Dark Light Project - How NOT to prototype
Finally it's summer! You don't have to follow lessons, study and work 24/7, and have some time to relax! While waiting to go to DevCom in Cologne, nothing is better than start a new Unreal 4 project, to have some fun learning and prototyping, to make good use of your fresh knowledge. With this mindset i clicked on the Epic Games Launcher. This was not my first project, but it was by far the most ambitious compared to the previous ones: a full playable prototype.
So it began: and it was a massacre.
I messed up in so many ways, ending up with a half level, from aesthetics and mechanics point of view. It was clear from the very first moments of my post mortem that to sum up all my work i needed to look at the wrong choices, not the right ones. From that evaluation I figured out a list of "DO NOT" rules, something I will keep in mind for every future project.
DO NOT OVERSCOPE
I wanted to do something surprising, something I never did, a survival horror experience. It was so plain in my mind, but the fact is I had several knowledge gap, too many things I didn't knew how to do. So here's the lesson number one, for myself. Foots on the ground. Don't try to run if you still didn't learn to stand on your feet. Do something simple, and learn to do it WELL, than you can try something new.
YOU WILL NEVER REACH PERFECTION
Making game is hard. Nothing ever goes exactly as expected. Your creation will be always a compromise between what you have in mind and what you are actually able (or have time) to do. So make sure, when you design, to plan a game that works as soon as possible. Only then allow yourself to improve the experience, to seek perfection.
BE SURE YOU KNOW HOW TO DO WHAT'S INDISPENSABLE
This concept can be split in two lessons, two faces of the same coin:
- Make best use of what you are good at. Caravaggio was a master in painting lights and shadows, and that's the reason he choose to actually paint lots of that.
- Don't project something that primary needs to have something you can't do. Experiment when the risk of failing is not too high, with features you can afford to abandon. If you imagine a first person shooter and have to learn how to make players shoot, what happens if you fail to learn it? Don't shoot the devil in the back. What if you miss?
DON'T COUNT TOO MUCH ON OTHERS
Let me be straight clear about this: asking help from the others is a MUST DO to improve. I asked myself for help to teachers and colleagues, when I had issues on this project, and I'm grateful to them: they helped me to keep going and solve many problems. But there are things none can teach you. Skills that you have to improve yourself. Many lessons can be learn only in person. So always first consider YOUR skills, your resources, above every help you can hope to have by others.
YOU WILL FAIL AND THIS IS A GOOD THING
The best way to grow up, probably the only one, is to fail and learn from it. Mistakes are the key part of the learning curve, embrace the fail as a gift to get stronger. You just have to be careful to one single thing: don't make the same mistakes twice. At the end of the day, this is the reason why I wrote this article.
Always forward.