Last week I said that I was going to START working on a level. This level is supposed to be a vertical slice. Something to show off to important people or maybe a crowd of people. I don’t know when this switched, but when I was a kid if you gave me a blank piece of paper I would fill it up with a drawing. Without hesitation. With a blimp, a monster, an astronaut with a hover board and whatever else my 8 year old brain could think of. I would just START drawing. Now if you hand me that same blank paper I have to contemplate what is the purpose of this astronaut and his hover board, what is his motivation, who is he? Is THAT his blimp? Working on a project as large as this one is gives me the advantage of never really needing to know what am I supposed to draw.
I deleted almost everything in the new VS level and was
faced with absolute Tabula Rasa. Where should I START?
I had a conversation with a friend at a coffee shop about
this very thing. I told her that I had been working on this project for about a
year. She thought that was great but how do you START? Personally this game I
am working on has existed in my head since at least 2009. I have had dreams
about playing this thing. I had worked on it in XNA, drew sprite sheets, concept
art, propaganda. But it was always something that I was going to do when I had
X. X being a programmer, or more time, or motivation, or inspiration, or two
dozen other excuses that stopped me from moving forward.
NONE of that matters! Do you have a thing you want to
accomplish? I can give you the best advice that was ever given to me right now.
START! Just START. This is the single biggest thing standing in your way right
now. If you are always waiting to be ready you may never be ready. So you have
to START. But what if I fail? If you never START you have already failed. Hell
it may not even work out you may try and the results may suck but at least your
idea now exists.
“You can’t depend on motivation. Motivation comes and goes.
What matters is discipline. Are you putting in the work to achieve your goals?
That is what it is about.” Brandon Carter. <-That dude is my
freaking hero.
I can’t tell you that it is going to be easy. More than
likely it will be hard and difficult. I would be lying to you if I said that
there has been zero self doubt while working on this. There are coding problems
that I don’t or didn’t know how to solve. There were days when I wanted to
strangle a line of code. “WHY AREN’T YOU WORKING! WHY ARE YOU BREAKING MY GAME!”
This IS hard for me sometimes. Everyday I press START and continue forward on
this thing. Some days I get in very little work because of real life getting in
the way. But even on the days when little happens I still press START on work.
So what is the next step in accomplishing your goals? START.
The day after I had this conversation was the day that I
STARTED working on my VS level. I have to continue following my own advice.
The
idea of quitting was more scary than the idea of STARTING putting in the
work.
So I STARTED.
It IS the most important concept in any creative endeavor! One of my FIRST big projects at Apple I worked on day after day, and week after week, and FINALLY got it almost "finished". But final testing showed some problems. I worked through several of them but one (VERY SERIOUS) problem proved to have no viable solution. I met with many other engineers who also could not find a work around.
ReplyDeleteSo finally being convinced after all that time (and their money) that the project was a bust. I steeled up my nerves and walked into the office of one of the (at that time) VP of Engineering, and admitted that my great idea was NOT going to work. I fully expected to be fired, or at the very least severely chewed out.
Instead the VP looked at me and smiled and said, "Great job!" I was totally confused. I had just wasted a lot of time and money on something that didn't work. How could this be a "great job"? So I asked that question. His reply made me a better programmer and engineer for all the following years.
He said, by trying to get this concept to work, which he said was a creative idea that no one else had thought of, I had learned MORE about their product and computers in a few months than I could have in years of education. And he was certain that I was likely already equally on a par (knowledge wise) with those who created the products already. AND he pointed out, that know we KNOW FOR CERTAIN, some things that will NOT work so we don't have to spend any more time or money on them.
Then I went on to work on other projects most of which DID work, but any fear of failure had been vanquished. And I later was at least a little bit proud, that years later, many of the ideas I used in my "failed" project were used to create an actual PRODUCT, that was sold mainly in the education market. It never did GREAT due to the limited customer base for such a product, but it worked. It did sell some before it was pulled and replaced with better things later.
So even progress that doesn't SEEM like progress, actually IS if you look at it correctly. So in parting, "GREAT JOB Kyle!!"