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Time and time again I've discovered the same pattern in my life. Those things I really try hard to do and achieve never seem to go right, while the things I do as a joke always succeed.Take game making, for example. Since 2001 I have wanted to make an above view Metal Gear Solid style game. Fast forward 6 years and I still hadn't finished anything (Apart from two small projects). Why? Because I was aiming too high. I was adding small details to bushes and making the boxes blow up in realistic ways, and I forgot the gameplay. Those two small projects I mentioned were made in early 2004, a month apart from each other. If I had been making projects like that since 2001 I would have over 50 games finished by now. The same applies to the maps that I've made. I always start grand and majestic projects and fail because they don't live up to my expectations. I know a lot about game and map making, but have nothing to show for it.

Now let's compare that to my music making. I'm not saying you should like it. Far from it- you probably think that it's amateurish and simplistic. If you're a song maker yourself, let me ask you this- how many songs have you finished? And which have you been most pleased with? I find the best things I've made have been lucky accidents. I might plonk a load of notes on the music maker, play it and suddenly get inspired. Those songs tend to be far better than the ones where I plan it all out in great detail.

I'll examine some of the things I've done that have gone right. Those two games I made in 2004 started off as little tests. I programmed a person with a bomb in his hand. He could place them down and after a certain amount of time it would blow up, demolishing any walls near by. Within 3 days I had a game out of it, simply because it was fun. My normal tactic when making a game is to start off with the physics, then add the detail, the AI and THEN start working on the gameplay. Bad idea. The best games and maps are playtested from an early stage. Fun gameplay leads to ideas, not the other way around. The other game was a sequel to 2 very, very basic games I don't even consider games as they were so simple. The reason that it worked was because I built up slowly. I started with a simple game, then made a slightly more complex sequel, building on what went right and getting rid of what didn't. Finally I made a third game. People were quick to dismiss the earlier games as rubbish (Okay, nobody really played them, but I know exactly what they'd think if they did play them) but with out those experiments I wouldn't have released a good third game.

Don't lie- you've criticised other people's work before. You might have played a map that was rubbish, or a game that was so simple you think that you could have done better. I do it all the time. Other people do it to my work. Most of the time those criticising haven't done any better. Or they'll set out to do so, but will hit a brick wall when they realise how much time and effort it'll take. Or they'll give up when it doesn't feel as polished and as fun as the game they were trying to copy.

No matter how many maps you start, if you don't finish any then you're not going to become a good mapper. I know how the editor works. I can help other people to make maps, but I'm terrible at finishing a map myself. I get satisfaction from helping others who have the ideas and patience, but not the know-how, to make the map they want to make. Gameplay, balance and that hook that some maps possess come from sheer good luck (rare) or from experience. For those of you who aren't familiar with the game making community, it's a small group of game makers, surrounded by thousands of people who just drop by to post on the forums and to rate the latest games. I have two different perceptions of the site:. The one I had up until last year was...

It's a site where the rating of the games are based off who made them. Those who are well known on the forums will have their games downloaded more than new comer's games will. The 'Game of the Month' award goes to the game made by the most famous person, or which ever one has the nicest screenshot on the main page because people can't be bothered to download the game. When people do bother to play a game, it's rated on how polished it is, rather than what the game's like. For instance, a polished version of pong will score better than... say, an epic Metal Gear Solid 2D version, simply because the latter includes a crate that looks slightly blocky, or there was an occasion where the AI glitched on a wall. In other words, a game with nothing in, but done perfectly, does much better than an ambitious game that lacks the polish they expect.

Oh, how I hated that site. I'd make complex games, release them and they'd be ignored. I started to joke about. I even made a fake account- uh, I mean, got my FRIEND to sign up and make some pathetic games in the style that they prefer, simply so I could have the satisfaction of proving to myself that the website was unfair.

I got to work, making bad games. Lots and lots of them. And guess what- I felt more inclined to carry on with them! I would almost complete the game's engine, but then I'd realise that it was actually quite fun to play, so I'd add more to it. And more, and more. What was meant to be a simple 2 hours project turned into a 2 week... project. (Much like these blogs always start out small but end up being so long nobody reads them, please email me if you get to this point, I'll be impressed if you do. My email's at the top) At the end of that time I'd have a fairly decent game, some of which were more fun than my month long proper projects. I actually felt bad, parting with them. Then I felt even worse when even those games were criticised. Argh! What do they want? Blood?!?!

Any way, I consider this 'clever market research'. Sure, it was long winded, but I learnt a LOT from good old James Luke. Hell, some of his games were so good I had to steal them and put them up as my own! JUR also happens to include my first songs ever. I decided to try and make the music myself for that game simply to say it was all my own work, and simply due to a LUCKY ACCIDENT I discovered that I could make songs that I liked! Since then, I have been busy making new songs.

Closing up the game making bit of this blog, here's some advice to anybody who wants to make a game- start SIMPLE. Start with a bat n ball game. I know you want to make the next Unreal Tournament or what ever, but you'll learn more from a Bat and Ball game. Unless you finish a project you'll never have anything to show for your work and you're inferior to those people whose best game is a 4-colour, buggy version of spin the bottle. And you don't want that, now, do you?

That would have been a good end to the blog. But I can't stop yet, I have more to say! I have aimed too high in both game making and map design and because of that I have nothing to show for either (Although I have been aiming lower recently and have finished a series of games, as well as a couple of maps- and have become all the better because of them). In comparison, my music making has given me far more pleasure than both. I've never aimed high with it, I've just messed about, come up with a good idea and gone along with it. I am now about to finish my 20th song and plan to start a third one shortly. My first album already reminds me of the end of my last Summer Holiday before University and hopefully I'll remember this first year of University very time I play Atomic Amnesia or Nursery Nightmare, both of which were thoroughly 'playtested' on my mp3 player as I walked to and from lectures. The song 'That's Life' was a lucky accident and I believe it's one of my best songs because of it. Hey, even my mapping tutorials were an accident. I thought of doing tutorials while I was up in the mountains of Sri Lanka on an 8 hour car ride. I started with game making tutorials and just happened to do one on the Source SDK. I started juggling because my Mum told me to get off the computer one day as apparently I spent 'too much time on it'. (We all know that's not true...). Everything good that's happened to me has been unexpected and I don't think I made the most of it at the time. My advice is to do random stuff. Sleep in a hedge. Talk to somebody random. Try knitting (It's actually great fun). Do the things that seem a bad idea at the time, because you'll learn more from it either way. And for those of you who are interested, my name's 3kliksphilip because I used to make games on a program called Klik and Play, and was in a group of game makers called the 3klikateers. We had great things planned for that company. There were only two of us. We expected to expand... and look what happened to that.

(In our defence we did team up again in 2007 to make Santasatnas)