Someone asked me a while back where I get my motivation. It’s spite.
Garry’s Mod
I’d have probably lost interest in Garry’s Mod within a couple of weeks. There was one thing that drove me forward.
It was called HL2World. It had a forum full of people that hated me and hated GMod. They were big fans of another mod called JBMod and were pretty militant about it.
So a lot of my motivation came from lurking their forums. They’d say Garry’s Mod was shit because of some reason, then I’d spend a month fixing that thing. Then I’d stalk the person that made the post to see if they changed their mind.
The more they hated me the more motivation I’d get. People who hate you tell you the truth – they don’t make the best of it – they attack you with every flaw they can find. That’s useful if you want to fix things in a game.
The good thing about the HL2World guys was that even though JBMod pretty much immediately ceased development after it hit, they held onto the belief that one day there would be a big update and it’d stomp Garry’s Mod.That wasn’t likely to happen, but it was likely enough to drive me to work hard to make sure it didn’t.
Just out of spite.
Rust
Rust launched in early access and got really popular really fast. Too fast for us. We realised it needed a total rewrite. Huge sections of the code were over-engineered, webs of dependancies for no reason. It was hurting development.
So we called that version Rust Legacy and I started making a new version along side it. From scratch.
A lot of people didn’t like this. They saw what it was, not what it would become. They swore that we were killing Rust and that they’d never play new Rust and would stick with Rust Legacy forever.
So I’d stalk them on reddit and the forums. Any complaints they had I’d address in a way that not only solved their initial issue but was a million times better than how it worked in Legacy.
The biggest reward was watching them disband their impossible position and start playing the new version. They thought I was making the game better for money and career, but I was doing it because they pissed me off.
I just came across this when im midway developing a game myself. I played Gmod and Rust for thousand of hours (started with Gmod9), and this is so funny to read. I also think people are so degenerate that it hurts nowadays, and even if you really don't want to care what they say, its somehow not possible. Game dev nowadays feels like how to get your game accepted by degenerates and idiots. Holding their hands when introducing new features, giving them the most BASIC explaination as why certain things are like they are and can't be changed that easily. I just stopped arguing with people as why Antialiasing is performance heavy if they don't want a blurry mess with TAA, why dense forests are not possible if they want them to look good with decent performance. Why anticheat is not a task of 2 days when even the biggest studios struggle with that for YEARS. And why cheating will still happen with the best AC that could ever be coded.
But it felt like talking with a wall, how can you explain someone who does not even know what a memory adress is, why a simple mechanic needs weeks of work. Everything is so easy for the audience because they don't know how much goes into that and how deep the iceberg is behind game dev.
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