Ideas for start-up developers

[gatti]

I was thinking... When new individuals gain interset in game development and visit the site, should idevgames have an article that focuses on the fundamentals regarding what they need in order to be successfull in their development/journey?

The article (prominently accessible from the homepage) could provide the starting steps for those interested in any of the 3 core functions: code development, visual content creation, music/sound effect composition.

Perhaps it can be a total of 4 pages. An Intro page, and then 3 pages for the 3 main categories. Any thoughts? Does this already exist on the site?

[Nick]

I think that would help. I am going to college for a programming degree and plan to try and start my own developer company. I would like to know any key information that I'll need to make it in the world. Obviously I plan to keep a steady, decent-paying job until my company picks up, but the other things I may not know would help.

If it does exist, I've never seen it.

[BeyondCloister]

Large chunks, if not all, of my From Little Acorns or Taking Development a Step at a Time (http://www.createmacgames.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2&Itemid=26) article would also fit into this overview of things to watch out for and do. It is theory rather than actual code, but it should help some people from getting in too deep and giving up too soon.

[funkboy]

A good idea... who is interested in writing a rough draft up?
If I have time this weekend this would be a good writing assignment.

[Najdorf]

So your purpose is a tutorial on how to start making games or a tutorial on how to make games that sell?

In the first case, the task is not too hard, in the second case... good luck... I think to make a game that sells you need 1) a good conversion rate, which is obtainable through a good game 2) Many downloaders, which is obtainable by being famous, by having built a good reputation, or by advertising.

I really dont think the "corporate" strategies (discussed by dexterity software for instance...) are of any use... In my opinion Steve Pavlina's articles are completely worthless, he limits to saying stuff like "so if your conversion rate is 1% and you manage to get it to 1.5%, you will increase your sales by 50% in one day!" and that kind of stuff. I really can't understand how he managed to write 300 pages so utterly useless. Plus he does not tell you the actually useful tricks he uses.

Take danlab, he is a no-bullshit kind of guy that works hard, makes great games and after a while people noticed it and he is becoming one of the most succesful devs on the mac scene, and it's certainly not due to corporate strategy.

[Dan Potter]

Obviously I plan to keep a steady, decent-paying job until my company picks up

Unfortunately this is one of the top reasons why people's companies never do pick up. Once you get comfortable with a well-paying job, what's your motivation for working hard on stuff anymore? If you don't see it this way now, you will. I know I do, which is why I don't have more done :wacko:

If it does exist, I've never seen it.

Try the macsb list on YahooGroups. Good stuff.

[BeyondCloister]

Unfortunately this is one of the top reasons why people's companies never do pick up. Once you get comfortable with a well-paying job, what's your motivation for working hard on stuff anymore?

Motivation can come in the form of your employer messing up and the company going bust with no warning and leaving you £6k out of pocket due to unpaid pay and expenses. Once you have been in that kind of situation you quickly realise that no job is secure and you might as well take the same risks working for yourself but with greater reward.

Or it can come from being a contractor and your contract finishing due to a project finishing.

When this happens you can fall back on using your network of contacts you have built up during the 'comfortable' jobs and before you know where you are you have your development company up and running.

Once you get used to the feeling of freedom of not working directly from someone else then you will not want to go back.

[Nick]

My motivation is simply that I love programming and making games. It's my favorite hobby and I hope to turn it into my career someday. I just don't want to go broke and starve to death in the process. No one needs a starving programmer.

[Dan Potter]

Yeah, true... and it's not like I've quit my day job either. :D Just saying, it's a speed bump to watch out for.

[Nick]

I know it'll take some time away from coding, but the job I currently have and plan to have through college is working at GameStop so it's not that bad of a job to do programming around.

[funkboy]

I can understand some of Dan's idea, but I think the follow-up posts have shown many of the positives of having a "regular" day job.

I think the experience you gain on a 8-5 job is very, very important; learning how to work with others in a team, learning how meetings, communication, interpersonal things work out... it's one big learning experience that's invaluable. If all you do is work at home, you are missing a very important piece of the working experience... a piece that may make you appreciate certain aspects of working at home that you may not realized before, and a piece that you may miss working at home.

