Distilling your project down to its core ideas by scoping it out has other benefits.  As Jason Fried over at 37signals has noted:

“Imagine if”‘ is always a red flag. It doesn’t mean the imagination won’t prove to be right, it just means slow down, step back, and get back to what’s real for a moment.

Get back to what’s real.  By doing this, you’ll end up with a more coherent, focused, and clean product.  Failing to do this will lead to a product that is a confusing mess.

Ignoring Scope

I’ve been to (and hosted) game jams and seen scope issues tear teams apart. I’ve also seen real, professional development teams fall apart for the same reasons. Scope always seems to be the variable that many enthusiastic and aspiring developers are least willing to sacrifice.

Yet, releasing a game — or software product, or whatever else — that does not have all of the things that you wanted in it does NOT preclude your ability to add those things in later. In fact, most successful teams that I know have succeeded because they’ve been willing to release an imperfect  (in this case, imperfect simply means “not everything you wanted it to be”) product on time and on budget, and then iterate on that product.

I want to close this post with a little anecdote.  At the end of the Chicago Game Jam last year (which IGDA Chicago hosted), we took an informal survey. One of the questions we asked was “what would you do differently next time?” Most team’s answers didn’t revolve around wishing they’d been more ambitious, but that they’d been less ambitious. Why is that?

PostScript

If you live in the Chicago area, and would like to speak with me or other (more intelligent than I am) game developers about the process behind game development, come out to an IGDA Chicago gathering.  You can also watch some of our panel videos on how to build and publish a game.  And above all, work hard towards whatever it is you’re doing.

We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another – porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn’t go through. We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.

The more platforms and hardware specs you need to make a game for, the more time/money it costs. In the mobile space, Android fragmentation is the most glaring example of this. For large developers with tons of cash to throw at development, support, and test machines, this isn’t a particular problem and would probably pay off in the longrun. But it’s a definite pain point for smaller developers with less cash on hand. It’s also a problem that I’ve personally grappled with in the past, and have heard many other small devs gripe about.

So what else could be giving me problems with file uploads? As is usually the case, when I run into problems like this, I overthink them before looking at the simplest solution.  I went back into the gallery root to start poking around the php.ini, but noticed something almost immediately: I hadn’t uploaded the .htaccess file that comes included in the gallery download.  This sometimes happens when I do a quick drag and drop of files from my “Downloads” folder, as .htaccess files are hidden, and thus not transferred.

Anyway, since the .htaccess file instructs my server as to what file sizes should be allowed, this was the problem.  I uploaded the .htaccess file and everything now works: all new uploaded pictures/thumbnails display.

This is a characteristic that I think all truly creative people share.  Where defining yourself by what you dislike is a destructive act, defining yourself by what you do or what you like is purely productive.  Where worrying about what other people are doing is a distraction and largely unproductive, focusing on doing great things on your own is, in my opinion, what makes the world go ’round.

I think the we’d all be better off if more people thought like this.

GDC ’12: How To Explain Your Game To An Asshole:

With Assholes, you have Only 3 sentences to make 4 points.

(Via The Indie Game Magazine)