By Liam Sanchez, Logan Treboutat
Game development (gamedev) isn’t really one hobby. It’s more of a culmination of multiple hobbies that result in a video game. In order to be somewhat good at it, you need to be proficient in art, programming, 3D modeling, organization, music, and ambition. All of these skills create an extremely high barrier to entry. Problems like burnout, passive learning dependency, unimaginativeness, and lethargy are some of the issues that arise when starting. Throughout my time doing this hobby, I’ve learned ways to bypass these issues.
- Just try again: For me, burnout occurs when I spend too much time on system-based projects, or I just don’t add more stuff to the game in a while. Don’t be afraid of failure and just try again. Learn from your mistakes and don’t repeat them. Another way to avoid burnout is to play a video game in the same genre as the game that you are making. This way, you don’t feel completely lost when making the game.
- Content creators just want money: This is the same thing with stockbrokers, scammers, and hair stylists. They don’t want to help you; they just want to create an infinite cycle of commissions and problems. Don’t watch YouTube tutorials repeatedly. Just use your fragmented knowledge of the programming language to piece together a Frankenstein’s monster project. Now this requires creativity and problem-solving skills; however, in our generation, things like AI diminish this factor significantly.
- Abandon AI: Artificial Intelligence is a powerful learning tool if you know what you’re doing, but it usually enables habits of unoriginality, passive learning dependency, and loss of creativity. All the skills mentioned above don’t mean anything if you rely on a stupid robot to do all your work. It masks copying with productivity. So just leave it. Once you know how to do gamedev, then you can use it as a tool to enhance your work. Don’t give it prompts to give you the code or make a game idea for you. Otherwise, you’ll lose what you never had to begin with when you started using AI: the vision for the game.
- You need to have a friggin vision: The biggest problem is that people either want to make the next Baldur’s Gate game and have an unattainable vision, or they have no clue what they want to create. Another issue with most people beginning a creative hobby is that they don’t even know what they want to create. They would just spend time in a brainless purgatory rather than make something. Just create the most absurd concept for a game and then stick with it, or just copy others, like in every other art form.