Balancing your 8-5 workday with development at home on the side can also really take a lot out of a guy; when I get home from work for the day, I just want to relax for a bit, take a break. But if I do a good job at taking a break, I'm usually thirsting to put some of my other ideas I can't apply at work to a game project at home.

Working at GameStop, where you're not writing code all day long (like I'm doing here at my summer job), would probably be even more helpful to keeping a coding project going at home - unless you're tired of talking about video games ;)

[Nick]

I can never get tired of games. Heck right now I have a fulltime job from 7am-4pm and then, only one or two days a week, I work from 5-10 at GameStop. But I need the money for college. Still time to code on the weekends :).

[Dan Potter]

I can never get tired of games.

I used to think that too. :wow: I'm still interested, but a lot less so than I used to be.

I agree that GameStop is a good day job to have while you're trying to start a game business. What funkboy said is what screws me up -- I have a coding job for a day job and by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is work on more code. And the work experience is definitely very useful if you haven't had it.

[funkboy]

I used to think that too. :wow: I'm still interested, but a lot less so than I used to be.
You may be on the wrong forum then... (http://www.idevapps.com)

Of course, you're at the right forum if you want your passion for games to be rekindled. It's like a love affair.

I agree that GameStop is a good day job to have while you're trying to start a game business. What funkboy said is what screws me up -- I have a coding job for a day job and by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do is work on more code. And the work experience is definitely very useful if you haven't had it.

I never understood why people would be so adverse to using a computer once they got home from work. It took working for 8 hours a day, where your job is to look at a computer, to understand their point of view.
Now if only we can go towards figuring out a way to fix this problem... but now I'm getting way off topic.

[Dan Potter]

Of course, you're at the right forum if you want your passion for games to be rekindled. It's like a love affair.

Yeah, true. I've been getting a little more interested in writing some apps lately rather than games, but it still doesn't compare interest-wise for me. Getting into writing Mac games was a big improvement for me, though. So much less BS to wade through to get to writing code and designing.

Now if only we can go towards figuring out a way to fix this problem... but now I'm getting way off topic.

Heheh.. I think it's a very relevant thing to think about though, if one is going to try to be a successful developer. There was actually a long discussion about this on the YahooGroups macsb list recently. Anyone who's interested in it can find it in the archives on the site.

[PowerMacX]

There was actually a long discussion about this on the YahooGroups macsb list recently. Anyone who's interested in it can find it in the archives on the site.

I just joined yesterday, although I have to say I really prefer forums over mailing lists!
Anyway, I found two very interesting polls about downloads & registration rates, but: the only way to see the results is by voting!. I'm not currently(*) selling any shareware, so I don't want to make up some random vote to see the results. Could you post them here? (assuming you can see them/already voted)

(*) and, back on topic, not in the near future at least, due to my day job... :\

[Dan Potter]

Getting pretty OT here... ;) But honestly I have only paid any attention to the mailing list, so I wouldn't know about the polls. Each one definitely has its place. The thing I like most about mailing lists is that I get to keep a permanent, searchable archive of all the communications :)

[Nick]

So is this "tutorial" going to explain all the aspects of beginning making the games, or things they need to know such as licensing, publishing, and selling games as well? Those are some of the topics I really need(ed) to know. I never knew a thing about licensing until a few days ago. And selling games? I have a PayPal account set up that can accept credit cards. That's the best I could come up with without anyone else telling me any ideas. To really help the beginners, this would have to be a full tutorial. It would start with designing the game, then creating the game, and then all the fun stuff after the game like licensing and selling. That'd be how you could really help beginners.

[BeyondCloister]

The tutorials need to be broken down into a series of tutorials.

The following would be a list to kick off some ideas and discussions:

* Designing a game
** Simple
** Advanced
* Coding a game
** Simple (my From Little Acorns article would fit in at the is level)
** Advanced
* Selling a game
** Doing it yourself
** Finding a publisher

It should be possible for someone to go straight to one of the main headings without having to read through all the other tutorials.

