I’ve been struggling to develop my own game for a while. I’ve been working on my own for this goal for years, but nothing is sinking in. I can’t get down programming and I find scripting languages boring as all hell. I might need some help so I’m looking for others to work with, but I want to work with people in person. I tried working with someone online before and it didn’t go well. The past week I’ve been talking to students at the local HBCU and have posted flyers around campus, but since students are concentrating on their finals right now and summer break will be here I need to find some people who can work with me now and during the summer. What are some places where I can find gamers other than colleges?
Hey dude, I’m not a game dev but my wife is, quite a few points to cover here…
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Where do you live? Some places like LA, Seattle, SF, NYC are really good for indie devs meeting up. You can usually find weekly/monthly meetup groups.
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Are you looped into IndieCade or IGF? There are some pretty decent communities and forums for people building stuff to compete.
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Is this your first project? It’s easy to get really ambitious out of the gate and try to make that perfect game. It’s better to resist that and work on smaller stuff first. You’re going to make mistakes, rewrite code, burn shit to the ground and start over dozens of times. Super Meat Boy wasn’t Edmund McMillen’s first game, he’d made like 30 silly Flash games before it. Phil Fish worked at Ubi and a few other places as a regular game developer for a good 5+ years before he started on his 5 year (!) process to make Fez. Derek Lu was doing indie game dev projects for over a decade before Spelunky. This shit takes time. If it was easy, everyone would do it.
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What engine/framework are you trying to learn in? There are strengths and weaknesses to various approaches. Unity is by far the most beginner-friendly and has tons of pre-built resources on the shop for you to purchase and work with, but it also requires building most of the custom assets you want, if you need any. Unreal Engine 4 tends to have fewer available assets, but holds your hand much better throughout the general process and the blueprint system is stellar.
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What language are you trying to learn? C# is pretty much the main one you’ll need, and Swift if you plan on doing a mobile release. There are a wealth of free resources online that will give you lessons in them, from beginner to expert.
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Are you doing your own artwork and need someone to handle the backend, or are you looking for someone to partner with who can do your UI/art? Are you good at level design, or do you hate it? Figuring out your strengths and weaknesses will go a long way towards finding the right people to collaborate with.
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Have you tried joining on someone else’s project? It’s okay to be upfront and say you’re still learning. That person may just be grateful to have some assistance.
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Are you going to E3, PAX or GDC this year? Plan a trip and print some business cards, you’ll meet a shit ton of people.
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Seek out a mentor while networking in these groups. So much of this shit can be solved in five seconds by asking an expert you can rely on, that would otherwise take you literally days researching and testing broken shit and getting nowhere. Mrs. Rageous went through this quite a bit when she was first teaching herself.
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Look for code jams and hackathons that don’t have anything to do with gaming. They teach you a shit ton about foundational object-oriented programming, and how to collaborate effectively in groups.
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All else failing, save up and take a boot camp. It’s pricey upfront, but way smarter and more effective than doing years at school. Full Sail will happily put you $300k in debt for shit you could learn in a 12-week course, and the likelihood of getting placed in a job afterward is about the same. You’ll also still be doing about the same amount of learning on the job when you DO get a job (if that’s what you want to do).
- No where near a major city
- I’m not sure what those two are. I’ll look into them though.
- Yes, but with trying to do this forever and being into games and following development I know how hard and long it can take to make a game. Anything I plan to make should be able to be beaten in 5 minutes tops, probably not even that. Ideally, I want to make something that doesn’t really have an ending like Tetris, Pac-man and that thing with the blocks.
- Been trying to learn RPG Maker XV Ace recently, but was using Pico-8 before that. I’ve messed around with about ten different engines though.
- I tried learning C++ in and out of school, but I’m just shit at programming and while scripting languages aren’t as hard I find them boring as hell. I still manage to make myself script something because otherwise nothing will get done. I give up half the time, but eventually come back.
- I’m leaning towards going to Pico-8 and in that there’s a sprite resource so I don’t think I need an artist for it. I prefer level design after getting into LBP a lot.
- I have online but it didn’t work out. Other person stopped just left and stopped responding to my messages and I couldn’t do shit because he had basically all the assets.
- I would like to, but I have 0 money, like nada.
- It would be nice to find people in the field here where I live, but the industry is small in my state.
- Thanks, I’ll look into this.
- I was thinking about doing this, but I heard $10,000 and was like nah. I already have student loans I haven’t paid a penny back on.