Was Learning to Code Worth It...?
Chris Hawkes reflects on completing a three-year indie game development project called King Crab, drawing parallels to his earlier journey learning to code. He argues that the value of long-term creative projects lies not in financial returns but in the fulfillment of bringing a personal vision to life, regardless of commercial success.
Key takeaways
- • Persistence through self-doubt is critical when undertaking multi-year projects; Hawkes nearly quit both his coding journey and game development but found success by pushing through moments of despair.
- • Building with passion over profit produces better results than chasing market trends—Hawkes created the game he envisioned rather than researching popular genres or copying existing ideas.
- • Custom technical solutions require significant effort: Hawkes built a custom wave system in C++ for realistic water physics, which presented unexpected challenges like the impossibility of true curling waves in real-time simulation.
- • The VR game development market is limited, forcing Hawkes to port his originally VR-only vision to PC to reach a wider audience.
- • Getting external feedback (through a YouTuber's playtest at Steam NextFest) revealed critical bugs that the developer fixed before the May 14th release.
- • The moral takeaway: you never know unless you try—success isn't guaranteed, but not attempting guarantees failure.
Recommendations (3)
"I chose one of the more difficult tasks to take on in my opinion when it comes to game development by going both, you know, 3D and also VR and then doing Unreal Engine with VR, which there just isn..."
Chris Hawkes · ▶ 7:18
"The games entered into Steam NextFest. I'm going to release it on May the 14th."
Chris Hawkes · ▶ 8:43