjoy the game we made anyway, I realized something important:
I never had a time management problem, but I DID have a consistency problem.
Had I not tried to create such a big game to justify the amount of time I spent away from making games, who knows how many smaller games I could've made?
And who knows how much knowledge I could have gained, skills I could have honed, and experience I could have accumulated with each game?
When you're in college, you have your classmates and your professors remind you of when to start and finish your games.
But when you're a post-graduate who doesn't have a manager at a games job? You have to be your own reminder to consistently make games.
You don't need to have a job at any studio to be a game developer, but you DO need to, you know, develop games to be one.
They don't have to be great games, but they do have to be your best game each time.
Quantity births Quality. Consistency births Creativity.
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The Pressure to Deliver Bigger & Better
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