Hi,

What are your thoughts on the statement "Your first ten games will be bad"?

Think I'm probably approaching or have done more than ten games now. If I count > 60% finished games, I think I have only done maybe five games.

With only two > 90% finished games.

Which I guess is one reason why I am trying to finish a bunch of unfinished small games now. It has been very educational so far.

Have fun!

What is a bad game ?

A game that doesn't sell doesn't mean it's bad...
pat.

Bad is too vague.
Anyway, I wouldn't be able to make 10 bad games... after the first 5 that sells less than 10/copies month, I'd commit harakiri :D

hmm... only 4 to go...! ;)

Talking seriously, the worst thing is NOT finish a game. The rest (if a game is successfull or not) depends on the quality, your skill, and A LOT of luck :p

A bad game is a game that sucks, obviously. I don't think my first game sucked. And I think my second game is coming out great, so far. BUT, when I was a kid I made heaps of little games, mostly unfinished. And most of them sucked. There was a lot more than 10 of them.


The worst thing isn't necessarily not to finish. I think it's worse to continue on something that you knew was going to suck badly from fairly early on. What is unforgivable though, is when you don't finish a game that is turning out WELL...!

Ah well yes, considering games I made when was a kid, yes! :p
I almost started over 10-15 games, finished 2 of them but they sucked badly. That were the times of C64 and Amiga 500 :p
I don't count the games I made on PC while working on my previous software house as they were made in a team (and not by myself alone). They were classical adventures like Lucasfilm ones (of course a lot worse!!).

I was saying that the worst thing is not finishing a game because that can lead to a "unfinishing" attitude even in other real-life things.
Having an "attitude to finish things" is always a good thing: you get some goal and build up skills and make more experiences (if you don't ever finish a game, you miss completely the "marketing" thing after the game is finished).

Since we talk about shareware, I can't think of a single game that can't be easily changed during the developing process to make it more fun, or at least decent :)

Unless you're so "stupid" to starting another tetris clone (the stupid is not referred to anyone of course, just a general consideration) :D

Until I get to know dexterity.com I was thinking purely ameteur. I had written about 50 games from 20 lines of code in qbasic to 5000 lines in c++ and they all suck! I do not know what would do if I had been thinking professional from the beginning.

Since we talk about shareware, I can't think of a single game that can't be easily changed during the developing process to make it more fun, or at least decent

Well, in my case my games are pretty labour intensive to produce. The game BEFORE my first game was turning out okay-but-not-great. It had some serious flaws. And it was only maybe 15% finished. And it would have taken at least another year to make it into a finished, average game. For that amount of time spent, it really needed to be a GREAT game. So I canned it. My current game must be at least 75% finished; there's no question of me chucking it in at this point as I've already invested far too much time. And I agree, if you never finish anything you start, then I'm sorry, but you are a LOSER

I should probably point out that if you expect your first ten games to suck, then they almost certainly will.

That's tough to count.

I probably wrote 20 games (some finished, some not so much) for the Commodore 64. Just for grins. For my programming projects in college I made simple games out of them (I implemented a dynamic binary search tree in a game of "Guess the Animal", and used stacks to create the "Towers of Hanoi" puzzle, and made a very simple 3D shoot-the-tank multiplayer game for my Networking class). I did a few incomplete games / demos while in college... one was intended for shareware but was never completed, and the others were used to help me land a job in a games company.

As a professional, my first three games pretty much rocked by all counts except for a few reviewers who didn't "get it." All three went on to sell over a million copies. My next SIX games after that didn't do nearly as well (AFAIK --- I don't know what the sales numbers were), but there were lots of other reasons in that mix (one was a port, two were budget titles, etc.) One failed mainly because it was too early out the door, and a couple of development decisions made early on were proven incorrect in the marketplace, and it suffered from massive lack-of-support from both the publisher and the developer. That's the one I feel worst about.

So now I'm coming out with my first title as an indie. Will it suck? I hope not. Will it be nearly as good as it could be if it were my fifth title as an indie? Doubtful - I'm still getting a huge education in spite of my past experience. But I don't know what you'd count it... my first (indie) game? My tenth (commercially released) game? My fifteenth (completed) game? My thirtieth (competed to a full prototype) game?

Saying that your first ten games will be bad is a bit discouraging if you're just starting. If you think your first ten games will be bad, you won't really try, and then they will be bad.

All depends on your idea of good and bad games. Personally, I believe that if you learnt something useful from creating the game, you've succeeded.