Do you ever feel like making art (like games) you know you wouldn't like yourself?

Yakoob on 7/9/2013 at 04:43

Working and releasing indie games (yes I consider them a form of art), I always have several ideas and design docs brewing. The weird thing is, I noticed I've been having reccuring ideas for the type of games... I know I wouldn't actually care to play!

For example one Of my first games ever was a DOS strategy game... even tho I generally dislike and terribly suck at strategy games. More recently I've been craving making (and already have a partial design doc!) for a Zelda/roguelike action rpg, even tho I don't like Zeldas and get bored of rogues likes within the first hour.

Anyone else ever get that? I wonder why.... Fatigue from other types of projects? Passing phase? Or difference in creative production vs leisurely consumption of medium?

(I wasn't sure if I should put this in GenGaming or here, but figured the idea may extend to art in general like writing/music/film/etc. as well)

icemann on 7/9/2013 at 05:34

For me, I don't like making the same sorts of games over and over again. Far prefer trying something different each time since for me I get the biggest amount of fun from the learning of how things are done, rather than in completing development of the games.

For my absolute first proper proper game Bipolar Game I learned about basic game design, using SDL for sound and music, how to make music and how to create and edit sound effects. Plus alittle on how ineffective forum based advertising can be sales wise compared to when your game gets covered on a website.

For the next 2 games I developed (Space Invaders and Fishing Time). With those I learned about basic enemy AI, movement (both player based and enemy), how to display basic text + text display libraries for openGL (and the annoyances in trying to get them to work on other peoples PCs). Whilst working on these I setup my own mediafire account for file hosting which I've used ever since.

For my final game Dragon's Castle I easily learned the most and was definitely the most fun out of all the game I've done so far. Learned about image display, enemy and player sprite display/use, FAR more in depth on player and enemy movement vs physics and events that they play against, setting up a physics system of gravity, creating and using a level editor to assist with level design + customizing it as the game continues on to use more and more features, setting up custom level naming + loading those up in the main game, creating a 2D tile based game, how to allow for a customizably sized game, setting up time based events, implementing a credits screen + title screen + how to create 2D pixel art, converting over 2D art from one medium and converting it over to other resolutions etc and much much more. So much :) and yet so damn FUN. Fucking love it. Oh and I learned how getting your game mentioned on sites VASTLY improves downloads (Dragon's Castle has got around 10x better downloads than any of my other releases).

So yeah, making games of different types each time where I'll be learning lots is what is most fun for me. I'd love to do a first person view dungeon crawler one day for example. Or even a racing game of some sort in 2D but with a gran turismo style car upgrade system. The catch 22 is that the more fun types of games to make take a CONSIDERABLE amount of time to take on vs the more basic easy stuff.

That said, once you've made 1 of a particular type of game you then have a heap of re-useable code which greatly speeds up development times.

Oh and lastly the best fun for me, is when on games dev is when I get to take on many different types of roles (ie coder, designer, music developer at once etc) as that means not always just doing the same type of work over and over again.

But to answer the overall question of this thread of whether I ever feel like making games I myself don't like. If its for paid work then I don't care at all. I did some work for Monash University last year in games dev, helping set up a pharmaceutical test thing in the Unity engine. Not the type of thing I myself would have wanted to do if it'd been minus the pay, but it was so I didn't care at all.

Briareos H on 7/9/2013 at 08:10

No.

Sulphur on 7/9/2013 at 08:28

A denial of service strategy game sounds like a grand idea! :D

But nope. I always want to make games I'd want to play. It's a crying shame I don't have the willpower to put together a level in an SDK, because that'd call for an unholy amount of time investment, as well as breaking my head over a new programming language/script to execute my ideas. So it's pretty much interactive fiction get for me, and one of these days I'm gonna muster up the effort to put all these ideas out into playable form, textual or otherwise.

demagogue on 7/9/2013 at 09:46

I've very conscious that I'm often tempted to make games I know from the start would be polarizing and not appreciated by most gamers, and in some cases I want to make games I know from the start will be downright alienating & offputting to a lot of gamers. And even thinking about myself playing them, I'd have to be in the mood, and if I wasn't in the mood I know I wouldn't want to deal with them -- like listening to dark ambient or dark postrock.

I'm thinking about rather heavy sims like Dwarf Fortress or anti-game/mindfuck IF-FPS where it's a little inscrutable what's going on and you have to dig to get a twisted meaning out of it, but that twisted meaning is meant to get under your skin & prod. Unlike Dear Esther though, all my concepts are still interactive; I want to draw the player into complicity with the punchline. It's not something you'd want to just play to chill out after work though.

To answer the question though, they are still games I'd want to experience when I was in the mood, like Dwarf Fortress or a good, dark IF.

Interestingly, my TDM FM was more mainstream than I'd maybe do by preference--if it were just what I wanted to do alone I was thinking about--because I wanted to be part of the team & help build the FM library early on. So, in my thinking, there's more to it than just what I feel like making. But even then it was pretty dark & gritty.