Open thread, 11-17 March 2014

David_Gerard

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Yeah, I am already working on my own games. I worked on one for two hours earlier today.

My eternal problem is that I can only think big. When I was a little kid I would constantly envision these 1000-page epics I was going to write, type about seven pages or so, and then get bored and start a new project the next week. I constantly try to come up with ideas for small, fun little games that I could realistically make by myself in a few months but I can never come up with anything that appeals to me even a little. My current project seems like it will take a few years to complete and it will in all probability never see the light of day since I have never actually completed a game before. This is the most irrational habit I have and I hate it but I don't know how to stop.

EDIT: I typed this out in the hopes that somehow the act of writing it down and LW users commenting on it would kick my brain into realizing how irrational it was being, and it worked exactly as planned. I will start working on a small project starting tomorrow. Thanks guys.

Hi, I worked in the game industry for a while. I worked on AAA titles, indie stuff and semi-indie. I'm not a designer though.

I would say that the best way to become who you want to be is to make many of your own excellent SMALL indie stuff and work your way up from there. Fortunately you're in the right double major! Build your own games, from scratch, over and over again until you produce something really good. Make little 24 or 48-hour games for hackathons, ludum dare, global game jam, etc. I can't give you better advice than to simply scale down your am... (read more)

6chaosmage12y

Can you contribute art to other people's game projects? Battle for Wesnoth proved big games can be made the open source way, so there got to be projects like that out there, and art isn't a skill many programmers have. You'll build portfolio, and maybe gain allies for future bigger projects of yours.