Feeling lost. Advice?

Question

If anyone has the time, would really appreciate some advice.

[sad rant ]

Been feeling sort of lost with what to do with hobbies lately, and just like I'm not making the most potential. "Real life" everything is fine, doing well at what I do and socialise great and everything, but a big proportion of my time is spent on the computer and a lot of "skills" I have are too. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but there's no one I talk to with common interests and absolutely no outlet for those things to be used with..

Something I love to do is game design (as you know if you've seen any of my posts), but for a long time now absolutely nothings been done with that - just working and writing about it by myself because it interests me. Graphic design and sound design are other things, but everything with that is alone and no one to talk about it with or work on things with. Its just an incredibly lonely feeling, when you just want to talk about it with other people. Hard to feel like you're truly good at something or have it as a serious passion if you don't do anything with it!

Just don't know the right places to look. Does anyone know of some nice communities or forums that talk about any of these hobbies? Even if only partially related?

What would peoples advice be for getting actually involved with more (successful) game projects? Game design or otherwise. Thats one thing that is really fun and creative, but everyone I've done it with has either lost interest or just not been very good at it, even the discussions I try to start on here get barely any posts and this is the largest group of truly passionate game developers that I've seen before! Quite discouraging..

[/sad rant ]

:)

Peejle · Answer

Try these sites to get the juices flowing and make connections with passionate people in the industry. Both have active forums related to game design:Polycount.comCGhub.comPeejle

AnotherAtreyu · Answer

I can sort of relate Louis. I have a great passion for game design, 3d modelling and anything of the like and none of my rl friends are really into any of that kind of stuff. I have a supportive Wife who thinks a lot of it is cool and 3 awesome kids who Love the stuff I do, but nobody who really understands it to be of much use in a conversation regarding such things.
I sometimes chat with other people with like interests on various forums, but it's not really the same.
It would be nice to have some rl peeps who understand what it is all about and could offer more towards a discussion on the topic than "sounds neat", but I think that until I become a little more involved in the industry and get a little closer to my goals I can't really expect things to be much different so I make due well enough! :)

If it is something that is really getting you down, I mean seriously so, then perhaps the issue is one of some form of underlying depression and not so much just a lack of people to share your hobbies with? It could be worth looking into if any chimes go off when you think about it.

You can always hit me up to chat if you like. I'm not sure how good I will be at conversation as I tend to alternate across a long spectrum of different moods throughout the day but I'm always down to try!

drash · Answer

I try to start on here get barely any posts and this is the largest group of truly passionate game developers that I've seen before! Quite discouraging.

I wouldn't take that personally. There are a lot of threads that get viewed hundreds times without any reply for no real good reason, really. I wish those people would stop lurking and start posting! We're all human here. :) Also, this forum is very young, the audience diverse and their aims are varied (shipping complainers, hardware guys, optics experts, game devs, modders, artists, etc). VR is really a gateway to a lot of things so even if you have a bunch of VR enthusiasts in one room you're still going to have a lot of different sub-hobbies that people will go for and be able to talk about.

Whatever you do, keep on doing what you feel passionate about and try not to depend on others for validation. Although I hear ya, it does help to have at least one good friend you can talk to freely about your ideas and whatnot. Like Peejle said, if you're not making the connections you want here, you could take what you've learned here to other circles of thought, other forums, meetups, whatever.

One last bit of advice -- if you really feel that no one in your social circle is really listening or cares about what you have to say, start a blog. You'll be communicating your ideas with the world at large, and at any time in the future you can simply refer people to it. At some point, you'll probably fall in with like-minded individuals that liked your ideas from the past and want to hear more.

Korda · Answer

I find the unity forums to be really good in general for interacting with the community and because a lot of them are part on the hobbyist side of development they don't mind collaborating for the fun of it.

My biggest advice would be to work on skills that would help benefit a team. You mention graphic and sound design; these are both skills that are highly valued in the dev community.

LouisB · Answer

Those look great Peejle! Definately going to check them out more this evening

It's not an underlying depression or anything like that, perfectly happy with everything else, but I'm sure a lot of you can appreciate spending a lot of your spare time online, but not having any purpose or knowing where to look to FIND a purpose is part thats getting to me. I used to use a small gaming forum a lot and made lots of good friends on there, but that's gotten quiet and due to other things its been quite busy for me and not really bothered getting involved in anything else - only just realising how much I miss being in a community like that.

I appreciate the advice - perhaps I'll focus on sound design and see if I can get involved with something through that, maybe start making videos or something too. Would love to do a blog or podcast or make a forum or something but don't really know how or what I'd consistantly have to say..

Thanks

Forum Discussion

Feeling lost. Advice?

8 Replies

Related Content

Quest 3 lost all tracking

Lost google authenticator key

Finding lost controllers

Any advice for setting up events?

Lost Keystore Password