dotBit: Stop Lying To Yourself!

In my fairly long quest in becoming a respectable game developer I have met many people who had a very ignorant idea and view on video games and the video game industry. These views have ranged from the belief that video games are the main cause for the increase of anti-social behavior and up to the thought that it's easy to make the next best AAA game which will sell billions all by yourself in your mother's basement. Now, today I will not speak about video games and its effects on society and its culture but about those people who aspire to be the next Shigeru Miyamoto or Hideo Kojima.

To start off, why don't you open your eyes and grow up? It's great to dream about your future and have goals set out and placed for you to reach, but it isn't good to dream wildly and have unrealistic expectations. Plus, it is good to take note that any dream or goal you have in life, no matter what size, requires a lot of work and dedication. Don't believe me? Ask Martin Luther King. All that dude talked about was how he had a dream and he fought hard for making that dream a reality!

Once all of that is said and done then you have to find the idea which your game will be based on and I cannot stress just how many times I have heard people just shouting out the supposedly next best game idea. Sure, ideas will just come to you the same way oxygen comes to you, but that is not the one and only idea that you will need. When it comes to having an idea to base a game on it will most likely never end up consisting of just one idea because the quality of ideas tends to be proportional to quantity of ideas. You need lots of ideas to get some decent ones and in the end, it's the execution of an idea that is most important. So let us take Runner for a second. How did the idea come to me? I was traveling on the highway for two hours just looking at the road and thinking and then I thought about a game which consisted of ant-sized people who had internals like a car and raced every year in the beginning of summer. These guys ran the entire world on this one day just as a way to begin summer. Now as you can see I went insane with my imagination and I even gave these runners a name called Atomic Runner. Hence the game title, Atomic Run. So you can see that with that alone, which I thought up almost a year ago and started writing a game document for, if you compare it to what we now know as Runner you will not find an ounce of Atomic Run. This is why you gather all of your ideas and put it in a book of any sort so that when the time comes you can start putting all your game ideas together and end up with a potential AAA game.

So you now have your epic video game idea. Who will make them? Well my friend, I am very sad to inform you that game development is not all creativity. Game design can be fun, it can be creative, but it's also work. To think is to work. So when you are writing out your clear description of your main character and the world he/she roams in, this eventually becomes work. Figuring out how to implement your creative imagination into computer language then testing it to see how you can improve the game is work. I, myself, for a while, didn't consider it "work" until I started Binary Odyssey and the development of Runner. It was, and still is, fun and exciting but there is a joke about being up day after day for 15+ hours coding and testing one level just to get it perfect and presentable and it turns out that joke was a pretty accurate description of game development. This is why the great late inventor Thomas Edison once said that success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.

Great! You manage to have a game idea and develop on it for the past couple of years and you're almost done so you're looking for a publisher. You've caught the attention of a couple publishers and they end up telling you that some design has to be changed for them to jump on the band wagon. Bummer right? Nope! This is the way it works in the industry. Even the most successful designers, such as Hironobu Sakaguchi, creator of the Final Fantasy series, sometimes must satisfy publishers who are funding their efforts. Typically, you'll be told to work on a particular design problem, and won't be able to do your own thing.

Harsh isn't it? I have been in the industry for a short while and I am still learning the ins and outs but I can tell you that it just gets harder and harder but for me and my team this is fine because it came with the package deal of being a game developer and we never regret jumping on this opportunity to be a part of something great. So a tip from myself to all of you passionate game developers/designers free of charge and here it is: as long as you are truly passionate, dedicated, and assertive about what you are doing, nothing can stop you except yourself.