How to make a game:
1 - Come up with ideas and start adding them to your project.
2 - ???
3 - Playtest, polish and release!
That’s what making a game is like.
It’s easy to start on a project.
Progress is quick!
With every hour you invest into it, features begin to add up and your project starts to
take form.
You expect to have it done by Christmas!
But then something happens.
Things start to slow down.
You hit unexpected problems.
Your deadlines begin to slip and the full extent of your project balloons beyond your
wildest expectations, the end fading out of sight.
Well done!
You’ve reached mid-development hell.
This is a much over-looked part of game development, invisible to the casual observer.
It is because of this that so many dream projects fail to become something, despite the developers
embarking on it with good intentions.
Indeed, this is where my own game, Destruction Darius 2, sits right now.
When I look at it it’s pretty much complete!
But I know that whenever I try to work on it right now, a new problem will suddenly
appear and will require a boring day or so to fix.
There is so much hidden work still to go before I can hope to finish it.
Don’t get me wrong, nobody finds this more frustrating than those working on the project.
You’d think that the hardest bit would be in adding stuff to the game’s foundations
in the first place!
And in a way, you’d be right: but I actually ENJOY that and the challenges it throws my
way.
What defeats me is the boring slog that comes after.
This is what sucks the enthusiasm for the project out of your soul.
As it begins to transition from an idea into an actual thing.
Any illusions in your mind about how good it could be are replaced with actual proof
of its mediocrity.
Not that your game’s bad!
It could be rather fun.
But it never lives up to your expectations.
And if it does then you might have been aiming too low in the first place.
So what are these unexpected roadblocks?
Let me give you an example.
I recently spent an entire day making it so that the edges of islands automatically smooth
themselves out.
AN ENTIRE DAY!
If you had asked me at the beginning how much time I would dedicate to such a task I- well,
it wouldn’t even have crossed my mind.
It’s one of those things that you can’t plan for.
You just work on a project and it becomes more and more apparent that you’ll need
to do this bit of boring work at some point.
You’ll dread it for weeks and months until you finally get around to it.
Then once you’ve done it you feel all proud of yourself.
Even though you know that nobody will notice it and will look at you kind of funny if you
try talking about it as if it’s worth mentioning.
I mean that’s just one example.
You get chicken-and-egg things as well, like the character creation screen.
Cos you’ll need to make the skins to be able to code it in the first place, but you’ll
only have to redo them later on if you botch what they look like now.
But you don’t want to have to draw the final character models until the rest of the game
is finished, because that’s when you’ll begin to focus on the art style of the game.
But you can’t reach that stage until the character creation is done.
EUGH.
What this means is that you’ll spend weeks or even months grinding away on the game.
People will (hopefully!) ask you how you’re doing with it, you’ll show them and they’ll
look all disappointed and will say something like ‘oh it looks the same as it did last
time’.
Which kills you a bit inside!
Because you KNOW that it’s a lot better.
And a lot closer to completion.
Probably.
It’s hard to say when the end is still so far away.
So that’s what the mid-stage of game development is.
A long, hard slog.
The addition of unplanned, unrewarding features and unfathomable quantities of bug-swatting.
The boring sort.
It won’t last forever.
But it will feel like it will at the time!
At some point you’ll suddenly reach the home-run stage, where progress picks up again
and you the end goal appears on the horizon!
But until then you’ve just gotta stick with it, ignoring the temptations that new and
more exciting projects seem to offer.
Right now I’m looking at the time I’ve poured into Destruction Darius 2, thinking
that I could have made a far more exciting game in the time it’s taken so far.
Indeed, I begin to think that these dream projects could in fact be easier to make than
this game!
I’m sick of problems with the replay system.
In making a user-friendly campaign editor and in finding ways to combat the cheating
that will no doubt happen with the online scoreboards.
At least if I tried making Half Life 3 I wouldn’t have to worry about these things and would
be left with a far more exciting game at the end of it!
…But I’ve got to remember that any project will come with unexpected hold-ups.
My dream Half Life 3 project will also no doubt balloon far beyond what I expect, complete
with a set of boring problems of its own.
It’s just that until I reach those, I can’t see the problems and instead only see the
positives of working on such a project.
Come to think of it, it’s a miracle that I ever finished anything back when new game
ideas would leap at me every step of the way!
And that is why even the simplest of games take so much longer than expected to complete!
And even if you manage to reach that stage, nobody will care.
You WILL get shot down by everybody else.
Other people will think that your game is simpler than what they could manage.
Other game developers can be particularly nasty about this, thinking that just because
they’re so good at embarking on complicated game ideas that it suddenly puts them above
you and your simple finished projects!
…But it doesn’t.
Every game developer has experience on starting on a project.
Very few can say that they’ve finished them.
Even those who do, their finished games don’t reflect the full extent of their ability or
ambition.
They’ll likely have far more exciting and complicated ideas that they never finished.
These will remain as pipe-dreams until they can be carried through that long hard mid-development
slog.
Occasionally you’ll have a really productive day where you feel you’ve completed like
half of what’s left to do on it.
You’ll alternate between wanting to do that every day, and starting on a new project…
as though somehow that’s going to help you to avoid the middle stages of game development!
It won’t.
It will only delay the inevitable.
The solution is simple: bite the bullet, and do the hard work.
When it comes to mid-development hell, you just have to keep chipping away at it.
Day after day.
Whenever you’re sat on a train with nothing else to do.
When you’re waiting for a friend to come around, or just before you go to school in
the morning.
Completing your own game IS a fantastic and rewarding experience.
But you’re not going to enjoy every stage of making it, no matter how much you think
you will when you begin!
And take it from me, as somebody with a thousand unfinished projects with so much potential:
the next one isn’t magically going to be any easier.
Mid development hell is your game’s ultimate challenge that you have got to face.
Do it sooner, rather than later.
For yourself, and for that wonderful little project you’ve already lovingly invested
weeks in to.
Don’t let it become another unfinished prototype that haunts your past.
With hindsight, I’m not too proud of any of the things I didn’t finish.
I can see what they were trying to be.
All too clearly, in fact.
They’re always shameless rip-offs that defeated my attempts to copy.
I’m sure that the vast majority of these could have become something had I pushed on
with them, rather than to hope I found that magic spark earlier with my next project.
In a way, you never truly complete anything.
There’s always more that you could add.
But the games that I stuck with through mid-development hell, perhaps for long enough to get a few
levels finished, those, I was proud of.
They could be my trophy.
To finally lay that game idea to rest and to let me move onto other ones.
Without that empty, nagging feeling that I should try that old idea again.
Those are the projects that make their mark on my game making journey, clearly dividing
what came before from what came after on the timeline.
Sure, they all have flaws that I’d like to fix- but I guess that wanting to do that
is a thousand times better than wanting to start it again from the beginning, right?
Completed games are an asset.
Ones that you only get more proud of as you yourself get better and your standards, higher.
So when your interest in your project begins to wane, rejoice!
Now’s your chance to prove yourself.
Grit your teeth and fight your way through that mid-development hell.
Emerge the other side with a game that you can be proud of.
Do it.
If not for you, then for your future self.