forget about excuses

Recently, I have been fortunate enough to be in contact with a hero of mine, all culminating from a presentation I gave about the Armies of Death iOS game. We emailed very briefly before the day, and have been in fairly regular conversation since.

Now; I am incredibly excited to say that I actually have an internship at this legend's new studio. I am purposefully refraining from saying his name, because I am not too sure about how impolite that would be. This internship will unfortunately only be a few days, but considering that I initially planned on only going up to check the studio out, this is a pretty incredible outcome.

He's told me that whilst there, I will be working with Unity. I have never used this engine before, and since hearing about it this morning, I have been messing around with it. I am genuinely impressed with the intuitive nature of the engine, and am looking forward to using it properly. However, I have not been blessed with many years of games development experience, and still consider myself extremely ignorant when it comes to so much in terms of programming. He's told me bluntly that I 'will be thrown in at the deep end'. At first this brought a rather large amount of fear. Not that I wouldn't do well, but that I would disappoint this nameless (but take my word for it; genius) man. 

After a bit of thinking, I've decided that what the hell have I got to lose? I may go there, and achieve nothing. The alternative to that would be to not go at all, and just wonder. I couldn't live with that, and whilst I never doubted the fact that I would be going, I was at one point quite nervous. Nervousness can be such a pointless emotion in my opinion, and in this case, it serves no purpose. I am focusing on the astounding opportunity I've been given, and even if I fail, I will do so in a spectacular fashion. Anonymous individual, here I come.

which one am i?

Just meeting Ronnie Coleman. I guess it's the way that I role these days?
By the way, I'm the one on the left, but I'll admit, we do look an awful lot alike.

Maybe one day he too can have a body as good as mine. 

realising you're making a gears of war clone

I have mentioned before, specifically in this post, what a great thing inspiration and progress can be in games development. The building of ideas, mechanics, art styles, and emotionally impacting moments has allowed video games to become what they are today. It is still a relatively immature medium when compared to that of movies and books. However, it is evolving at a rapid pace, due almost solely to the sharing of all of these things.

Personally, I lieve there to be a problem with the notion that we are all always completely conscious of the fact that we are using pre-existing methods to achieve a certain emotional resonance, or reaction in our games. I have only worked on one true game so far, and it is still in production. Nonetheless, I have already realised how natural an occurrence inspiration can be. You're trying to think of a way to do something, and of course, your brain makes the links back to something you've already noticed works. Very few games studios set out to make a Limbo clone, but the atmosphere of that game may just be what they want to portray, and so they might just choose to be black and white.

Now, there is a fine line between drawing upon what's there, and totally ripping it off, but it's one that's relatively easy to not cross. If you begin making a game with a vision of what you would like to produce, and a rough idea of what it should be, then unless you've stated from the outset that you wanted to make The Old Scrolls: Oblivious, it's unlikely you'll run into too many issues with appearing to be sell-outs.

As we move forward and make new games, we can't expect everything to be completely new. Innovation is awesome, but obvious improvements in the way a genre is thought of can be just as exciting. We have to stop feeling as though anything that's not a completely unseen experience is invalid, because if it's done something to further the entertainment value of an existing game type, then it's already completely justified. Games developers who actually care beyond the monetisation of a game will always be here, and trust me, nobody with good intentions wakes up one day and realises that they've made a Gears of War clone.