Hurt | Gamedev Brain

If You Aren’t Doing the Happy Dance, Do Something Else

Posted on July 21, 2015 by magicrat_larry

Life is not easy, being a creator makes it harder. Make sure that you are happy with what you are doing. Game development is creation, you take nothing but an idea of an experience and start typing code that to a normal human being would be unrelated and, BOOM, experience comes out. If that doesn’t make you do the happy dance, do something else.

I mean it, if you are not jumping out of your chair and dancing, or at least holding your hands in the air wanting to shout…

I’m the greatest programmer alive!!!

If it doesn’t, then maybe you have the wrong hobby. It gets rough, it gets terrible even. You will think you cannot do it. You are wrong, but only if success makes you do this…

See the only reason game development is so rewarding is because there are times where things all fall apart. It crushes you, and makes you feel very small.

The thing is, directly after that, if you make it through, you hit the highest of highs. You defeat that crushing moment and feel like king of the world. You take down what seems like a dream killer, and you elevate yourself to seemingly one of the best in the world at problem solving. You stand up on the mountain and you simply dance, mostly alone, but you dance none the less. For a moment you are in game developer heaven.

So if you are in it for anything other than this, get a different goal. You won’t make money here, unless you love it. You need to understand the highs and lows, the crushing defeats, and the elevation of the successes. Really think about game development, do you love the lows? Can you get through to the highs? When you get there will you dance?

If the answer is no, get out. 🙂

Hello, Let me Grab This By the Face

Posted on July 7, 2015 by magicrat_larry

You know what I do? I see something, I learn it quickly, then I grab it by the face and never let go. Not sure if this is the right way to do things, but for game development it seems to be a good thing. See, I love the visual effects, so what did I do?

I saw games, said I wanna do that. I learned how to do it quickly just by doing things. I then grabbed it by the face and have never let go since. What do I mean by grabbing it by the face? Well, I mean that you don’t just do it, you live it. To really excel at something, you need to make it part of your life. Part of your life so much, that if you stopped doing it, you would be left with an empty hole.

So that is what I do, I constantly feel like I’m riding a raging bull an I love every second of it. Try it for a while and see how fun it is. Take something you like to do. Grab it by the face and see what happens. It’ll hurt, it’ll be exhilarating, but it’ll be worth every second of it.

Game Developer SMASH!!!!

Posted on July 4, 2015 by magicrat_larry

Let me explain this in three phases and I am sure all you game developers will understand.

Phase 1: The Plan

Today, my wife and daughter were leaving for about 4 hours and leaving me home to work on the game. Awesome!!! So the plan is to crank through the remaining physics task to get the car to not be completely jacked up by a collision with a human sized bug. So Seems easy, I can crank that out and maybe have some time to play a game or two afterwards. I’m excited.

Phase 2: Let’s Do This

I sit down after they leave and crack down on this physics thing. Turns out, this is not easy, go figure. I bust my butt on it for hours getting nowhere. No matter what I do I cannot get a good outcome. I have my car driving and the wheels literally flying off for no reason. I get frustrated, the doomed feeling sets in. I did nothing, I think to myself. Then I hear it, my wife and kid are home, 4 hours are gone, nothing to show for it besides the pure joy of pounding on code that was pointless. At this point my brain is jumping into the computer and killing all the bad things in violent, terrible, imaginative glory.

Phase 3: Just One More Go

I sit down, right after my wife and daughter go to bed. I open the laptop, look at the code and see a variable being set in some obscure location in our jacked up proof of concept code. I start playing with that variable. It turns out that is the most important thing in my life, I just didn’t know it. So now I am happy. What a strange way to be happy huh?

Some Days Just Hurt

Posted on July 1, 2015 by magicrat_larry

Today seems like one of those days. One of those days where things just don’t get done. I tried, but got nowhere, kind of day. I suppose I tend to have the other kind of day more than this, so that makes these days a bit harder to swallow.

I’m trying to get our physics for driving to balance. It is not easy to understand. The problem is I used other peoples math to get this all to “work” properly. Turns out their math tended to be a rigged in mess. So now I am attempting to clean that up. As you can tell, I got nowhere.

The best part is, that these days always build up to a moment where you physically throw your hands in the air and smile with glee when you fix the problems. That is the light at the end of the tunnel, and what we all do game development for. I look forward to that moment where this days setup becomes the foundation for a massive victory moment.