oh, holy shit. I had seen a few other games with the same concept but nothing before 2009 (me, Sophie Houlden's BOXGAME, Nitrome's Project Surface came later i think)
It s a very basic idea not really hard to come up with that. It's basically one of the first things that comes to mind when you are thinking of how to make a basic platform game. Dude, you are overhyping your intelligence and material. You sound pretentious, when you are really not that deep.@@GSTChannelVEVO
(nodding) yes, exactly. ideas are cheap. execution defines the result. (realizing this is a sick burn against my poor execution) actually i think the idea is at least half of the value of great art. maybe even 90% of the value.
totally unexpected content from this channel, but this was a great concept for a video! i'm working on my first narrated video right now (previously i've just archived some mildly obscure chiptune releases also) and seeing this video has given me some good motivation. keep up the good work :)
it's an odd case where I probably wouldn't have made the video if not for my work on this channel. i'll return to more "usual" musical stuff next ;) that said, embrace your motivation! I love seeing people make the effort to share obscure knowledge through narrated videos like this
That thing about building tools not games is incredibly true in my own experience. I get stuck on the game part so I make 'tools to make development easier' when really I'm just making tools to avoid making the game bit.
The idea that people are making games in high school is really heartening to me. even if none of my little projects came to fruition, I treasure them and consider it all a valuable experience. hopefully you feel similarly!
Awesome. I wish I had taken the small amount of game development we were being taught in one of my middle school classes more seriously. I might have actually made something. I was such a distracted kid at the time.
Nice little vid, thanks for sharing. I don't know about the idea being "stolen", though. I get that it's a snappy title, something along the lines of "what I learned from seeing that somebody happened to have the same game idea as me but executed it better due to their previous experience in game design" wouldn't really work lol. Making titles is hard, I totally get it.
I've gotten a few comments about this so I think I'll change the title, after all. I think "someone used my game idea before I even announced it" captures the same vibe, even if it is a bit longer...
Really cool comparison! The waterfall vs agile approach is something I discussed with two friends at uni today, where we were discussing the merits of reading entire man (manual) pages to learn about unknown functions like fork(), pipe(), execve(), versus just copying stuff off of the internet and kitbashing a first prototype together. I recommended my friend who just started the project to do the latter, since he has been in a sort of paralysis for a few days, where he just stares at man pages for a few minutes and then looks on his phone out of boredom on repeat. Staying motivated during a project is definitely way easier when you constantly get the dopamine rush of having programmed something new, so I mostly work this way. There are times however where I spend days thinking about how to optimize a program to hopefully be orders of magnitude faster, without doing any actual programming, apart from looking up data structures and algorithms I can use. I haven't really ever sat down to make a proper game, but that's often because I just wanted to have something specific and small on the screen as quick as possible, without any care for whether it even counts as a game. So I'll be using the infamous "it depends" programmers like to throw around for whether I prefer the waterfall or agile approach. :)
I had the same idea too years ago, except it was on a sphere instead of a cube. I didn't get beyond a really tiny prototype though. Using a sphere would be interesting, but it presents problems, like how moving in a small circle multiple times would gradually change the direction of gravity, potentially breaking puzzles
After having been a dev for a good while now I feel it's safe to say most devs have had a similar experience to yourself. My personal one was when as a teen I learned about voxels and thought they were cool, decided to start work on a voxel based mining game like a sort of 3d dwarf fortress. I'd barely gotten basic movement working before minecraft hit the scene!
and then you learn about Infiniminer. I guess it makes sense that it's a common experience that just doesn't get talked about much because the minecrafts are going to overshadow the odysyr-voxel-game-tba. the CBAs overshadow the highschool-cube-project. :P
Great ideas have great potential. But without execution and realization they wither and die. Some of us (me and you included) found it and this harsh truth the hard way. Personally I kinda created HOMM in early 90s on paper, before playing what will become one of my favourite series. I was too young to realize those brilliant ideas on a big or global scale, which later Jon Van Caneghem did. But locally we enjoyed playing it very much. It also gave me a good lessons and experience. Leibniz moment, yeah, ha-ha. Thanks for sharing your story.
