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Have you ever seen large developers or even indie developers who's games are making a lot come to the forums asking for help with code?
- Thread starter flyinian
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sitebender
Member
Yes and no. Most of the grander developers that need help will just get someone from the forum, private message them and take them as a consultant rather than post questions.
ceaselessly
Member
These aren't examples that perfectly align with what you're asking, but you might draw something from them anyway.
Back in the early to mid 00's, Matt Thorson (developer of Towerfall and Celeste) was a member of the old Game Maker Community, when they were a teenager. While Matt's games were really good and entertaining, they weren't a programming wizard or anything. There were a lot of valid critiques against the games they made from both programming and design perspectives, and it wouldn't surprise me if they sought out advice from other more experienced users to fix them. (This was a long time ago, so forgive me for being unable to provide concrete examples!) The point is, Matt stuck with programming and game design and is now one of the creative forces behind one of the most well-regarded indie games of the past few years.
The other example I can think of is, from time to time I like to watch Shaun Spalding and HeartBeast do gamedev live on Twitch. They're both incredibly experienced programmers and designers, and if you've ever done any amount of poking on YouTube for GameMaker tutorials, you've probably encountered their videos. However, when you're watching them do their thing live, without the benefit of video editing, sometimes they run into a wall. There's an error, or something isn't working quite the way they expect it to, and they're having trouble untangling what's gone wrong. A recent example of this was when Shaun was doing Ludum Dare a few weeks ago, his game hit a major roadblock when he was having trouble figuring out a collision bug.
What I think is valuable about Matt Thorson as an example, is that anyone can acquire the skills needed to make great games if they are patient and receptive to feedback. And with Shaun/HeartBeast, you can draw the knowledge that no one is too good at programming to run into problems they have trouble sussing out. That may seem like it's kind of counter-inspirational, but I find it inspiring that expert-level users of GameMaker still have to go through the same processes that people lower on the skill ladder do, with regard to troubleshooting, retooling, or untangling their code.
Hope that helps! Keep at it!
Back in the early to mid 00's, Matt Thorson (developer of Towerfall and Celeste) was a member of the old Game Maker Community, when they were a teenager. While Matt's games were really good and entertaining, they weren't a programming wizard or anything. There were a lot of valid critiques against the games they made from both programming and design perspectives, and it wouldn't surprise me if they sought out advice from other more experienced users to fix them. (This was a long time ago, so forgive me for being unable to provide concrete examples!) The point is, Matt stuck with programming and game design and is now one of the creative forces behind one of the most well-regarded indie games of the past few years.
The other example I can think of is, from time to time I like to watch Shaun Spalding and HeartBeast do gamedev live on Twitch. They're both incredibly experienced programmers and designers, and if you've ever done any amount of poking on YouTube for GameMaker tutorials, you've probably encountered their videos. However, when you're watching them do their thing live, without the benefit of video editing, sometimes they run into a wall. There's an error, or something isn't working quite the way they expect it to, and they're having trouble untangling what's gone wrong. A recent example of this was when Shaun was doing Ludum Dare a few weeks ago, his game hit a major roadblock when he was having trouble figuring out a collision bug.
What I think is valuable about Matt Thorson as an example, is that anyone can acquire the skills needed to make great games if they are patient and receptive to feedback. And with Shaun/HeartBeast, you can draw the knowledge that no one is too good at programming to run into problems they have trouble sussing out. That may seem like it's kind of counter-inspirational, but I find it inspiring that expert-level users of GameMaker still have to go through the same processes that people lower on the skill ladder do, with regard to troubleshooting, retooling, or untangling their code.
Hope that helps! Keep at it!
Just to add some more anecdotal evidence... I can confirm that even with 15 years of experience with Game Maker, I still do incredibly stupid mistakes at an alarming frequency.
I'd go so far as to say that I'm just really good at finding my mistakes and debugging, not actually make good code. The hardest part is finding what the problem is, once you know that, fixing it is usually trivial.There's a quote attributed to Miyamoto Musashi that sums it up pretty well: one of his pupils asked him why he never seemed to do any mistakes when swordfighting, and he replied "Oh, I make mistakes all the time. I just correct them so quickly you don't notice."
TheouAegis
Member
Have Russ or Mike ever asked for help on the forums? lol I think they're the biggest names we've had around here.