Ok so I watch a lot of devlog videos, and talk to a lot of wannabe devs on Discord (definitely not using “wannabe” as an insult there, it applies to me too!) and there’s this concept of a dream game that keeps coming up.
I’ve been playing video games since the 1980s and yeah, there are always improvements I’d love to one day see in every genre I play. But this idea of having a specific dream game is just entirely foreign to me. There are way too many possibilities to have just one dream!
My first attempt at a real game, I quickly found out it was going to be way too big and way too far above my current skill level. So I just…dropped it. Yeah I might go back one day, it would make for a cool game, but beyond that I’m not super attached.
So basically my question is, how common is this attitude among game devs? Do you all have a specific dream “one day” game in the back of your mind? Or maybe you’re already working on it? Or are you like me and you just enjoy making games in general?
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A long time ago… when games were using ASCII characters and were called Adventure, Rogue, Moria, NetHack et al… I started creating something I called “The Wandering Wizard’s Castle”. It never went anywhere because the machine I wrote it for only had 4K bytes of RAM…
Anyway, being a games developer never entered my mind until I joined an audio company and started porting their 3D audio library to Windows device drivers and supporting a bunch of hardware companies trying to be in that space.
That got me exposed to audio and to games! We played Unreal Tournament or Quake at lunchtimes and had all the insane audio taunts installed. It was a fun time… and eventually lead to me joining Codemasters in their audio team and working on some of their racing games.
Racing has never been an interest of mine. Seeing the scene rendered, yes… that was interesting. Seeing how audio gets used…
Then after ten years out of the games industry, I’m back, working on a massive online space sim and finding I actually like playing the game - either on my own, or with others.
I’m like you in this regard. I don’t have a specific dream game. Sure there are games I would love to see made but they are mostly something out of my reach (as a hobby dev) anyways. The first big project I’ve been working on for over I year was not my dream game, just something I kind of thought would be neat. I never finished it though, maybe because it wasn’t my dream game? I also kind of feel like not the kind of person to develop the games I personally enjoy playing most. Which are grand strategy, 4x, tactical games and big story driven games. Most of them just have too many variables for little me to keep track of and balance which isn’t something I enjoy too much.
Yeah I absolutely love 4x games too but as a solo dev there’s absolutely no way. And I do feel like a lot of the devs making their dream game are doing some variation of a huge RPG which is going to have similar issues.
My approach so far has been to think of types of games I enjoy, then put solo-friendly limitations on them. So instead of making a normal city builder for example I gave myself the challenge “what if the city builds itself?” because that takes away a ton of features and lends itself more to a smaller more minimalist game.
Your point about not finishing things because of lacking that “dream game” passion is a bit worrying though, maybe that really is all that keeps people going by the end. Guess I’ll see how that goes!
My approach so far has been to think of types of games I enjoy, then put solo-friendly limitations on them.
That is a very cool approach. I might have to steal it haha.
What I always try to do is get friends to help me out. Hasn’t worked out yet unfortunately. At the end of the day I was the one doing 99% of the work. But some of these days I’d like to get into a group project that actually works.
Exactly the same for me yes. I don’t have this one big dream game, but I do enjoy reusing cool concepts in a solo-friendly way.
I wonder what it is about people on here so far that make us outside what seems to be the norm everywhere else. Maybe an age thing? Are we all grumpy old nerds? I know I am!
That must be it 😀
I used to have a dream game when I had lots of free time and played a lot of MMOs. There’s a lot of systems I wanted, and to be something you could be on all day. Don’t get me wrong though, I in no way had delusions that I was gonna make an mmo.
A combination of getting responsibilities and learning more about game dev made me realize you don’t need an All game, the perfect dream one, when it would be better served to have multiple smaller and more focused games for the concepts you want to explore.
There are lots of small games I’m envisioning, but they start to get really complex while planning them so I haven’t quite got there yet.
It does make you wonder whether this is just a younger person idealism thing. Maybe I’d have been exactly the same if I got into gamedev in my teens instead of in my 30s!
Not knocking them ofc, that kind of goal can teach you a lot before you realise it’s never going to work, but Lemmy seems to attract more…um…mature folks so far so that’s my current hypothesis on why we don’t fall for the dream game trap.
That sounds about right, the MMO game ideas was in my upper teens. And yeah, it seems fedi in general is older.
You have to be realistic about what you can complete in 3-6 months. That’s the only way you’ll ever actually finish something.
Yes. Take an idea that you’re sure can be finished in 6 months, then allow about 3 years for overrun, and you might just get there.
