Brandon the Game Dev

Ignorance is bliss. No, really! Sure, ignorance is a state in which no person should gleefully wallow forever since it will ultimately be their undoing. Even still, ignorance is a reliable shield from the emotional strain of the trials and tribulations of starting a business or beginning game development. If you are a first time developer, you know less now than you ever will, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The ignorant aren’t stressed out about the “unknown unknowns.”

If you ever get the feeling that you’re a big dummy in a room full of people whose minds contain vast libraries of information, I want you to take solace in a few things. The ignorant developers are the ones that Steve Jobs would think of as “staying hungry and staying foolish.” When you have no idea what you’re up against, you can make some incredibly unrealistic goals. That’s a good thing sometimes. Big dreams are, in fact, achievable. People underestimate the time it takes to get there, but the important thing is that the ignorant aren’t afraid to dream big because they’re not jaded yet. Dreaming big is a powerful ability that comes naturally to the ignorant and which the knowing can and must fight to maintain.

If you ever get the feeling that you need to do the reading, that you need to start somewhere – anywhere! – to get better, then congratulations! When you’re ignorant, it’s so much easier to start learning. You just have to accept that you’re ignorant.

Yes, it is true that some resources are lousy and will teach you wrong. But as a tabula rasa, you can learn new facts and develop new habits instead of fixing old ones. Just as it’s easier to refuse your first cigarette than to stop smoking, it’s easier to read about game design than to admit that you did it wrong and then start reading.

Nothing is available to the ignorant that isn’t to the knowing except for a clean slate. From an emotional perspective, it’s easier to start when you know nothing than when you do. Take advantage of it. Remember, that ignorance is not a state of mind to achieve. It’s just a great square one.

Game development is extremely iterative by nature. Many game developers create dozens (or even hundreds) of versions of their game before it is finally complete. Simple games need to be played at least 100 times before they’re considered complete. For more complicated games, that number is closer to 1,000 or more.

It’s easy, in the abstract, to shake your head to these numbers. “Sure, I can test my game 1,000 times.” It’s easy in the same way that running a marathon is – all you have to do is keep moving your feet for 26.2 miles. Don’t fool yourself. Staying motivated throughout the seemingly endless iterative stages of game development requires a lot of commitment and care.

It might seem like I’m dumping a cold bucket of water on your head when you need a warm blanket. Please understand: I’m trying to help you set realistic expectations. Bill Gates once said “most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

Endless change is a gift. Iterating your work until it is right is a gift. There is a meditative bliss in staying with an idea until it reaches the beautiful state you always wanted it to be in. You’d be amazed what you can do with hard work, time, and effort. You’d also be amazed just how much hard work, time, and effort it takes.

Practice begets mastery. Tenacity begets practice. After a while, baby steps start turning into leaps and bounds. Those baby steps are hard, purgatorial steps that feel like tiny eternities on ground that’s ready to give way. Push through it. Get stronger. Get better. The power to create what you want to create exists within you, but it is through persistence, patience, and iterative change that you will unlock it.

“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

Even having written many posts for this blog and a novel’s worth of lore for War Co., the blankness of the unmarked page still gives me the chills. That blank page could be anything. Before you write on it, it is everything and it is nothing, the most perfect work of literature and the most grammatically defunct Internet copypasta shlock. Creative freedom is intimidating, even horrifying, because suddenly you assume the responsibilities of creating a cohesive product, testing and perfecting it so it reaches its potential, and sharing it with people who don’t see what you do.

Except that’s not really true, is it?

I’m not convinced that writer’s block, in and of itself, exists. What I do think exists is the fear of starting. When it’s time to get creative, throw out your preconceptions of right and wrong. Yes, game development, novel writing, music making, film production, and all the other creative endeavors require a lot of iteration and rigor. You have to find your destination by making wrong turns. It’s all too easy to take these feelings to heart and say “this isn’t good enough” when you’re making something.

My response to the gaping chasm of creative freedom is to laugh. I laugh because the flip side of creative freedom gives me one amazing privilege: failure in a safe environment. Your first draft can be as terrible or brilliant as you want. You’ll likely be the only one to see it, so don’t sweat the rough edges. As I see it, if you start doing something, one of three things can come as a result:

You make something brilliant with a few rough edges. A little polish and you have a readymade work of art. Something for the Spiel des Jahres.

You make something that’s shaky, but with sporadic moments of cleverness. From the cleverness, you build the connective tissue of your game. Trial and error. You’ll eventually have something.

You make something unabashedly terrible. There’s nothing redeeming about it. In that case, you don’t have those bad ideas in your head anymore and you can analyze your work for flaws. In essence, you purge yourself and you can make a plan to get better.

When I think of it that way, I feel better about the radical Sartrean freedom of the blank page. There’s no pressure. Anything you create opens doors.