There are people in our lives, who we really hate because of how they react about the things we care about. You too have a few of them. We spend hours thinking about their response and they simply ignores all the details we put. We want to punch them. But we want to act like a good human being, so we don’t punch.

But there is something else that needs to be noticed. We are more disturbed by the negative response or ignorance of people whom we expected a good response than the total number of good response we got.

Now this is not right. Are you following me?

We tend to make a few people more important to us than everyone else. And their opinions matters to us more than anything. They become deciding factors. But you and me both would agree that, this is not right.

Okay let me give you a few examples that you would relate.

One is, there are a few people in your life, very few, but they are there, who will try their best to ensure that you feel good. You feel appreciated. But instead of feeling good, you would tend to spend your time discussing with them the problems you have about the people you don’t like.

Another is, you are working on a project you are excited about. Now what your ten friends said about this project would totally means less to you as compared to what your parents or spouse think about it.

I wrote this letter up to this point. Then I started thinking, may be it is just me who is so sensitive about the opinions of people not my readers. So I should begin to write something meaningful for them.

You got my point ? What about those who would really are like this letter? That was the point of beginning this newsletter to write for me and people like me.

This negativity overshadows the positivity. This is where it becomes wrong as now it is killing my creativity.

Okay, let us navigate through it.

So what is happening:

“[Negative opinions] of few [important people], [Impacts us more] than the total positivity”

The problem is in one of the three things.

1. Negative opinions
2. Important People
3. Impacts us more

Let’s go through them one by one

• Negative opinions : Humans beings are smart enough to be well aware of the fact that not everyone would have a good opinion.
• Impact us more : This is a matter of sensitivity. If I stop feeling more, I will become a stone. I am a sensitive person. I feel more and I want to feel more. That is what differentiate me from machines. I will not practice making myself insensitive and numb just to handle a few people.
• Important people : This is where the problem should be. Obviously because we purposely skip the above twos!

Trust me, I do have a question. How do we categorize a few people as “Important People” while others not?

Just because they have matching blood, or they have historically spent more time with you, or they have more control over life, makes them really important for you?

This was the first category.

But what about the second category? You don’t know them? Let me tell you.

• What about those few who waited for you on the lunch table at office and didn’t eat till you came.
• What about those who made is sure to buy two tickets and cancelled their movie because you can’t go.
• What about those who took care of the shade of blue you like more for your jeans.
• What about those who didn’t like the new cafe because you don’t like it’s ambience.

The beautiful people they are.

But we don’t consider them important. Slowly they also stops considering you important. It’s not your fault, we all simply do.

Worse is, we use the second category people to discuss our passion to make things right with the first category of people.

All this occurs with a simple misjudgement.

“Who is really important to you?”

It took me a mug of tea to ponder about. But I have come up with a definition:

There are people who were purposely doing their best to make you know again and again that they are impressed by you, they appreciate your work, what you feel is important to them. These are the people whom you share things without ever feeling judged or trying to make an impression. You just know they would not judge you.

I believe those are the important people.

• Even if you are sensitive, even if you take things negatively too quickly, these people were there to hang in their and make sure they clear all the confusions.

These people deserves a justice.

Instead, we morally confuse ourselves and make wrong people important. No. They are not important for our feelings, rather, they are a situation that needs to be handled.

The second category people are important.

It’s simple :

“Those people are important to you who makes you feel important for them.”

Its equal exchange.

Put your morality in context. The rest of the people, does not deserves your importance because of fairness. You should not be unfair with those who find your importance.

It is just like love. When you love someone, you don’t sit and feel yourself, you make them feel.

And those are important people.

Let us be fair and divide these people into two categories.

As now you already know that the first category people don’t consider you important YET, and thus not important SO FAR, so you don’t need to get UPSET by them either. So you won’t get angry either. You won’t consider them punching.

And there will be more peace overall!

This was the point I wanted to make for which I wrote this so far.

Just by putting your expectations on the right side, you simply removed all the complexities.

Now you simply know that it is a nature of a few people to make you feel negative and you don’t care about their words much because it is fair, you have decided not to give them importance either, and they also don’t give you much and you both don’t care. You are like known strangers. And thus no need to get angry.