P.S. Also, nothing new under the Sun. Those ideas are most probably nothing new. Someone already had them or even realized them, we just didn't know. Sad, but true.
I plan to put them on a compilation album eventually, though I worry it'd be a bit rough of an album since some of these tunes are short / bespoke for each video I make. still, thanks for the kind words
it's a hammer and nail situation. really hard to see the forest for the trees, especially when you are a tree! The best (worst? ) example I heard of this was told by Seth Godin, he was a book publisher in the 90s. He was one of the first people to have access to the internet, and upon experiencing the incredible technology, his first instinct was to...... write a book about the internet!
it's my own composition! I took a bunch of bits from another release of mine ("Instructional VHS Music Kit") and tried to chop it up into some sort of lofi-hip-hop type thing. It's currently unreleased, sorry to say.
Nice vid. One thing I'd argue re: agile vs waterfall approaches is that an agile approach would be to review your design assumptions in development; to lock them in (however unintentionally) is in some respects very waterfall-esque. I recognise this is rather meaningless as we're applying software methodologies to unfinished teenage gamedev projects from 14 years ago; I have many from around the same time and I certainly didn't think about my design process back then either.
Too bad the arcade game QB-3 beat both of you by just 27 years!
oh, holy shit. I had seen a few other games with the same concept but nothing before 2009 (me, Sophie Houlden's BOXGAME, Nitrome's Project Surface came later i think)
It s a very basic idea not really hard to come up with that. It's basically one of the first things that comes to mind when you are thinking of how to make a basic platform game. Dude, you are overhyping your intelligence and material. You sound pretentious, when you are really not that deep.@@GSTChannelVEVO
I guess it goes to show that great art is not a great idea, but great execution.
(nodding) yes, exactly. ideas are cheap. execution defines the result.
(realizing this is a sick burn against my poor execution) actually i think the idea is at least half of the value of great art. maybe even 90% of the value.
totally unexpected content from this channel, but this was a great concept for a video! i'm working on my first narrated video right now (previously i've just archived some mildly obscure chiptune releases also) and seeing this video has given me some good motivation. keep up the good work :)
it's an odd case where I probably wouldn't have made the video if not for my work on this channel.
i'll return to more "usual" musical stuff next ;)
that said, embrace your motivation! I love seeing people make the effort to share obscure knowledge through narrated videos like this
A nice video from a cool channel.
Just can't place the clickbait with the chill style of your contents.
I'm considering it a setup for a joke, but yeah it's kinda clickbaity... or at least oversensationalized.
Very insightful sci! Luv wildcard stuff like this once in a while
Oh dang, Miguel is argentinian!
Obligatory AR GEN TINA, AR GEN TINA post.
One time I thought "what if there was an arcade that mixed driving and lightgun?" and thought it was a new idea. Nope. "Lucky & Wild" by Namco.
That thing about building tools not games is incredibly true in my own experience. I get stuck on the game part so I make 'tools to make development easier' when really I'm just making tools to avoid making the game bit.
Super enjoying this hits me in my old high school dev days. Glad you got to talk to the devs and compare though.
The idea that people are making games in high school is really heartening to me.
even if none of my little projects came to fruition, I treasure them and consider it all a valuable experience. hopefully you feel similarly!
This was an extremely interesting video and a lot of great advice! I'm glad you were able to get in touch with the designer too!!
Awesome. I wish I had taken the small amount of game development we were being taught in one of my middle school classes more seriously. I might have actually made something. I was such a distracted kid at the time.
Nice little vid, thanks for sharing. I don't know about the idea being "stolen", though. I get that it's a snappy title, something along the lines of "what I learned from seeing that somebody happened to have the same game idea as me but executed it better due to their previous experience in game design" wouldn't really work lol. Making titles is hard, I totally get it.
I've gotten a few comments about this so I think I'll change the title, after all. I think "someone used my game idea before I even announced it" captures the same vibe, even if it is a bit longer...
Really cool comparison! The waterfall vs agile approach is something I discussed with two friends at uni today, where we were discussing the merits of reading entire man (manual) pages to learn about unknown functions like fork(), pipe(), execve(), versus just copying stuff off of the internet and kitbashing a first prototype together.
