Overscoping: A Much Needed Failure for Success

We are all ambitious people that want to do everything in a short amount of time. As game developers, we always have a new amazing idea in our head every day that we want to create. A lot of us quit though because it gets too tough: we lose motivation, get imposter syndrome, or realize that overscoping our project led to failure. But when you overscope, you learn to redesign your core mechanics and redefine what your project is.

Going back to the Fall of 2022, I remember how my goal was to teach people how to apply their coding knowledge that they got from high school to actual computer science careers. I planned to start with three different courses: game development, web development, and machine learning. To make it even more complex, we would have different roles in the organization and we would mandate that every member contributes to the community in a positive way. We would let members pick from either developing blog content or mentoring. I might have been too stubborn to admit, but all of our members back then knew that this wasn’t going anywhere.

There just wasn’t any theme to our mission. Not just that but it was absurd to think that I can create a mandatory voice channel meeting on Discord at my convenient time, especially since members are coming from all over the world. There’s something different about teaching online than teaching in person in the way of delegating tasks and communicating to a community. There’s a difference between a school curriculum class and an online course: one is mandatory while the other should be a choice.

Game development is supposed to be hobby that you learn on the side. No one should be forcing you to do anything and we should be having fun developing games and sharing our experiences at our own convenient times. And at the end of the day, it is your choice if you want to pursue your dreams and reach a successful career. What we can only do is provide you with all the resources you need to make that decision yourself.

That’s why our new mission has been to encourage people to start early on their careers. While encouragement can include teaching, which we do in our program, we take inspiration from YouTubers and their Discord servers to create a fun learning environment. And, just like any game, we give our design and framework a small twist to bring a reward system for learning, something I feel like everyone has wished for at least once in their educational career.

Now everything we do now and in the future will be for game development and that’s fine because every programmer who has changed the world in different fields of computer science started from making games. We still managed to keep our initial mission, but we’re doing it in a different way.