I am stressing it again and again to not to fall into the confusion of morality. The fair thing here is to make those important for you who put effort to make you feel important.

I am not upset anymore. I didn’t made myself insensitive, I simply made them less sensual. Ha ha ha.

Or else, this letter would not have ever written.

Thank you very much for being on my second category and reading this letter.

Thanks a lot for making me feel important.

Every year, I ignore taking up any new year resolution because I know I won’t do them. But, Every year around this time, I dream about being the freest person, going on the beaches, with a ripped 6 abs fit body taking awesome photographs. Just like new year resolutions, I don’t work on this either.

Technically It is not impossible to do. See, after listening to Tim Ferris for some time, you will get motivated enough to believe that anything is possible in 3 months. You can change your life completely within 3 months of focused actions. And my goals are also possible in 3 months. All I need to do is to spend 30 minutes every other day for exercise, and a few hours for work. That’s it. I already have laptop and a place to live.

Yeah I know I won’t. Just telling you.

Yesterday, I was in a stadium with a friend of mine. A guy was sprinting through the track passed through us. We say them and looked at each other. After a moment of enlightenment, a word blurb out of his divine mouth, “Dedication, bro”.

I took me a few seconds to even realize, “Oh! There is a word like that in English!”, while we were laughing on each other’s stupidity, that guy, wearing his grey hoodie, kept on running in the cold.

In reality, we both felt ashamed. Where is my dedication? Am I really dedicated or not? It is not like I keep wasting time. I am always busy in working on my things. Thinking solutions through problems, juggling between the stuffs thrown at me by life, managing each and everything making things work out. But still internally, things didn’t felt right. Even after doing so much hard work, why do I felt ashamed?

I know I am hard working, but still I feel something is a bit off shore between me and the word “dedication”.

Let’s analyze it. When we hear someone saying, “He is dedicated to his family/goal” what do we understand? We imagine a person who is committed to the progress of his commitments. We imagine a hard working person, who does not let excuses ruining his progress.

Am I not?

In the books, there is a separate page called “dedication”. You see, there is already an “acknowledgement” page, but still, dedication is something different.

To dedicate means to giving up self.

And I am not giving myself up. Yes I am working hard, but I am letting myself becoming the bottleneck in the progress of the goal I am committed to.

And that is the root of my shame on myself.

What is happening, as the sprint guy was dedicated, he didn’t care whether it was cold or night or he was hungry or not. What time it was. He didn’t care about himself. He was like a machine. Not caring about the situations and conditions he was in, instead focused only on his objective, ignoring everything.

I was juggling everything based on how I was feeling. And he made himself a robot, to feel nothing for his goal.

And no, he is not doing wrong. Being focused and resilient like this is actually healthy for mind and also for his accomplishments. His success is going to make him far more satisfied than my excuse for cold.

At least he won’t be feeling guilty like we did.

And here is this word. GUILT. That is how you know whether you were dedicated or not.

Is this the best you can do? Are you giving your 101%? Or letting self comforts take over you?

When we are working on things, there are certain other things that allows the comfortable execution of our goals. For example, it would have been better if it was not too cold, if it was a little warmer, running for me was also better. But you notice, there are people running despite that. I might say, “but I am sensitive to cold”, again, there are people who are running despite that.

You are not a princess. When we allow ourselves to let the present situations be favorable, we start demanding more! You need a hot day, a good friend, a good clothes, free mind, and everything to run, and there are people running despite of these.

This is what I meant when I said, dedication means giving up yourself. To give up my sensitivities so that I can achieve something bigger than me. My goal.

You are underestimating yourself. You can do better. But being too comfortable, you are making your life hard.

There are walls in front of you. You can either keep wasting time finding ways, or you can walk through them breaking them with your sheer dedication. Yes you can.

If you are committed to accomplish something, accepting your sensitivities and current difficult conditions, you have two options. Acknowledge these bad conditions and blaming your life for not letting you have a favorable environment where you can work productive, or ignore everything, just do what is required despite of these defects.

Are you allowing yourself to have more control over you than your commitments? Have you dedicated yourself to your goal?

Only you can tell yourself.