I recommended my friend who just started the project to do the latter, since he has been in a sort of paralysis for a few days, where he just stares at man pages for a few minutes and then looks on his phone out of boredom on repeat. Staying motivated during a project is definitely way easier when you constantly get the dopamine rush of having programmed something new, so I mostly work this way.
There are times however where I spend days thinking about how to optimize a program to hopefully be orders of magnitude faster, without doing any actual programming, apart from looking up data structures and algorithms I can use.
I haven't really ever sat down to make a proper game, but that's often because I just wanted to have something specific and small on the screen as quick as possible, without any care for whether it even counts as a game. So I'll be using the infamous "it depends" programmers like to throw around for whether I prefer the waterfall or agile approach. :)
I also made a game exactly like this in highschool lol! I never released it, it wasn't any good but I think this is a fairly common idea for a game
woah! cubes were in the air, huh.
I'd love to see your take on the concept and compare it to these two!
There is a very good game with exactly the same mechanics called Flat Pack.
I had the same idea too years ago, except it was on a sphere instead of a cube. I didn't get beyond a really tiny prototype though. Using a sphere would be interesting, but it presents problems, like how moving in a small circle multiple times would gradually change the direction of gravity, potentially breaking puzzles
After having been a dev for a good while now I feel it's safe to say most devs have had a similar experience to yourself. My personal one was when as a teen I learned about voxels and thought they were cool, decided to start work on a voxel based mining game like a sort of 3d dwarf fortress. I'd barely gotten basic movement working before minecraft hit the scene!
and then you learn about Infiniminer.
I guess it makes sense that it's a common experience that just doesn't get talked about much because the minecrafts are going to overshadow the odysyr-voxel-game-tba. the CBAs overshadow the highschool-cube-project. :P
Great ideas have great potential. But without execution and realization they wither and die. Some of us (me and you included) found it and this harsh truth the hard way.
Personally I kinda created HOMM in early 90s on paper, before playing what will become one of my favourite series. I was too young to realize those brilliant ideas on a big or global scale, which later Jon Van Caneghem did. But locally we enjoyed playing it very much. It also gave me a good lessons and experience. Leibniz moment, yeah, ha-ha.
Thanks for sharing your story.
P.S. Also, nothing new under the Sun. Those ideas are most probably nothing new. Someone already had them or even realized them, we just didn't know. Sad, but true.
I think there's beauty in that, not sadness!
@@GSTChannelVEVO In sadness there can be beauty.
gosh, that was before FEZ even!
Great music.
you need to stop using such bangers as background music and not linking them in the description
I plan to put them on a compilation album eventually, though I worry it'd be a bit rough of an album since some of these tunes are short / bespoke for each video I make. still, thanks for the kind words
it's a hammer and nail situation. really hard to see the forest for the trees, especially when you are a tree!
The best (worst? ) example I heard of this was told by Seth Godin, he was a book publisher in the 90s. He was one of the first people to have access to the internet, and upon experiencing the incredible technology, his first instinct was to...... write a book about the internet!
Hey what is the song that plays at 3:00 ?
it's my own composition! I took a bunch of bits from another release of mine ("Instructional VHS Music Kit") and tried to chop it up into some sort of lofi-hip-hop type thing. It's currently unreleased, sorry to say.
@@GSTChannelVEVO damn it’s super good!
Nice vid. One thing I'd argue re: agile vs waterfall approaches is that an agile approach would be to review your design assumptions in development; to lock them in (however unintentionally) is in some respects very waterfall-esque.
I recognise this is rather meaningless as we're applying software methodologies to unfinished teenage gamedev projects from 14 years ago; I have many from around the same time and I certainly didn't think about my design process back then either.
oh yeah, good point. accidental waterfall 😅
Interesting idea and video!
Unrelated, but where did you get that pikachu sticker you used to demo the game concept at the start?
it's from my bootleg pokemon sticker collection I bought on aliexpress
@@Metaflossy Can you please share where to buy it?
apparently it was listed on aliexpress under some super generic title like "pokemon stickers". this was years ago though...
God idea bro
hey can i have that idea too
yeah, feel free!
ideas are cheap. the devil is in the details of the implementation ;)