On not doing everything yourself

I have always been somewhat of an “impractical” person. Despite my mother telling me this during most of my childhood, I never really thought of it as a thing to work on, a thing to change.

This however, became very clear to me last weekend, which I spent teaching myself how to use the program called Tiled, to generate maps. I’m not sure whether many of you will have read our older blog posts, long before we gave up on working on MikuRPG. We (and by we I really mean just Matt) were working on making our own map editor back then. A map editor incredibly similar to Tiled exept with less functionality, which was directly integrated to the entity editor as well as the game engine. This editor took two attempts and over a year to make (by the time it was ready we had basically lost all motivation to work on the actual game). Learning to use Tiled, which is completely free, took me a weekend.

I suppose just the fact that we are attempting to use a different program means that we are improving, although the mention of using a ready-made game engine still sends provokes an “you’re kidding, right?” from my boyfriend and programmer.

This impracticality doesn’t only happen in the tools we use or make from scratch though. It happens a lot in my pixel art as well. Sometimes I unconciously choose to try to figure out why something isn’t working by just looking at it for long enough, moving pixel upon pixel until it clicks, rather than look up a tutorial or some reference image. While I do use photos as reference, looking at other pixel feels like cheating, like I need to figure it out alone and no one else is allowed to help me.

While this approach is most certainly helpful when it comes to learning and deeply understanding something, I don’t believe that it is always beneficial. I think that indepence is overly glorified in our generation, and I think that it’s okay to look at other people’s work and to use other people’s work (obviously only work that is available for you to use, don’t steal anything!).

If we can do a year’s work in a weekend by using someone else’s tool, it’s exciting to think how much better I could get at pixel art by studying other people’s work instead of trying to figure it all out. While I don’t think this knowledge will become quite as deeply engrained as experimentationally obtained knowledge, I do think I could obtain it so much faster that way.

I don’t know whether this is something other people struggle with as well or whether I’m just being particularly stubborn, but if this sounds like you, I would like to give you the same little 2 cents of advise that I would have liked to give my younger self when she started working on her first game project (or sooner than that): Stop doing everything yourself. Speed of learning and speed of execution are far more valuable than a tiny extra snippet of independence. Don’t be afraid to accept the help of others.

Have a wonderful week,

-Marta

Obligatory additional game update at the end of the post: We are almost ready to announce our new project, however we both agree that we want to find a name for it before we do so and for some reason we can’t come up with an appropiate name for it. Other than that it’s going really well and we are working on many things I won’t describe in detail until we have a name.