Hi everyone.
We wanted to tell you about the mistakes we made while developing our games.
First of all, everyone who makes their first steps, no matter what the case – do not take your mistakes as something terrible. Remember: error is, first of all, a lesson from which you can draw conclusions and learn something new to go on further and reach your goals. The only nightmare will be the mistake that will teach you nothing.
Our company doesn’t have a lot of expertise, but we started on our own, without having experienced people in the team, or specific education. So we made a lot of mistakes.
Our very first mistake was lack of deep study for technical tasks creation. While we clearly understood the general concept, the lack of knowledge of the details resulted in a huge number of missed less but vital things.
What is it:
- Distortion of the essence. If you are not working alone, a poorly executed technical task without details set right is likely to be done wrong, or completely distorted. This is the problem of all who begins to work in a team, as a person in charge understands what is at stake, and suggests that others should understand it clearly as well. This is not true – do not be lazy to clarify all the details of your perception: often it will help you to learn more about the process or a subject as well.
- Omissions. Quite often the gameplay in theory can seem vague and unclear, and if you hurry, for example, making the graphics or sounds, you can just miss or not finish a huge amount of other details. A perfect example is one of our first works, where I hurried to order graphics part. There had been quite a lot of it, but among all the small and bigger details, we missed out the opponent death animations. What an embarrassment!
This error can be easily avoided in two ways. The first is creation of specifica mechanics & objects table, which contains everything that will be present in the game, as well as the properties of all these things. Second, a working prototype – even if it consists of hundreds of dummies.
- Ambitiousness. The project development estimates should be adequate. Without having a proper team and financing, it is better to try your hand at someone else’s project, while gaining experience. Either way – take a very small-scale, albeit not very interesting project. Not having a cohesive team, large projects will be impossible to implement at all. Now we do know that for sure.
We had gone through all sorts of errors quite often. The above mentioned are fundamental, they spoil the project heavily, however – they are not difficult to fix.
In conclusion, I would like to say: remember, there is no miraculous formula, which will allow to do something in a blink of an eye. Do not be afraid to make mistakes, do not be afraid to go forward, and most importantly – do not quit what you’ve started, despite sometimes the path will seem insurmountable and endless. Go forward and goodspeed!
