You MUST have THIS skill to SUCCEED at Game Dev

hey what's up guys so the other day i was asked by somebody what do i think is the most important skill to become good and proficient at game dev and programming now the question was asked to me in the context of somebody wanting to become like a solo game developer which is relevant because the skills required to be like a solo independent developer versus like a commercial studio developer are different yet they do overlap so anyway i told them that i would think about it and get back to them so here is that response you know there are a lot of different skills required to become competent at game dev or anything for that matter many hats to wear some technical some creative and others which fall into a category which are classed as soft skills you know things like patience and of all these different skills there is one which i believe ties them all together and is absolutely essential to hone if you have any chance of finding success in this field and that skill is self reliance the ability to derive answers and solutions without needing to rely on others to be independent and autonomous and while this could be classed as a behavioral trait i do classify it as a skill because it can be learned and it can be improved but it also has its pitfalls and we'll get to that too so in this video i'll be doing a deep dive into the topic of self reliance what it is in the context of game development why we need it and why it's a problem if we don't have it and how it can completely change not only your game development journey but also your life journey when setting out on the game dev journey we are constantly hit with walls of confusion frustration as we navigate that early difficulty curve and there is a natural tendency for many of us to rely on others to make progress to be carried rather than to walk the path ourselves and i see this all the time from you know discord servers forums the workplace and even in myself especially in those early days as a junior developer and there are many reasons for this often you know a lack of experience a lack of problem solving skills a lack of critical thinking skills a lack of discipline laziness and you know sometimes people just want to take up people's times you know to be intentionally obnoxious perhaps you know some of these people you've come across them before and it's quite fascinating because the further we move into an age of technological ease and information abundance you know the answer to just about everything being a few clicks away a condition has emerged where people become more self-reliant on being handed information and answers you know and this phenomenon might very well be a direct symptom of this information abundance you know it's an overload you know think about those pre-internet game developers you know how self-reliant and resourceful they had to have been you know they didn't have the luxury of stack overflow or the unity forums you know or even game frameworks which did most of the heavy lifting as we do now you know have you ever considered why indie developers today can make a game which um may have taken a small studio you know months or even years to make back in the day yes there is a technological gap that has changed in that time with hardware gpus and cpus but the main reason is the frameworks have changed you know frameworks like unity unreal and godot you know they do the majority of the work for you you don't have to worry about writing a renderer code from scratch you know you plug the gamepad in and gamepads just work and things like that you know like you don't have to worry about coding up the connectivity between peripheral devices or worrying about drivers and things like that it's all automated we no longer have to build the house from the ground up we are more like interior decorators but i digress so why is this why do some of us tend to fall into this reliancy trap and the simple answer is likely you know why choose the hard path when you can choose the easy path and this might be correct from a you know evolutionary life and death survival perspective but in terms of skills growth it's a horrible choice to take that easy path you know over the long term self-reliance will save you a lot more time and lead you to a place of mastery with each problem you solve for your own thoughtful consideration new neural pathways in your brain are unlocked you know a new door opens and a network of understanding emerges where you are physically changing your brain through neural plasticity this is a real thing but if you're just being handed all the information by somebody else those neural pathways are not created or if they are created they are created in relationship to that reliancy so you're you're forging a closer connection to a reliancy loop you know as you start getting into the swing of game dev you will run into countless problems every single day it's pretty much the nature of the craft this is constantly troubleshooting and problem solving that's what it's all about you know with various degrees of difficulty you know sometimes you might have simple syntax issues sometimes like your whole game stops working and you've got to spend days trying to work out what the hell went wrong and at a point it becomes completely impractical to be attempting to delegate those answers to others all skill growth is derived from that friction and struggle in the process all skill growth is derived from the friction and struggle in the process don't forget that there is absolutely no growth when you are spoon fed the answers without any effort of your own you can't hope to move boulders before you first learned how to move pebbles and that's part of the problem i see a lot of beginners overreaching trying to move those boulders before they've understood how to move the pebbles and i know i think a tool about this from my own personal game dev journey where many times early on i was trying to move those big blocks big boulders without even understanding the basics and that massive overreach when you try to jump all these steps and try to do something that you're you're ill prepared for that's when those massive resistance points emerge and you might feel that tendency then hey i'm overwhelmed i need to you know rely on others that's how it happens and to be clear there is absolutely no problem asking stupid questions you know stupidity is subjective for the most part and stupid questions often prove themselves to be not so stupid after all you know world changing in some cases but there is such a thing as a lazy question and you will often see