Knowing if you made something good? Thread

How/when do you know if something you made is good or not, and how do you know how it'll be received?

This is something that's came up a few times over the last few days, and I have no idea. I'll give 2 examples to try to explain what I mean.

1- I spent the last week or 2 working on a Doom Snapmap loosely based on games like Payday. Not the best map ever made, but I think it was better than the 2 likes it got. Soon, the map was buried under half arsed maps and achievement maps. A few friends say I should keep making Doom Snapmaps, but it's hard to justify real effort when it's just going to disappear into a pit alongside gdfhjk and BaRaLaChEvMaNt2.

2- Another thing is weirdness. People love Sweary games despite subpar gameplay because they are "weird!" "zany!", "wacky!", and "crazy!". Yet I have a hard time getting people to play weird, abstract mods like Mayhem Mansion, Pasiri, and Mistake of Pythagoras. These mods manage to be weird while keeping good gameplay. Even games like Vanquinsh, No More Heroes, and Binary Domain rarely get a look in.

The specifics of these particular examples (such as how Doom Snapmap fails to separate the wheat from the chaff) aren't important, the important point is, what am I missing?

I get that there's a degree of personal taste involved, and when I play my own games I have a hard time enjoying it as I can see what could have been done better. But it seems my throw away jokes get praised, but my more polished work gets shrugs. So, how do you know when you've done something good?

You know you've made something good when people who don't know you tell you it's good.

You're talking about making maps. I think that's very different from making games. It's absolutely random to get a map noticed by many people since the audience is very small right from the start, and the amount of people spamming crappy ones is insane. There's nothing to advertise and in the end making maps will do absolutely nothing for you 'fame'-wise.

Making games is a bit different. You can find playtesters and ask them if they like your game. These are ideally not family nor friends. If they like it, I guess you made something good.

How/when do you know if something you made is good or not, and how do you know how it'll be received?

TBH those two are two different things IMO. Something good doesn't mean it will be well received and vice versa. Not to mention the taste of audience who might be different than yours

The key here is confidence: are you happy with your creations? do you like playing them again and again? . If the answer is yes, then they are good

Why do you need to be successfull? Failure is learning: if you never fail you will never learn - don't be ashamed of it. Fail fast and move on to new projects.

You know you've done something good when people praise you for it. It's as simple as that. It's not about how many downloads you get, or how noticed your map gets on some chart.

Since you are a map maker you should perhaps do something that a level designer friend of mine does: he enters online competitions in map-making. It's a good way of getting continous feedback from the community/participants (ie: knowing if you are doing good, working in the right direction and so on) and it gives you a nice end-goal and something you can be proud of - even if not a whole lot people play it in the end. I think he won one of these, and came third in another. I imagine it's pretty rewarding when you see online streamers play your map, evaluating it, comparing it to the other submissions and really having a blast playing it - even if you don't win.

One of my most successful tools wasn't that popular for the first two years and there were other similiar - but worse tools around: one which was really popular and still is today. I didn't think much about it because my goal was not to be popular, but to make the best tool. Then I made it into a commercial version, keeping on improving it all the time over the course of soon to be 4 years. Today I'm making some money off it - not a whole lot but it definetly keeps the motivation up. But what's most rewarding is that I know that studios such as DICE, Sledgehammer Games, 2K and ILM (StarWars!!!) use it. That tells me that what I am doing is worth my time: it is good - and people like my creation.

Edited by: Nightshade