BecomeAPatron

What makes people successful?

Read a good article today about why some people are almost always sucessful. It lists some key traits that successful people have. I feel that I am strong on most of those points.

My martial arts training helps with some of them too like “They do things even when they don’t feel like it”. I think that some people just want to do all the fun bits of making games and then when it comes to the boring bits they just don’t do them and so their game is never finished, or if they do finish it, they don’t do any marketing and so it never sells.

6 Responses to “What makes people successful?”

  1. Stephen Says:

    Marketing is a large part of becomming successful in the area of making a return. The fun part of game development is the idea stage (For me and others). Over 6 years of working with teams we would spend months in the “ideas” stage. A cool idea is very unsellable and very unplayable as well :). In 2 weeks time we will have our 2 week break which is our ideas stage for 4 products which is really fun. Then I do the hard yards and produce the design documents and place holder art for the production pipeline.

    Most people want to know for sure that game X is going to make a nice return so they can quit there job “on the release day or close to it” (bad move). Now I would love to quit my normal jobs but it is not going to happen for a while (maybe I can quit my jobs game 16 🙂 march 2009). The only thing we focus on here is game output matched with a 2 year plan. Also one of my positive qualities is I like doing the hard yards to get a job done. 98 % of teams get to the hard yards and quit.

    We had a big sports match here in Australia and one of the best players on the field put in a big effort (and you can tell). In fact you can’t get a best player effort reward without a big effort. Marketing for me would be the boring part, but I am making it into a game as well. I am producing a marketing product (line of marketing material) in the company to be released soonish drip style. So I made my marketing fun by making it into a product I can get excited about, so I can put in the big effort.

  2. Grey Alien Games Says:

    yeah good advice. Looking fun and excitement in the hard work (and also by visualising your end goal) is a good way to get that work done well. It’s all part of the whole process of making and selling games!

  3. Stephen Says:

    Doing 2 weeks of marketing = oh boy :(. The marketing part is the hard yards for me. I am turning the marketing into a art project which probably works for me because I am a artist. I think maybe for a coder it would be harder to make marketing fun.

    My email box is loaded to the hilt with emails. Also Molipop got a bug fix as well so I have to update it from 1.01 to 1.02. More emails now :(. I just want to go back into my cave and make some new art. Looking forward to the new project starting in July 🙂 (casual rpg and I can’t wait, foaming at the mouth).

  4. Grey Alien Games Says:

    Yeah I did a couple of solid weeks of marketing for Holiday Bonus, then some ongoing stuff ovre time.

    Casual RGP sounds great!

  5. Stephen Says:

    I am looking forward to it. Getting out of this cloning habit :).
    But the clone projects were great and a solid grounding.

  6. Grey Alien Games Says:

    Yes cloning is good for practicing. You know the game mechanic is proven so you can focusing on getting a professional looking polished game out. Then use those same skills to make more unique games later.