this on forums like stack overflow or the unity forums where people will post the same rudimentary questions that have previously been asked hundreds of times before over and over and over and responders will be quick to often point that out it would have probably been faster had they just googled the answer rather than posting it to these forums you know it probably would have been the very first google result but that's what happens when you are caught in a dependency loop every single speed bump every single hurdle or obstacle every single problem that arises you hold out your hand to others looking for a solution and quite often the solution might actually be right in front of you you know how often have you asked a question about a problem only to find the solution by yourself moments later you know it's like that process of asking often stimulates um the perspective shift which reveals the answer to you this is of course an extremely common thing and nothing to be concerned with because there is a tendency for perspective shift when we verbalize the questions aloud and as a result there are actually um tools to mitigate this and it's why a lot of developers have like um a rubber duck on their desk or some kind of toys and they often pose the question to these desk toys um a lot of people think it's just kind of desk flare and for the most part it is but there is some kind of um intention and method to these objects on the desk you know and i have a little yoshi on my desk which i this guy i sometimes ask him you know why is my game not working why and i usually don't get an answer but when you enter spaces inhabited by professionals in your field of interest whether it's a discord server or the workplace you will quickly realize that people don't really have the patience for lazy questions and lazy people you know in my own uh lost relic games discord server we even have a rule set up where we don't want um it's do not treat other members of the community as your personal google bot you know that's how strongly i feel about this that i had to make it a rule because every now and then you'll get someone coming to the server basically asking people to google for them it's like just google it you know that's like how can you ever get anywhere if you adopt that kind of um like attitude where you're just asking people to google triple your trivial things for you you know things that uh can be found in a matter of seconds how do i install unity you know things like that like you shouldn't have to be wasting people's time with questions like that you need to rely on yourself for this kind of stuff at the very least that's the absolute baseline you know and again it's not a problem of asking questions questions are good but the quality of the question is highly relevant here you know if i'm in the workplace and i've forgotten some basic coding syntax you know this happens you often forget even the simplest things because your your mind is so overwhelmed with something else and you know i could turn to the person next to me and say hey you know what's this basic thing or i could just google it and it might you know take me 10 seconds to get a response out of google now that's probably the better choice rather than disturbing uh someone else you know there are of course exceptions in the workplace for this kind of inter-developer discussions often people just intentionally want to break up their workflow and you know have conversations and that's fine you know but for the most part to disturb someone else with a problem that you can you can solve yourself you do have the ability and the tools but you offload it to them that's considered bad etiquette it's um yeah it's bad form and myself coming up as a developer in different jobs you know i had to learn this the hard way i remember one time when i was a junior i strolled by another developer's desk he was like a intermediate or senior developer and he took his headphones off you know and he wondered what i wanted he's standing there and i asked him a i guess an objectively lazy question something that i could have you know found out very easily myself something about like a raise like how to erase certain arrays work or whatever and he turned to me and he said why don't you just google it and you know he was right why didn't i just google it because you know i was relying on other people i felt i was compelled i felt that urge and i never forgot the judgmental look in his eyes it was a good wake-up call and that's perhaps the best way to determine whether a question is lazy or not can your answer be googled relatively easily the ability to find information is key you know almost everything can be found online and for the most part questions related to game dev have already been asked many times over so it's up to us to find them which is a skill in itself you know learn how to google learn about stack overflow learn about the unity forums learn how to navigate them and find information they are your tools as game developers and of course the official unity documentation or the godot or unreal documentation is a vital source of information you know most my answers i find when i'm stumped and i need information come from the official documentation when i'm stumped i get so many of my answers directly from official docs and it's true that um you know they can be a little bit cryptic if you're a beginner so often beginners they choose not to go for the official docs and they will you know go to a youtube video or whatever and that's fine i understand that but the official docs once you start learning how to read them they're going to save you a lot of time so start putting value and time into learning how to find information you know knowledge of knowledge that is to say you can't use stack overflow if you don't know what it is you know if you don't know about something you can't leverage it to your benefit and often it's the case that people haven't even attempted the solution for themselves before asking somebody else and that is a huge problem in programming and development because much of the skill of programming and development is about problem solving and trial and error you have to have the confidence to try something measure the outcome even if it's right or wrong and then you know move and try again and again and again till you find a appropriate answer it would be a bit like wanting to enter a building and rather than just turning the door handle and opening the door you turn to the person next to you and say hey which way do i turn the door handle and they'll be like i don't know just like turn it left