Stop Making Excuses

tim-cain game-development motivation beginner unity learning productivity

Abstract

Problem: Aspiring game developers frequently cite lack of time, money, skills, or industry connections as reasons not to start making games.

Approach: Tim Cain addresses each excuse directly, drawing on his own experience starting from nothing, and proposes two concrete starter projects that teach fundamental skills.

Findings: Every common excuse has a straightforward counter: free engines exist, free assets are abundant, 15 minutes a day adds up, and having a demo dramatically improves job prospects. Small, focused projects like a space combat game or an image filter app teach a surprising breadth of skills.

Key insight: The barrier to entry for game development has never been lower — the only real obstacle is choosing not to start.

Source: Tim Cain — "Stop Making Excuses" (YouTube)

1. The Common Excuses

Tim identifies several excuses he reads constantly in his comments:

1.1. "I don't have time"

The number one excuse. Tim's counter: you're watching his video right now. If you spent just 15 minutes a day working on something, you'd start seeing results. His videos will still be there when you come back — your project won't build itself.

1.2. "I don't have money"

This might have been valid 40 years ago. Today, Godot, Unreal, Unity, and GameSalad are all free. Almost any basic PC, Mac, or Linux machine can run them. The financial barrier to entry has never been smaller.

1.3. "I can't do it all"

You don't have to. There are massive amounts of free assets — models, code snippets, sound effects — available online, especially for learning projects. Tutorials routinely include starter assets. Just grab things and start assembling.

1.4. "Why bother? The industry is too hard to break into"

Tim has spoken about this repeatedly: having a demo changes everything. It gets you interviews. It gets people asking how you figured things out. Tim recalls hiring people specifically because they demonstrated the ability to solve problems independently — the kind of person who won't just sit and wait when stuck.

1.5. "It's easy for you because you're privileged"

Tim pushes back: don't compare yourself to him now — compare yourself to him when he started. In high school, he had to go to the library to figure out how the Atari worked. His computer teacher couldn't explain the machines, only point him to books and tech manuals. Before joining Interplay, he was a student tens of thousands of dollars in debt. He took a risk over a safer, better-paying job. He draws an analogy to his Fallout: New Vegas cameo — he wasn't comparing himself to the professional actors, he was just glad to stand next to them and not look stupid for a few minutes.

2. Starter Project 1: Space Combat Game

Tim walks through a small Unity space combat game he built during a bout of insomnia, explaining the cascade of skills it teaches:

  • Project setup — Choosing 2D vs 3D, naming, folder structure, importing free models
  • Player movement — Translating keyboard/mouse input into ship movement; deciding on inertia, auto-leveling after banking
  • Skyboxes — Learning how to set up and navigate within a skybox; discovering that at infinite distance you can't perceive forward/backward motion
  • Star particles — Adding small spheres for depth cues; learning ambient lighting, object pooling (repositioning stars ahead of the player rather than destroying/recreating)
  • Enemy AI — Reusing the player ship model; implementing basic state-driven AI in Unity's update loop
  • Combat — Firing projectiles teaches object movement, collision detection, damage tracking, destruction states, and particle effects for explosions

Each feature naturally leads to the next, making it an excellent self-contained learning project.

3. Starter Project 2: Image Filter Program

When Tim taught himself C# in the early 2000s (already knowing C and C++), he built an image filtering application. This deceptively simple project taught him:

  • File system operations — Loading and saving files, working with JPEG format
  • UI development — Building a graphical interface in C#
  • Convolution matrix filters — Applying kernels across image rows and columns to produce effects like sharpen, blur, emboss, and edge detection. Learn one, and you understand them all.

3.1. The C# vs C Performance Lesson

Building the same program in both languages taught Tim a lasting lesson about trade-offs:

  • C# version: Took a few days to build (the language handles much of the heavy lifting). But applying a single convolution filter could take 30 seconds to a minute.
  • C version: Took a few weeks to build. The same filter ran in under a second.

The farther you get from the hardware (C → C++ → C#), the slower things get. This is something you can read about endlessly, but you only truly feel it when you experience it firsthand.

4. The Bottom Line

Tim's message is simple and direct: the tools are free, the assets are free, the knowledge is free. You can work in 15-minute increments. Pick a small project — a space shooter, an image filter, anything — and start making things. Stop making excuses.

5. References