Thanks for reading

Shubham Ramdeo

As always here I navigate through the complexities of human lives and situations using the stories and details in our lives we don’t notice and skip. But why do we skip? Do we want to skip?

Today, I am going to write. As I didn’t wrote the last time. I skipped and broke my chain. But, still I am writing this one.

What it could mean? Do I want to write? Or do I don’t want to? If I do want to write, then why I didn’t wrote the last time, and if I don’t want to, why am I writing this one?

What does it tells you about me?

You would make excuse for me. May be something critical might have happened. May be he was ill. I am making excuses for me too. Yes I was too busy to write anything meaningful.

What is the difference between excuse and reasoning. Or does there exists any of them?

Now consider if this newsletter was a paid thing. Now you won’t take any excuse or reasons. That would be a lousy service from my side. I will do the same. I don’t care, if I am paying for something, and if I am not given services as expected, I would get angry too. When the things are free of charge, not only the service is lousy, but also our expectations as a customer too.

But why do we skip ourselves? Are we considering ourselves free? You see? This all relates to devaluing ourselves.

We devalue ourselves.

This is wrong in every sense. Let me prove it to you, and me.

First we start beginning devaluing ourselves. Why do we do it? Simple. We don’t have any reason to value ourselves either. What you are? A prime minister? Even if you try to feel yourselves important, people around you will let you know your place.

Second, see, we are the service giver and we are the customer of ourselves. As we are the low value person in our life, we don’t give a damn. As a service we do lousy things to ourselves. As a customer, we have lousy expectations from ourselves.

Third, What does it all results in? Low quality output in business? Yes, low quality output in our lives too. We are not a paying customer of ourselves. Which is why we don’t care much. Other people, their opinions starts getting more valuable then ours. And so the priorities too. We are not able to prioritize ourselves.

Fourth, what does it all ends up in? We being a low quality person. Who was not given the attention and service from ourselves as needed.

Now the irony is that, we being a low quality person are not suitable and fir to help others too. And we become more useless for others too.

This is an irony because we begin to prioritize serving other people finding them more valuable than us, but we end up not able to help them as we would remain no more quality provider ourselves.

You see, this is logically a mistake! But where does the root of all this begun?

We devalue ourselves.

That is why I skipped. That is why you skipped complaining me either. That is why you and me both skipped the body exercise we need to do. And we both skipped to make ourselves feel good.

We skip because we devalue ourselves.

Now how to heal this?

BY NOT SKIPPING.

Next time whenever a situation comes where you might want to skip something you committed on, don’t skip. So that you can remind yourselves that you are the Most Important Customer of your life.

We become how we keep ourselves (Book: Atomic Habits) and thus, we need to keep voting for the right identity. And that is, don’t skip. And thus feel great to choose yourself.

Choose Yourself.

Thanks for reading.

Yours fellow self devaluing writer so far

Shubham Ramdeo

A week ago my friend of mine motivating me to use Twitter.

“No, we need a strategy and plan. It’s about branding and making meaningful connections with our audience. We cannot just make fool of ourselves in the public.” That is how my defensive brain responded.

I get caught in the disease of analysis paralysis frequently. And so I was strategizing twitter since years. And still doing so.

But this time their words hit me. “just two tweets…”.

My soul asked my mind and heart, “have we fallen so low that we can’t even post two tweets? Or is the world so difficult that it requires a rocket science project plan to tweet 280 characters? Or… Are you scared?”

Yes I was scared, not because of what people would think of me, or because of taking on something difficult.

No.

I am scared of not giving my best.

Yes it happens. Perfectionism does not only occur while showing things to other people, it can occur as a personal commitment, as a habit. And this is not good.

To always do your best, means to always criticize yourself when you fail. And 99% of your efforts, you will receive good enough results. But not the prefect thing.

Perfectionism, in itself is not a bad thing. Society value it. Being able to deliver a perfectly build product, a perfect performance, who would not desire it. Every time a performer makes any mistake, we don’t forget to notice it, whether we react or not.

The problem is in what it does to the performer himself. Criticism. Constantly emotionally criticizing yourself. Becoming cold to oneself. The process starts with getting into details of what’s wrong within me, and it keeps on until we start hating ourselves and keeps on validating everything.

