That little lightbulb

The idea's the thing. Every game starts with an idea—that little lightbulb above your head that flicks on all of a sudden and makes you say "aha!" If you've gone as far as picking up a book on Unity, you probably have at least one game idea floating around in your noggin. If you're like me, you really have 10,000 game ideas floating around in your head, all clamoring for your attention. "Build me! Build me!" Which of these ideas should you go ahead with?

The quality that defines a successful game developer is not the number of ideas he has. The guy with ten game ideas is equally as valuable as the girl with 500 game ideas. They're both essentially worthless! A game developer develops games. The one thing that separates you from success is not the number of ideas you've had or the number of projects you've started and abandoned. It's the games you've finished that count. To put it another way: he who executes, wins. Don't worry about getting it right just yet; worry about getting it done.

And what's with all this pressure to make your first game good, anyway? Before he directed Titanic and Avatar, James Cameron worked on the sequel to Piranha—a zero-budget, B-movie schlockfest about murderous fish. Don't worry—you'll be the game world's answer to Cameron some day. But for now, let's finish the fish.