I think the most important thing would be that the articles are actually written and we do not end up with the case of spending months deciding on who is going to write what, where is to going to go and what colour should the links be.

If we end up assigning articles to people then they either don't end up finishing them or they get finished and end up in a limbo just like the uDevGame postmortems (this limbo is one of the reasons I helped set up CreateMacGames).

If more than one person writes something for the same topic then that is so much better. Someone just needs to take all the articles written for that subject and edit them into a single article. Another option is that we have each of the duplicate subject articles on the site and a bullet point type summary that gets edited every time a new article is added. (Before anyone jumps in with the, 'Why not use a Wikki for this?' let me just say - article can be written and linked to now, Wikki needs setting up sometime in the future.) There should be no waiting for a second article to be done before the first goes up though otherwise you are back to limbo land again.

Obviously someone needs to proof read and possibly any of the articles before they go live but someone can be found to do that (preferably someone with experience in proof reading / someone with published work). If, however, we spend ages discussing who is going to proof read an article before it is done then nothing will happen.

With the exception of forum postings, there has been no real meaty get your teeth into them articles published here for a long time. If we just keep on waiting until the backend system is ready for them then nothing will happen. In my mind it is better to have a link to an article with maybe the wrong font or heading style than no articles at all.

[Najdorf]

I could write about the esellerate system

[BeyondCloister]

I could write about the esellerate system

That would be really good. I feel the sooner we start getting some stuff together the better. How long before you actually had a finished article?

A possible way to move forward to begin with would be to set up a forum thread and link the the articles and have them hosted on the author's site or volunteer sites until iDevGames finally has its relaunch and the articles can be moved into the backend system.

Hopefully this should have a snowball effect once people actually see something happening and can see that their articles are actually made available.

[Nick]

I could do some simple game tutorials. I'm pretty much a beginner (less than a year of Mac (or any) game programming) so I'm near the target audience :). I can write up a quick tutorial on simple game programming I suppose. I'll use Cocoa and Quartz just to let someone know (in case they want to make a simple game tutorial with other technologies). I think I'm going to use my tic-tac-toe and rock paper scissors games. I might also use that tutorial I once wrote on making Whack-A-Mole. I was thinking about redoing Whack-A-Mole using Quartz anyway. I'll let you know as they get done.

Edit:
I'm pretty much done with the mole game and am starting on the tutorial. Should be done next Tuesday/Wednesday. After that I'll do tic-tac-toe and rock-paper-scissors and those should both be done by the end of next week. I'm writing them with the idea that TTT and RPS will be presented before the mole game.

[Najdorf]

>How long before you actually had a finished article?

About a week I guess. I'm not good at html so I would prefer if someone else could edit it.

[gatti]

I like andrew's approach. However, for the time being, perhaps this article can be a small synopsis introducing the individual basically into the world of game development. As the article is broken down into the 3 core jobs within development (code, art, music) they can each have a sidebar with references to great books in that discipline. This can also pave a great starting place to the more in-depth articles that have been discussed here so far.

After the user gets acquainted with the discipline that their interested in, then they can navigate through the listing of articles that Andrew and others have mentioned for a more in-depth understanding.

[BeyondCloister]

I like andrew's approach. However, for the time being, perhaps this article can be a small synopsis introducing the individual basically into the world of game development. As the article is broken down into the 3 core jobs within development (code, art, music) they can each have a sidebar with references to great books in that discipline. This can also pave a great starting place to the more in-depth articles that have been discussed here so far.

Thank you supporting my ideas - it means I must be heading in the right direction :)

In theory the synopsis article is a great idea and best way to kick things off.

However, as is the way with all things in life, there is problem with doing the synopsis article that covers a bit of everything. Either someone who has experience in all the areas needs to write it (any one willing do this is?) or someone needs to edit together the parts from several contributors.

Unfortunatly one thing which we are all too well aware of is that when it comes to everyone working together to produce something for this site something throws a spanner in the works and nothing happens :(

In some ways it may be easier to write the synopsis article once some of the full articles have been published.