As a human being, we all are a kind of performer, working hard to share love, but tell me, how a performer would share love if he has started hating himself?

And so it happens. Perfection kills us.

I have killed half of my life so far.

Even while writing this, I am rechecking each and every sentence, if I have made some mistake, my spell check is already enabled, constantly thinking of more appropriate words. And even after doing my best, it won’t be good enough. Someone somewhere will point out something I missed. Validating that I am not perfect. So I might have already killed half of the creativity while writing this.

But why? I ponder.

May be for some of us, our parents trained us this way. They kept on demanding us to the best and perfect. But their efforts ends up in doing nothing for us! Or may be it because how some people are.

Or may be not, let’s not focus on the past, but how to stop it from happening again, how to treat this disease?

“I don’t know.”

This is what I know and this is beautiful. Many times, we are free to just say, “I don’t know. Let’s try it out.”

The problem thus lies in grand expectations we are having with ourselves.

On a planet of billions other living creatures, when did I become so important?

This is how I guess we would treat ourselves.

Stop taking yourself seriously. It’s okay. You are just a child, living and learning. That that does not sound so practical right? Okay so let’s figure it out.

I intuitively find that the problem lies in not able to measure the amount of perfection required.

Let me put it in a different perspective. Say I am a jewellery designer. My duty is to make amazing detail orientated jewelry. It’s not a moral obligation. Not everyone wants the amount of details I can do, my obligation should be with my client. I can provide cheaper service with medium details and premium service with painstaking details.

The point I am making is, perfectionism is like my skill. And not every time it is required. Sometimes good enough work is perfect for that situation.

Some say devil is in details. And I think we should let the devil stay there and bother with him otherwise we would miss a lot of other important things.

As of writing this I am remembering a friend of mine suggested me, “It’s not that you won’t make mistakes. Don’t make such confidence, that’s ego. But be confident that, you are strong enough that you can endure those losses.” She continued, “If you can’t, you won’t be able to start”.

Loose the battle win the war. That’s what it is.

We need to figure out whether the situation really requires that level of perfection? And this measurement lies in asking yourself a simple question.

What major thing in your life could go wrong If I purposely did not do my best?

“Just two tweets”. … My guess, in 99% of cases, your answer would be, “nothing much”.

More things gets destroyed in life by the life itself randomly than your own mistakes. Ha ha.

We are just scolding ourselves, like a parent or someone, confusing our effort to the level of moral obligation, “I must do the best”. No, you don’t. You just had bad parenting.

Laugh it off. Make the mistakes, and laugh it off. It’s fine. Of course measure it up, but don’t do everything perfect. It is your sacred gift, nature gave it to you. Value it and save it for the things that really deserves your detailed attention. For the rest, allow yourself to make the mistakes and laugh it off.

There is even a video about fearing setting by Tim Ferris, this would complement my idea of measuring.

So this is it. I am convinced. For this week, I am now allowing myself to go wrong where it is allowed. And laugh it off. I will nurture my inner child with my self learned parenting skills.

This letter is not perfect. It was not expected to be, I am not perfect either. And it’s fine. As I decided. I am writing this for me and people like me. And I succeeded in that. I did helped myself. I know Half of my subscribers won’t even bother to make it till here. If you did, I appreciate. I hope you have found some value in it.

Someone somewhere around you, like me, might be in need of this. I cannot reach everyone in this world, and have just a few readers as for now. So as you have made it so far, I request and would appreciate even further if you you can share or forward this letter to those who might need.

Thank you.

Stay connected. Don’t loose those who appreciate you, even when you are do it all wrong.

And of course throw away shit people. Life is too small for perfecting every relationship. I am tired of them already. More on them later.

Itch.io is a beautiful platform for creatives. It offers total freedom, total control and welcomes all kinds of creators. When the community game jam was announced, we were first hesitated, because it was of course a community jam, where thousands of experienced will be coming to compete! Where do we exist there?

But the point was, we never intend to compete. We just wanted to finish a game. Itch is a friendly and welcoming platform so it was not much of an anxiety and game jam gave us a one-word theme and most importantly, deadline.

