Saturday 6 July 2013

The cardinal skills of indie game development

I often worry that I'm wasting my time procrastinating browsing youtube, wikipedia or facebook, when I should be developing games, or improving the skills that help to develop games.

This post is inspired by these recurring thoughts. Earlier today, travelling on the metro, I wrote down what I think are the four core skills I'll need to be a good one-man game studio:

maths
programming
art
music

I then wrote how strong I thought I was in each area. There is no objective metric here; I just wrote down what I felt about my own abilities in relation to where I want them to be. Assuming a scale out of 10:

maths: 2
programming: 3
art: 3
music: 4

I then wrote today's date to the side of the four figures. For too long, a number of these skills have remained stagnant. I stockpile books and cram online tutorial after online tutorial into unseen favourites folders, never looking inside to see the contents. This post represents a change.

Week by week I'm going to record how many hours I'm putting into each skill. The idea is to compete with myself; so when I'm looking at a report at week's end, those are the figures I'll be aiming to beat in the coming week. After several months of this, collecting the reports together and plotting them out on a graph should reveal a pleasing upward trend.

I'll reasses how strong I am at the four cardinal skills some months down the line.

But what's the use of improving the above skills, if they're not actually employed in the creation of games? There must be a fifth, golden metric. The most important metric: game development itself. It's not something I'll mark out of ten at intervals; that's something I'd rather the players of my games judge. But it is certainly something - indeed, the main thing - I can strive to put more and more hours' work into, so this criteria will be way up there, competing for my hours at the very top.

2 comments:

  1. Procrastination is a mindset i'm overly familiar with :) Sure - sometimes it leads to artistically creative episodes, but otherwise it blunts our potential output, leaving us with without focus and clear goals.

    Self evaluation and improvement should be at the forefront of everyone's thoughts, and is no doubt a critical prerequisite of success, I mean - who wouldn't want to live up to their full potential? Surely everybody aspires to ( to paraphrase US Army recruiting slogan ) " be the best they can be " And yet most of the time it just seems like too much work!

    I have to admit I was surprised with your own given scores! After playing and completing Skyline Sublime I'm sure your skill set isn't that low! ( Not that I don't think theirs potential scope for improvement lol )I do admire the self honesty :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. To clarify: skylinesublime is the name of my webpage and the game itself is called Ascent. The pitfalls of not having a title screen :)

    Will Self said that slacking is like when we are in free fall during a bungee jump. The slack preceeds the sudden tension and pull back of the bungee rope; which is a creative episode. So yes, we need slacking, but it's all about balance.

    If we take Ascent as an example of my current skill set: the art is very basic, with basic objects, just a silhouette for a character, no real background art etc. It's made in Construct 2, which requires no programming and handles most of the physics, so there's hardly any maths involved from my end. I'm quite happy with how my composing is coming along though, and I can even notice a jump in quality between the first and second tracks I made for the game. So I might nudge my music score up to 5 on next evaluation :)

    ReplyDelete