Steve Pavlina recently wrote about becoming a millionaire by thinking like one. One of the things he mentions is the identity shift needed, which ties into the topic of his recent podcast on faster goal achievement.
When I first heard the podcast, I realized that I am not going to finish making games so long as I continue on the poor results I’ve been posting. I need to change how I act. I need to act more like an actual game developer and less like someone who is hoping to make games in the spare time I can squeeze. I need to be a game developer if I am going to do game development.
In the Thousander Club, I have managed to pull together over 250 hours of spare-time game development. If I was actually acting like a game developer in the past year, though, I imagine that I would have put up stronger results. I shouldn’t be satisfied with only 25% of my goal for the year, and practically speaking, I shouldn’t be satisfied with not having an actual, complete, professional-quality game in all that time. And if I am honest with myself, I know that I am not satisfied.
Maybe a year or two ago, 250 hours working on an ambitious-yet-unfinished component-based game engine, a poorly designed-and-unfinished puzzle game, and a mostly-finished Pong clone would have been fine, but I can’t be satisfied with similar results at the end of this year. It’s not like I don’t appreciate the real-life experience that the past year has given me. I just want to be serious about being a game developer, and I realized that I was being half-hearted about my efforts.
Bottom line: if I want to change anything, I have to change how I identify myself.
It’s going to be hard changing my habits. Even though I’ve identified this problem before, I am still treating game development as a lower priority task, and it is usually the first thing I put on the back-burner when my schedule gets disrupted. How can I expect to make games for a living if I can’t even consider them important enough to make in the first place?
When people ask me what I do, I tell them about my day job, and I sometimes mention that I started my own shareware video game business. I mention my blog, I mention that I reviewed games for Game Tunnel, and I might say that I am slowly programming some simple games. How can I expect to make GBGames into a success when I won’t even acknowledge what I want to do? Did DaVinci say, “Oh, by the way, I also sort of paint”? Did Einstein say, “I work at a patent office. Oh, and sometimes I like to think about physics”?
I am a game developer. Once I can think like one, I can act like one.
Good to hear you are going to think like you are a successful game developer.
I’ve found that thinking is the first step. It’s also important to *act* like one.
If you are a successful game developer and need to finish a project by a certain date….and you don’t have time to do it. What would you do?
Outsource
I’ve found that to be very helpful to my goals. For example, I want to get that new series out by a certain date…so what do I do…
I start looking to hire folks to help me get stuff done. Web design…I’m not the best at it…so I got someone to help. Improving the story….sure, I’ve got the basic idea, but need to tweak it and help it along…so I went to writing meetings and am working on finding someone to edit it.
Same with some of the programming and art too.
Yes, there are tradeoffs to doing this…but I can tell you that it is imperative to keep things flowing and moving along. I wanted to get the series out in December…but it got delayed cuz I didn’t outsource sooner
Or, make a bet … if you don’t finish by a certain date, you’re going to donate a check to someone. That may inspire you to spend to get the thing done before the deadline.
What if the deadline was the GDC? What if you had to show off a game at GDC? What would you do to get it done before then?
Take care,
Action
Left by Action on January 12th, 2007