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  • What part of game making do you tend to crash and burn on?

We all have parts of the process that makes it hard to finish.

What I struggle with:

Trying to do something the way I used to another game engine. This costs me time and headaches. It wasn't until I decided to forget about how I used to do things and just focus on how Godot does things that things became easier.

For me it's tutorial hell on 3d assets. I am not a good 3d artist and absolutely loathe blender as it is not intuitive for at all. I only make primitive 3d art anyway. So I use sketchup, tinker cad, shark cad, and anim8or instead.

Next to that is when I get an idea for a game or game feature- but the developing that idea turns into a designer block, where as it becomes difficult to decide a direction. I can actually shut down for days or weeks or even drop the project when this happens. How I overcome this is I work on design doc and play games that have the same ideas and see how they implemented it. And discussing this with people and seeing what they think.

Lastly trying to find documentation or examples of things I want to do- many times nobody has posted an example or video, or its buried inside of 1 hour video. And I lose enthusiasm. Until I find the resource or solve the problem I wonder "Why am I doing this game?"

What I love:

I love the game design- when I have a clear vision I love writing the game design docs, flowcharts, game parameters, working out art and music theme etc.

I love when I learn new skills. These give me tremendous boosts to my morale.

I love problem solving, with a passion. Like a terrier with a bone, I will chew on the problem obsessively until I have it resolved.

I love the marketing, website building, and franchise building of a game.

What about you what do you love and hate about game making?

I can't finish anything. I've been programming for 25 years, and have enough experience to work on a AAA game, but it's just so hard to finish anything. Games take a lot of work and patience, I mostly work on demos and get something playable and then abandon it. So that is an important skill.

I really like that there is always something new to learn and explore with game development. I think its awesome that even if you are really skilled, there is always a new and interesting topic to explore. I remember when I stumbled across procedural generation in game development! Really fun stuff and in that topic alone there are many different avenues to explore.

For struggles, I'd say the biggest block I have issues with 2D art. I can do really basic pixel art, but I'm just not comfortable with it and end up really feeling anxious about the results. I don't mind UI and GUI stuff, but 2D game art for me is often a struggle, though it's gotten better with practice.

@cybereality said: I can't finish anything. I've been programming for 25 years, and have enough experience to work on a AAA game, but it's just so hard to finish anything. Games take a lot of work and patience, I mostly work on demos and get something playable and then abandon it. So that is an important skill.

Same! I have a hard time taking a project past the demo or game-jam size stage.

I hate having to limit the cool mechanics in my game design to fit my programming abilities. It can really ruin my motivation, and ruin a good game idea.

For me it's tutorial hell on 3d assets. I am not a good 3d artist and absolutely loathe blender as it is not intuitive for at all. I only make primitive 3d art anyway.

I'm a longtime blender user, so I'm curious. What makes blender not intuitive? I might be able to help with some of the issues . (also, have you used it since 2.8?)

I can't finish anything.

My game was almost finished two months ago. I've been stuck trying to motivate myself to complete the last few details. :wink:

I thought Blender sucked for a while, but it's actually really good (at least after 2.8).

I was a big 3DS Max user for a while, though I used Maya in school and ended up thinking it was better. I subscribed to the Maya LT for several years at $35/month but ended up cancelling it cause I wasn't using it enough. Then I tried Maya Indie, which is the full version of Maya but for people making under a certain amount. I think that was like $250/year. Not a bad deal, but again, I wasn't using it enough to justify the cost.

Blender is actually really good and comparable in features to Maya (sometimes even better, like with EEVEE) but it takes some time to learn how it works. The hotkeys are not industry standard (though you can change them) and some things are confusing at first but actually faster once you know them. So it is very powerful and I would say the best 3D package available today and it's free.

Interesting fact, Tony Derose from Pixxar, is quoted saying:

"Blender can do almost everything Pixxar's in house software can do.... "Somewhere out there, a brilliant kid and their friends are working in their garage, using and improving on tools like blender... They will be the next Pixxar."

Also, I will defend blender to the death! =D

Btw, I'm in no way trying to attack you, @jbskaggs or discount your opinion. If someone told you that Godot was awful, you'd feel obligated to defend it as well. =)

@OpinionatedGamer said: Interesting fact, Tony Derose from Pixxar, is quoted saying:

"Blender can do almost everything Pixxar's in house software can do.... "Somewhere out there, a brilliant kid and their friends are working in their garage, using and improving on tools like blender... They will be the next Pixxar."

