Apparently it's misguided love 14. August 2010 Squize General (7) Here's something that really badly bugs me. I'm sure I've written about it before, but with so many words written here they blur into one.I was thinking about writing this post the other day, and in a weird twist of synchronicity ( By default that's always slightly weird though I guess ) I popped over to FlashKit games and there was a post summing up exactly the point of this post, the target of my ire.What drives me insane on any forum are posts like "I'm doing this game for a client... ...how do I make this game ?".I'm going to make some assumptions. The majority of these questions are for simple games, there's never anything really hard attached to these questions. So these are people who are of a pretty low ability with Flash.Continuing with my assumptions, these developers know very little about Flash, and have yet managed to persuade a client to go with them. The client is trusting their brand, no matter how large or small, to this developer.I'm also guessing these developers don't have a great cv. It's quite a stretch that they've got a ton of previous shiny work, but can't do a fairly simplistic game.Poor cv, lack of knowledge, and yet still won the gig. How could that happen ? It can only be down to the price they quoted ( Or they're excellent at selling themselves, but let me stay on track for now ).Why does this bug me ? We live in a world economy, what is a poor wage for me is a decent wage for people in other parts of the world. Why should I care if someone has gone in at the cheapest possible price ?Because it stops the people with real talent, those with the passion to learn and improve, from possibly getting a first foot on the ladder into the industry. If you take a job that you don't know how to do, and hope to just cobble something together using open source ( With no credit for the original author, naturally ) and the good will of forum members, then I've really got no time for you at all.There's no skill or artistry or creativity or passion to doing that, and for me all those are essential aspects of being a game developer. You're not making a game, you're just shoving bits together in a poor attempt to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.I know there's lots of ways to shoot down my "argument" here, we all have to start somewhere, it could be a great artist doing his first bit of coding and needing a head start, a rush job, a favour for a friend, needing to pay the vet bills etc. etc.I don't really care, that's the beauty of having your own blog, you can be as opinionated as you like ( The comments are there to call me an arsehole if you so wish ). Also I'm making a generalisation here, I think 90% of all these types of forum posts I've ever read support my point, as for the other 10%, I'm hoping you understand and we can still be friends. Not lending money friends, but saying hi in the street ones.We all have to learn on the job, it's insane to think that everyone should know everything before starting a project, but there's a difference from learning on the job the bits your unsure of, and accepting a job that you have no clue whatsoever how to accomplish.By doing so you are:* Producing something crap for your client.* Putting more crap on the internet. There's enough already.* Keeping prices artificially low.* Stopping someone whose taken the time and effort to learn their craft from taking the job.No one I've grouped into my little pile will ever read this blog, but hopefully next time you see a similar post on a forum instead of doing the good thing and helping them out, maybe think about it twice.Squize.