The game jam remained for 7 days, we did finish the game satisfactorily in our own way, even though we were short on resources, skills, and experience, but in the end, the whole experience was fun!

This 7-day journey taught us some simple fundamental important lessons every creator must keep in check.

Taking part in competition and community projects

I do not usually take part in competitions. But I learned it’s important to do so. One of the reasons is that we try We must always thrive for working around stupid projects. The biggest advantage we are given with such small projects is that we have a small risk boundary. So we can learn and experiment with things which we are not yet tried and still they are challenging enough because we are still ‘competing’.

The biggest advantage of having an external structure, like a competition, is that we are given a focus and a deadline. These two are the biggest sin.

Deadlines to stay away from perfectionism

Having a deadline protects us from the biggest issue of any creative person: Perfection. Perfection destroyed thousands of ideas. Works being delayed and not published because of being not perfect enough.

But here is the catch, we will never know how an art can be perfect, it’s not mathematics, it involves emotional expression and we get stuck in Nirvana Fallacy.

Deadlines don’t solve perfection, but it does allow us to think that time is more important. It’s well said that: “Its better done than perfect”.

Having some kind of focus or direction is also important as it gives us the main anchor point otherwise we get around trying everything! This directional approach helps in creating ideas in a radial fashion where we know all the concepts will still connect to a single dot, we can always go back to where we started.

Defining constraints, not steps

Initially, when we started we were afraid because we had almost no skills at that moment. Just basic unity we tried from YouTube. And we had no time to learn anything or to prepare. As we had deadlines, we decided to plan the constraints first before planning the game and thus to work on a game that can still be built on what we already know. I know this might sound cheesy, but what else we could have done? To have a fantastic game idea where we don’t even know how to work? We were like a non-game-developers, but still, because we did finish a game, so, we became someone who had a finished game however it may be!

The constraints helped us keep the project under control and satisfied. We knew the final product would be very ugly, but we also knew we are doing our best. We defined limits on arts, music, setting up the storyline as we go, game mechanics.

But I want to clear one point, we defined constraints, but we had only deadlines and boundaries. We had No Plans and No Vision how our game gonna be like.

Plan as you go, have space for creative solutions

Anyone who does write or draw to express himself will notice that we initially do have some kind of a blurry vision that, this is what I want to write about. But the work itself drifts us to build something we didn’t start with and of course we will do feel more satisfied.

This is a common mistake I do. I try to pre-plan everything and then when some trouble appears, it almost left no room no room for having any creative solutions.

Pre - Planning creative projects is like interior decorating with glues. We don’t just build it, we hit and try and check if we are comfortable or not. And planning is like experiments were done with glue so now it’s heavy to change anything.

Problem of chronology

What does it cost? Chronology. Somehow the order becomes important. What we are doing first and what we will do next, becomes too important. Because we are trying different interior decoration items with glues. So now we are diverted into order. And this is the worst thing because then there remains no art, only patterns.

When we plan as we go, we have plenty of room and flexibility to move around, grab better opportunities, and have both defensive and offensive options in the project. Fixation only caused me anxieties in my personal experience.

Let your emotions art guide you

So having deadlines and constraints gave us an experimental boundary. Then we just sat and started making “something”. Something that should feel “good enough” to show off to our friends.

We put a simple character, on a wall, who can walk right, left, and jump. And then we felt like, he must have some gun. Now because of the gun, we must need enemies to shoot. And then we added a key and a door to add a winning screen. But it was not having any concept. So we felt like we should add a boss to make it fun.

vysnvnt don’t like dogs, so a dog was added as a final boss. LOL.

What happened after all this experimentation is that, we didn’t have the mental capacity and time to make multiple levels. We only had a single stage. We noticed our issue: “The game is too short”. So to make “it takes a long time to finished”, being in our constraints, we tweaked the difficulty, where the mechanics of the game would be unfair, and only by playing the same level many times, the level can be completed.

And thus technically, we gave our game too much time to play with even when we had a single level. Every time the player loses, he learns how not to lose next time and thus gets one step closure to finishing the game. And this random idea worked like charm for us.

We had nothing like a game design plan, not a single drawing, and it involved itself. That’s the beauty of art. Art guides us to craft itself if we can simply listen to it.