I am still concerned that we will end up in the situation of unpublished articles being held up by wanting to having everything perfect to go online at the flick of a switch.

[gatti]

However, as is the way with all things in life, there is problem with doing the synopsis article that covers a bit of everything. Either someone who has experience in all the areas needs to write it (any one willing do this is?) or someone needs to edit together the parts from several contributors.I agree. This intro article should really only have one writer in which they work directly with 1-2 individuals in each discipline for it to successfully make completion and and ultimately hold pertinent content. Having any more could make it too hard to manage.

In some ways it may be easier to write the synopsis article once some of the full articles have been published.Also very good point. My time is starting to be open and would love to discuss this with other individuals interested in helping or leading some of the article creation. Perhaps a scheduled chat session with an agenda is a next step? This way we can all delegate eachother's roles and establish some goals regarding who the content experts are and what role they can play in the research and article creation process.


I am still concerned that we will end up in the situation of unpublished articles being held up by wanting to having everything perfect to go online at the flick of a switch.I feel the same thing. What are your thoughts to a temporary workaround? Perhaps the articles can be posted on www.createmacgames.org for the time-being and then launched on this site when the site transition is completed...

[BeyondCloister]

What are your thoughts to a temporary workaround? Perhaps the articles can be posted on www.createmacgames.org for the time-being and then launched on this site when the site transition is completed...

I have no problems with hosting the articles on CreateMacGames until everything is ready to go in one complete package.

Carlos, what are your thoughts on this as you seem to of been very quite about such a key subject?

[funkboy]

Just so we don't make this too complicated; is the main point of this article/idea for start-up to Keep It Simple? I would think so; it should be made clear some of the difficulties of creating software, as well as the rewards. But it shouldn't overwhelm the reader with too much information... though links to other sources would be very good.

I would be interested in discussing this article, and helping write it.

[Dan Potter]

This is Dreamcast specific, but I think it has some good info in it too:

http://www.cagames.com/articles/howtodev.php

My side-bar menu is messed up there, sorry... ;) I'm working on fixing it now.

[gatti]

This is Dreamcast specific, but I think it has some good info in it too: http://www.cagames.com/articles/howtodev.phpHi Dan, very cool article. That is a good article to derive some of the content from. Perhaps some of the aspects can be simplified to that of a more independent perspective so those new developers won't be overwhelmed with all the different kinds of jobs/tasks which are part of commercial level game dev.

Regarding funkboy... yeah, a part of me thinks it should be kept relatively simple. A nice quick read that gets a person's feet wet.

[BeyondCloister]

So has any progress been made with respect to any of the items we discussed in this thread?

[Nick]

Well I started on my tutorial and have a bit done (with accompanying screenshots) but I was wondering: should I write the entire tutorial (creating the UI with IB, then coding) or just focus on one aspect of it? Maybe just cover the logic and such of the actual game?

[BeyondCloister]

You could always do it in two phases.

Cover the logic and everything in one phase and then the Interface Builder and coding part in another phase.

Even though you may have not approached it in the order of designing and planning and then coding, you could still present it that way. Having a complete overview of the theory and concept would be useful as someone would then know what the end aim is all about. It would even then allow them to go on and a produce a similar game in any development environment on any platform. It may even allow them to come up with a more structured proposal for them to present to a developer should they decide that the actual coding side of things is beyond their desire or skills.

[Nick]

By "logic" I meant coding, really. I meant just showing them how to use NSTimer and take input and basicly show them the meat of game programming.

I have the first chapter (of three) done. It just shows how to create the interface using Interface Builder. The second chapter will show how to link everything and create a custom class. The third chapter will cover the coding of the game.

Just let me know how I can send it to you. I made it in Word and I DEFINITELY want someone to take what I wrote, edit it, think about it, and write it in a much nicer way. I'm not good at writing tutorials so the editor may be in for some work. I did include a lot of screenshots (which always helped me when I was starting) but you don't have to use all of them.

[funkboy]

I would be very happy to take a look at it. I really like being an editor on writing - bringing clarity to a bunch of words is something in which I take great pleasure.

[Nick]

Just give me an email and I'll send the .doc right over.