Also, I will defend blender to the death! =D

Btw, I'm in no way trying to attack you, @jbskaggs or discount your opinion. If someone told you that Godot was awful, you'd feel obligated to defend it as well. =)

Blender is one hell of a tool, what I have seen done with it is amazing. But for me I just want a super simple system. It is just too much for me, Im more of place blocks more than a actual modeler.

I know I need to learn it- but thats the problem for me, just learning the godot engine takes up much of my time. I have ver 2.9. have not tried to actual model on blender since 2010 or so.

Oh, that makes a lot more sense. Yeah, it takes a while to learn, but it's worth it in the end. But yeah, makes sense to focus on Godot.

Me seeing you guy's skillsets versus mine It makes me ponder the contradiction of how much you guys know and can do vs what you do. I saw this in woodworking as well. But the same thing here- finishing projects becomes very hard for me no matter how expert I become. By the time Im close to finishing something I am usually tired of that project and want to do something different.

I'm a longtime blender user, so I'm curious. What makes blender not intuitive? I might be able to help with some of the issues . (also, have you used it since 2.8?)

Maybe Ill take you up on some tutoring. Blender has been the one thing I have never been able to self teach.

Hi. I am currently stuck and struggled on the simplest of things, such as moving my sprite toward the mouse cursor , rotation, vector2, basically everything. I realized that I might not be as stupid as I thought I was after following the 2d tutorials(I am actually far more stupid). But most importantly, there is a simple game that I just have to make. It is my own take of the genre. There are a lot of game out there but this one is mine!

@bunnydefluff said: Hi. I am currently stuck and struggled on the simplest of things, such as moving my sprite toward the mouse cursor , rotation, vector2, basically everything. I realized that I might not be as stupid as I thought I was after following the 2d tutorials(I am actually far more stupid). But most importantly, there is a simple game that I just have to make. It is my own take of the genre. There are a lot of game out there but this one is mine!

Yep I go thru that. if you wanna post your code I could look at it. When I started going from 2d to 3d there was a few times I was stuck.

@jbskaggs Thanks I appreciate all your help from everyone around here, especially cybereality, luckily I am all out of noob question to ask of late, I will keep you in mind when I face another noob challenge learning the tutorials. By the way 3d is completely out of my league and I hope you guys all the best dealing with blender or such 3d things : )

I would recommend Udemy if you want to learn Blender or really anything you want. The material is significantly better than free YouTube videos, and they have sales all the time, you can get like 100 hour courses for $10. This one on Blender is only 30 minutes, but it teaches you the basics well to get started. You can also just search stuff on the page, they have Black Friday sale right now. https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-the-basics-of-blender-in-just-30-minutes/

I wonder if other people get burned out here: getting the game functionality halfway done and then starting to think most of the code should be implemented differently? For me a huge source of burnout is not finishing a specific script in one go. If you do it in one go all the logic is clear in your head and you don't have to sift through it the next day. The trick there I guess is eating away at the project in smaller modules. I finished my information sharing script in one day and it's always worked like a charm. Another script for simulating power consumption I did over a few days which meant it turning into a week of fixing and updating and reevaluating.

By far the biggest source tho for me has been UV maps. The help I've gotten on here tho has kept me sane.

@cybereality said: I would recommend Udemy if you want to learn Blender or really anything you want. The material is significantly better than free YouTube videos, and they have sales all the time, you can get like 100 hour courses for $10. This one on Blender is only 30 minutes, but it teaches you the basics well to get started. You can also just search stuff on the page, they have Black Friday sale right now. https://www.udemy.com/course/learn-the-basics-of-blender-in-just-30-minutes/

Yeah there are some great courses there. Never pay the full price tho, you can get them for 12 or less all the time, they go on sale every month.

I've never done programming or game development but I have some 3d animation experience. I failed the blender hype the first time but now I am catching up. Blender can do so much but you have to understand that you are in the Blender's world and you have to follow its rules to do things, same as Godot and GDscript.

If you've never done 3D you got a huge Blender mountain ahead of you. But at least you are well equipped since there are so many docs, tutorials, examples and free assets to play with (I just finished learning rigging a hand this past week) so just take little steps each time and you will be fine.

I wish Godot had more visual examples for codes in their docs (like blender has video showing how to use its tools) It would make things a lot easier

Udemy? I have a course on there on making a lich skull (demi lich) in 2d in krita with only a mouse. :) Udemy is a good system.

I have also discover if I write, code, or draw to an audience I get things faster and more thoroughly than by myself alone. So posting updates and discussions here really help me proceed with projects