or right and see which way it turns and had you had done that you would have realized which way through the process of trial and error which way it opens and i think that's the underlying thing here people are afraid of the mistake they're afraid of the friction and the emotional signature that comes with making mistakes even small ones even you know trivial things that don't even matter but you see there is huge utility in those failures and mistakes you have to embrace them you really do but unfortunately there will be still people who are afraid to turn that handle and will continue to rely on others for the solution like a crutch it becomes habitual it becomes cemented as a negative behavior pattern take an analogy of a toddler a toddler needs to be spoon-fed yes and they need to have their hand held when crossing the road but if you're old enough to drive and you know saying of mind then you know you should not be crapping in your pants and being spoon fit you have to take control and that's where discipline and character must play a part once you realize the power of problem solving it becomes the preferred solution when i for example run into programming challenges i absolutely love finding solutions i might even take you know days or weeks sometimes to work through a solution you know that's perfectly okay you know that's part of the journey that is the journey but look even i have my limits you know i will sometimes run into problems where i've exhausted every other solution and sometimes this is not practical especially if you're running a business it's useful to have a network of support you know i have like some friends that i can get in touch with online because it's also unreasonable to expect to be able to do everything yourself though it can be the case of course you know i myself do the programming for my projects the game design the um the art direction and so many other things you know marketing or whatever i have to take control of all of that and of course there are things that don't align with my skill set i'm not very good at music composition for example so there's no point me banging my head against the wall trying to um learn that i'm happy to offload that to somebody else through you know a value exchange of some kind but those are now like strategic business decisions they are less so about self-reliance you know so it can get a little bit gray because there is an area where some people are just um obsessed with doing everything themselves like a control freak situation but that's not what we're talking about we're talking about the lower end of the scale where people are trying to learn and the stuff they need to know the fundamentals the basics the principles of programming the principles of the framework they're using and the tools they're relying on others to turn those cogs for them and it's why i'm not a real fan of these mentor relationships where people get into this kind of mentorship dichotomies because i feel like that can lead to problems where the person being mentored rather than rising up and learning to kind of stand on their own feet gets into this really deep codependency with with the mentor you know they get stuck and then they left relying on the mentor for even the most trivial farcical answers what should i eat or what should i wear today and that's a trap that's a trap you want to avoid you do not want to have this kind of codependency with any other person on this planet so at this point you might ask yourself how do i know if i'm caught in one of these dependency traps well this is complicated in a sense because there are different reasons that can lead us to that point some might get pulled in unknowingly over time gradually where others will climb in willingly you know that's their their personality compels them to do that and for some being in the trap is the baseline state a chronic reliance on others and that's a sad place to be it really is because it means you don't trust yourself you don't trust your own judgment you are the passenger reliant on others to drive you around you know i've had a lot of hard times um in my life and career especially growing up i had a lot of various challenges you know i never never really had a father figure you could say or anything like that i had to learn to be very self-reliant and not rely on the people around me you know to forge steel you need fire so don't be afraid of the fire is all i can say face your problems dissect them understand them until they are no longer problems do this enough times and you can change your behavior you can change your negative behavioral patterns and make them positive this can be done i did this with myself and i've seen this in others you know you just have to make a conscious effort to do so these things don't happen on their own accord sometimes they can you can have some catalyst events in your life you know throughout our life we have various events that can completely change our perspective of life you know so look out for those too but you have to pay attention but for the most part you have to create these events for your own actions and choices we cannot fix or change something that we are not first aware of so ultimately my reason for making this video is to perhaps stimulate a perspective shift or to help you become aware that this is actually a thing and could become a problem so anyways guys thank you for watching i hope you've enjoyed the video please do give it a like drop a comment i'd love to hear about some of your stories if you have any um related to self-reliance maybe you weren't self-reliant and you you know developed yourself and you became self-reliant or maybe you know somebody in this situation or maybe just have some kind of you know peripheral experience with this so do drop a comment i'd love to hear about it big thanks to my patreon supporters who are supporting this channel i really appreciate you guys thank you very much and i'll see you all in the next video bye [Music] you

Channel: Lost Relic Games

Views: 27,681

Rating: 4.9285359 out of 5

Keywords: game dev, motivation, learn game dev, indie dev motivation, indie dev, get better, tips for beginner game devs, lost relic games, john stejskal, advice, game dev tips, indie dev advice, game development, how to make games, how to get into game development, game development beginner, game development college, how to make first indie game, how to learn game dev, tips for beginner game dev, tips for starting game dev, starting first indie game, how much money game dev

Id: rBFrqKL8Fc4

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 26 2021