Motivation

How do you people find motivation to work on fangames and complete them? What makes you think that finishing a fangame is worth it?

I've always been greatly unmotivated with projects, and there have been multiple times where I give up because of a major glitch after a few days of failing to fix it. I don't really understand how people can be motivated to work on and get a decent amount of progress on fangames. Maybe I'm just really bad at being motivated, but eh.

I'm only motivated to finish my game(Written to work on any x86-Based 32-Bit Computer, no OS required) to feed my Ego, and because it's what I like to do.

This post has been edited by OniLink10 on Apr 30 2009, 12:04 AM

I find motivation when someone tests my game and says it doesn't suck

but then others come and say its horrible

and I lose all my motivation

that's probably why I can't finish a game.

it depends on people


sometimes people just need to force themselves to continue

other people need to do things like listen to music

some people just need mental boosts, either self or given by others

at times, it can be hard. However, I have a good number of things I need to work on at once (MS Network, MS Engine, Portal, Coz, etc) so I can easily switch between the lot. If I lose interest in one, there's always one other that needs attention. That way, they're all progressing at about same speed.

i motivate myself by not working on it

then i think "**** if i don't do much work on it this year i won't finish it until 2012"

that usually makes me work on it a little (and by "little" i mean i type like 5 lines of code)

I try to think of how awesome it would be fighting a boss to certain music, or playing a difficult stage with kickass BGM that keeps you on the edge. Music gets me hyped up to make a boss/stage off it, and I continue from that point. Usually I can convey my ideas accurately in MMF2. It just takes a hell of a long time. If everything works bug-free and it's exactly as you imagined=motivation boost +100. (If things REALLY work the way I want, then I may just end up spending all day in MMF and not realize it)

This post has been edited by kirbyhi5 on Apr 30 2009, 11:44 AM

It helps if I don't need a huge number of sprites early on and, better yet, all the resources I need actually exist. Nothing pisses me off more than when I go to look for a sprite sheet of, say, the Geodude evolution family in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon 2, and then find that said sprite sheet is not on the internet.

I dont find motivation, I just give up after the first day or so

When I add a cool new feature and get it to work, that keeps me going.

Ugh.

I have no motivation what so ever. It's so bad.

Drawing. Draw what you want to be in the game, then make your game like that.

The best way I find to get motivation is to force myself to work on something, and at the end, if what I worked on actually WORKS then it pumps me up and I can keep going.

I watch movies

Some people say that they can keep motivated by working on two projects at once. I find the exact opposite: right now I want to get working on a new game but I've got another one on the computer at my dad's house that I really really really want to work on but I can't. As a result, I can't motivate myself to create anything right now.

I kinda have the same problem.
I downloaded Game Maker 6.1 years ago, and found so much I had to read before I got started (don't know the first thing about game making).
It was too intimidating so I just put it off.
I finally decided to buckle down and just do it, because I really want some games made, but when I started reading, it was just overwhelming for me and I never read even the easiest tutorial since.

Now I'm stuck here hoping you guys will do the work for me which is unlikely to happen, in fact that's part of the rules here.
All I can do is give you ideas for sets, props, levels, worlds, story, anything that doesn't involve real work.
I just hope someone takes requests.

That's why I wanted a super easy engine like Beetle Level Maker (4?).

This post has been edited by old school gamer on May 8 2009, 03:18 PM

Insteed of reading, take a engine(an easy one) and start looking how it's built, make a few changes, if you need help lock in the help file or post here, I did it that way and I think it worked kida well.

I never read anything, I just looked at tutorials and learnt to understand what the code meant.

Now I'm making games from scratch really quickly.

I did this too. I took all the tutorials from the game maker website and learned from them. I still don't know GML, but I will get around to that eventually.

As for motivation, I watch a lot of movies, listen to a lot of music, and I have a busy outside life. Games aren't always on my mind, but when I'm sitting at the computer, I don't know a better way to spend my time than to work on my projects.

And the reason I DO make games is because they end up being very fun to play and I hope I can go into the field professionally when I'm older.