Hello.
My name is Oscar Obeso, and I Live in Mexico. I'm 21 years old and I'm currently studying Business and Information Technologies Engineering. My career doesn't include more than a couple of basic courses about programming, but I do it and I've learned almost all that i know by myself just because I love it and I love videogames (besides no one else around here would know how to do it and wouldn't have any interest on doing it).
I've been around the forum for about 8 months or so, but I never had the time (or the guts, perhaps) to introduce myself. I've been working on my own soon to be videogame company with a few friends, working on our first videogame, and I got to say: things haven't been easy at all!
I've realized that in order to be successfull at something one must be PASSIONATE about it and must fall in love for that what you do. I've seen many friends getting excited about what I do asking me to join my team, but they all quit after they see that, indeed, one must work hard to get things done.
My actual team is small (just about 4 people) it consist on two graphic designer, one game designer and me:the programmer and project manager.
Trust me, it is really hard to ask for something to be done right and on time when you are not paying anything for it.
Since i've never really had known any game developer in person, i would really like to know. How has been your experience as a game developer so far? How do you face defeat and keep yourself motivated?
I think that's one of the hardest part of the job: knowing that there's a big chance that you're not gonna make it and you will fail. But also, there's that hope that keep us doing what we do, and that love and passion we have. I guess that, even if our first game fails, no one will take what i have learned so far, and just like great philosopher Thomas Wayne would say: Why do we fall? So we can learn to pick ourselves up. (C'mon! I had to do a Batman quote).
Cheers. (now let's get back on that bloody glitch)
Oscar Obeso.
Comments
I've seen a lot of people doing irrelavnt jobs to support their development process. A group of designers and programmers do website designs and they support their game development with that money. but this makes things slower.
About motivation I could say a couple of things. First of all you have to trust your idea / team in order to stay motivated. Secondly, you have to show them some great examples about mobile games (bubble ball - a 14 years old boy got 1 million downloads, angry birds - awesome graphics and sound effects etc.) to make them want to do the same. Allways stay calm and excited. And most importantly spend some personal time with them. Go out, play games, pick up girls together
I hope you guys could manage to finish your project and stay together till the end ^^
Likes: Ozkar619, ljp1203
Doing most of the coding for games and websites, I have some friends and my wife helping me, basically we work about 1.5 days a week on our apps, having full time work, family and university to attend to, the process is really slow.
And sometimes you get depressed by the stagnation, that week after week passes without significant progress, mostly because as you mentioned, you can't pressure them to work more, to spend their time more for free.
So this year we will try to do things a little different, we applied to GameFounder startup accelerator and if all goes right and we get accepted, there will be a lots of training (mostly on business and monetization aspects, as well as attracting investors) and we'll see where it'll lead us.
For now we've been working on small projects as Mashballs, as understandable, it would be nonsense to take greater project in these situations, but we have couple of great ideas for bigger projects, which we will try to accelerate by searching for investors.
And as @yvz5 said, most importantly to have good relationship with your team, as a friends we hang out a lot, although living in different parts of countries, we see each other in university and spend time afterwards and share many interests, so while we are holding together and no one gets mad, things will be ok
Likes: Ozkar619