Want To Make Your First Game? Watch THIS

I get it. You're motivated to make games, but you also know that you won't be motivated in about a week. Like all of us, you struggle to stick with a plan to actually stay disciplined and finish something. I know all about this, and so does Julian Ball, my buddy who made a game called Lens Island. I've spent 5 years on a single game that ultimately thankfully paid off. And Julian, he's about to release an eight-year project. We talk about the motivation we needed [music] to finish our games. But it's not normal motivation. We call it negative motivation. Negative motivation is a powerful force that drove both of us to finish our games. And this could be the missing ingredient for you in your project. This is a clip from the full length podcast [music] which is linked below. And it might be the secret sauce you need to actually stick with your game and release it. There's a lot of people listening right now who would say that they're not disciplined people and um they wish that they could be, you know, and I think that what I found with

disciplined game developers and disciplined entrepreneurs and artists is it's not necessarily that they're disciplined. It's that they know how to they know what turns them on and they know how to power through a desert a season where it's just a desert and it's boring. They know they know how to dream of like that moment where they get to a certain spot in development or [snorts] releasing the game. They can they almost know how to like see into the future and go, "Okay, I'm going to be I'm going to have so much pleasure at this moment and the only way to get to that moment is to power through." So, it's it's kind of like visualization. It's kind of having a vision and and knowing knowing what it's going to feel like. The problem with that is I think there's a lot of people who have never ever felt that before. They've never felt an early access launch or a demo launch or seeing their wish list tick up and all of a sudden they've got 20,000 more wish lists or having a streamer play their game which is really fun. I'm sure you've enjoyed seeing that too, you know. They've never experienced that. I know,

[laughter] right? Um, but side note, I I had I had some streamers play the demo for Twisted Tower, and there's so many like I think over it's close to a million total views for the demo, which I think is I'm really proud of, and I think that's awesome for a demo, but there's so many videos where it's like for some reason the streamer cranked up the brightness and so it's really washed out and it's got like eight or like a 100,000 views and I'm like, "No, what happened? Why does it look so bad?" Um, yeah, regardless, it's it's a great feeling to have all these things happen and I know how it feels and I know that it's possible to get to those moments. Whereas a lot of dreaming developers, they don't they've never experienced that. And I I would love to hear people's stories in the comments of like how they feel knowing that they've never had that before and they don't know that it's possible. And so I think discipline, the foundation of discipline is it's something like knowing what it

feels like to reach a goal and to have it happen, you know? Yeah, it all just stems from motivation. Like it just this is actually like a big part of my life. It's something I think about often. And I've talked to a lot of other game developers and just people all all walks of life about this topic of just about like what motivates people to do things and um and yeah like you always get but I was myself in in that sort of in those shoes at one point where I was like oh like I really want to do this and it it's it's like the worst position in life to be always saying you want to you want to do something you just never do it. And obviously it's a very very simple answer to that question. Just do it. Just start doing the thing that you like stop talking about the thing you want to do. Do it. Uh but in order to make that transition, there has to be motivation. Like if if motivation isn't there, um it just doesn't matter. You you will never truly do the thing you want to do. And motivation can stem from

two places from from positive or negative. Negative is always a lot more powerful than positive. And I think it's also why the whole story of I quit my job, you know, blah blah blah blah, people under these sort of very constrained circumstances usually end up flourishing and doing these extraordinary things because they have a very strong negative motivation. And then I think there's this uh more of a philosophical journey like an internal journey that happens if people start off with negative constraints forcing them to then become better people. How can they flip that into a positive motivation and start to structure life in positive ways? Because I had that exact transformation like throughout my whole life. Um I it's sort of random, but I've had like a really strong fear of death. Like I have panic attacks just in the middle of night. Oh my god, I'm going to die one day. Like what's the point of living if poof gone for infinity? And it's like this everpresent fear that I still have, but it used to be a lot more intense when I was younger. And um that's a pretty big

motivator and it's sort of put my life under this scope of like okay this is Julian's life and everything outside of that is the infinite void of death and it's like what do I have control over that part in the middle it's literally the only thing I have control over. So I have two choices. Just be a nihilist and be sad my whole life or like take some sense of ownership and agency and at least try to control and change that middle part. And that would make me feel like I won a little bit. Even if I'm in this this sort of these circumstances that I can't control and it it annoys me, getting some sense of control and agency back would make me feel better. So then that's what I did. Like I started doing these little things to try to get some control out of my life and it was all sparked by negative motivation and then it sort of got to the point few years ago where I sort of thought okay it's come it's got me this far and it's actually got me quite successful but now I feel like I have this unhealthy relationship with

motivation where unless something kicks me up the ass and makes you feel like I'm going to die I don't do it and I've had to make this transition now where it's like okay instead of being scared of what's behind me chasing me I need to be excited about what's in front of me and I need to run towards the exciting part. And for me now that is I want to I want to keep making games that I'm proud of. I want to add art to the world. I want to create experiences. I want to also hopefully as an outcome of that be able to buy a house and build a family and have a more sustainable fun life. I get to be creative and provide the world with these fun gaming experiences. I've got all this stuff to look forward to now. But I don't think anyone's going to do anything remotely interesting if they don't have an underlying motivation because it's just like why? Like why why do it if there is no why? Just keep doing what you're doing. If you're living a comfy life and you've got no reason to change, yeah, don't change. So I think like the first step is always like find a why. Sometimes it might be a negative why. Sometimes people force negative wise.

They suddenly quit their job. they do something drastic in order to force their own force themselves into like a survival situation which I wouldn't necessarily recommend but I've I think there's always that friend group where it's like there's that one person that just seems to always land on their feet and they're always in this like crazy situations and and things just seem to like come to them and those are typically those people where it's like they don't create their own luck like they don't they don't create their own reasons but if if a negative situation gets imposed on them bam like they this reaction.