How To Make A Thing

Yesterday I was talking with a good friend of mine, who is an artist and definitely a mentor figure to me, and she was giving me good advice about this that and the other thing, and at one point she said “You know, you’re a self-made man, kind of like me, and you’re smart and you’re going to have to know these things and figure these things out”. What she was talking about was following money and making the right kinds of connections (which doesn’t that seem to be what everyone is telling me these days), but the way in which she described me as a self-made man made me pause.

It’s something I don’t think a lot about, how I ended up where I am. By a few metrics I’m in quite a good position, and usually I tend to ascribe that to luck. When I stop to reflect, though, it occurs to me that maybe she’s right. Most of the things that have happened to me in my life, or rather that I’ve made happen, can be attributed to choices that I’ve made. Right now I’m not in any sort of situation where I haven’t brought it about by my own hand, which is a powerful thing to consider, and though I don’t want to discount the help of all the people who’ve helped me get where I am today, I definitely didn’t start out in a very comfortable position or, indeed, anywhere close to where I am today. Along the way I’ve learned a great deal of things, too many of which were never codified and have since been lost to the vagaries of my mind, but the one thing I still have experience with, the one thing you may say I’m becoming something of an expert at, one essential thing I can discourse about without feeling like a complete and total fool, is How To Make A Thing.

Prologue: Ideation

One day you’re going to have an idea to make a thing. It happens to everyone, for whatever reason. Maybe you’re really passionate about something, and you find yourself preoccupied with thoughts of it during your waking hours, until finally you come up with some notion of a way you could contribute. Maybe you’re testing yourself, or you want to try something new, or strike out where nobody’s been before. Or maybe you’re just fed up with the way things are, for you or others. These are all valid sources of ideas, and some of them may even be good ideas. The important thing is that if you come up with an idea that you truly value, keep it. Write it down. You don’t have to act on it now, necessarily (although why aren’t you acting on it now?). But write it down for the same reason I keep this blog and keep a diary — otherwise, it’s gone.

Chapter 1: Preliminary Research

This might be a Schuyler-specific step, because most of the projects I undertake are wildly different and require a new set of skills and a new base of knowledge, but that’s good! It means you’re growing! Frankly, I think every idea can do with some preliminary research, even if it’s centered around a field you’ve been involved with before. Here are some good questions to ask during this phase of your project:

Has anyone done anything like this before? Did it work? Was it easy? … No? How hard was it? … That hard, huh? Will they tell me how they did it? … No? Oh. How can I find out? And what are the best tools for me to use to do it?

In this phase, figure out what you might need to build something like your original idea. In my case, I spent literal weeks obsessing over whether to use GameMaker 2 or Unity for my video game project. While asking this question is useful, I definitely spent waaaay too much time trying to decide, and so my advice is to keep this phase to a minimum of time if possible.

No plan survives contact with the project.

Chapter 2: Watch Everything, Read Everything

If you’ve identified some tools and areas of interest that are useful for your project, you really have to dive right into those resources. This is both the least fun phase of project development for me as well as, paradoxically, the one I definitely spend way too much time on. There’s an odd sense of satisfaction that comes from, say, imbibing one tutorial after another, even though ultimately most of what you’re watching and reading is not going to be directly applicable to your own project. There are times I feel like I should discard this phase entirely, except for the fact that it is useful, for this reason: it’s impossible to come up with good questions when you don’t really understand what you’re up against. The materials you encounter in this phase are there to help you understand what exactly these tools are, what the specific contexts are, and how everything works in depth. Even if you’re making Gruyere cheese, watching someone make Swiss cheese can still be edifying. My advice on the whole, though, is to try and keep this phase to a minimum as well.

Chapter 3: Refining Your Idea

This is the fun part, because at this point you should know what kind of questions you need to be asking. At the beginning of my own process making a game demo, my question was “how do I make a game?” After watching enough videos and reading enough about Unity, my question was “how do I write a script that makes this skeleton jump?” One of these questions is very vague and hard to answer. The other is very specific and relatively easy to answer. In general, the important thing at this point is to understand what you can do with what you have and how to get what you don’t have — that’s an incredibly powerful piece of knowledge.

Chapters 4, 5, 6: Sit down and do it, refine more, iterative prototyping

At this point things start to blend together, because you’ve actually sat down and started working on your thing you’re building — but you’ve done it in such a way that you’re building smart! Iterative prototyping is super duper cool, and something I didn’t think much about before going to ITP, but it basically refers to making a bunch of low-cost low-commitment prototypes, testing them out, going back and making changes and then repeating the whole process. You don’t want to spend a bunch of time on one version of a thing trying to make every single detail perfect, because A. nothing is perfect and B. you’ll get to do a lot more and explore a lot more and learn a lot more if you work on getting something basically working and then build off of that. Don’t be afraid to make changes, sometimes something beautiful happens.

Epilogue: You’ve built the thing!

It’ll happen before you know it, so start now.