We even decided on the title of the game at the end! Based on the condition of the player character (try it here, you will find out why), and created the music after everything was set up. We wanted to set up the same irritating tone of the music as that of the stage.

The conclusion

In the end, when the last two hours were remaining, I completed two pieces of music to add to the game and designed itch.io’s homepage for our game. We released our game, even when we knew it won’t win anything, we had a huge learning experience and I was happy that I participated.

The game of course did not win anything! We shared it with our friends and they reacted very emotionally. Most of the time angry, frustrated, or still involved determined to complete it anyway! Some found it funny and enjoyed the funny ugly-looking beautiful-in-its-own-right artwork.

We were satisfied that when our friends did share the screenshots of the winning screens, we knew we were successful in finishing a game, our game did give our players some entertaining time, emotionally, even though making them angry.

And as we did “entertain” our players, so as a game designer, we were successful.

Here is the link to that funny incident, if you want to try: https://outboxcraft.itch.io/thug-of-life

Thanks for reading. And as always, Stay Connected.

Okay okay, Let’s come to the point. Ever wonder about the creators, dancers, and people like artists which have no systematic instructional approach of doing their skill, rather they believe in “following their heart”, why they nearly outperform every “A+ grade intelligent person” in terms of mental creativity?

Not just that, dropouts and F Grade students, they end up being entrepreneurs to hire A+‌ students. Why does this even happen? Isn’t that true that better grade equals better mind?

Well, first things first, how are we comparing two individuals in terms of their mental level?

Humans have brains. Well in that sense, animals and computers also have brains. So what’s the difference? One may say, humans have emotions, machine doesn’t. But, if having emotions is a sign of high-level mentality, wouldn’t that make your overbearing mother more intelligent than any person you know about?

So certainly it’s not the difference. This was my question too. So I‌ researched and found there are two beautiful things that humans have. That most of the creatures and machines lack. So these two makes you special:

1. Ability to asks questions (curiosity)
2. Using the above ability of curiosity, to “find a way” (creativity)

The above two ends up giving us the power of “IMAGINATION”. Which is like, to think about things which you don’t have any information about!

Let me tell you, these two are the prime reasons why humans have survived the most difficult situations and managed to lead the top of the food chain!

The curiosity lets us ask questions about possibilities, that we might do, or might happen to us. When we understand that, “Oh! I can die!”, we start with finding creative solutions by asking even more questions, “How can I not die?”.

This is the real ingeniousness of humans, we don’t stick! But we are probably doing the exact opposite of what we are supposed to do.

So what are our superpowers: Asking questions, Creativity, Imagination. The three superpowers, that adults are most afraid of !!!

But these three are not like having or not having actual superpowers, rather, they are our natural talents. About which we teamed up with society to turn down! Children are not like us. You can observe their curiosity, creativity, and imagination very high! But choosing to be an adult is like compromising your dependence on these natural abilities. In exchange for guess what? …‌ social bullshit!

So we can boil all these things to the fact that “curiosity, creativity, imagination” is what makes a person coming up with inventions. Not only science but also in their life, they seek opportunities to create their way to live, rather than following a way that worked for 80% of the society (and not caring if you are in the other 20% … oops !)

So how can we tap this natural ability back again?

Now, to be honest, the first paragraph was not a joke. I‌ really didn’t know how to write but end up writing this much! This is the solution… ! … Okay, let me explain.

Recently I came around this quote:

Your brain is most intelligent when you don’t instruct it on what to do—something people who take showers discover on occasion. - The Bed of Procrustes, Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Our brain has that natural capacity, always, to grasp the important questions to be asked, and being creative enough to create a solution, by imagining various possibilities we don’t know of.

It is true. I mean, notice the last time you took shower, either you start singing, or start thinking about something you didn’t think you will. But we don’t follow it. We draw better and write better “in our individualistic way” when we are not asked to share that work in public. Taking that shower example seriously, you will hear some people singing only when taking a bath, and most of the time, they sing better than usual!

Personally, I come up with the most creative solutions to the problems of my life, when I was driving alone! Firstly driving itself is a very complex process! You need to balance, being alert of everywhere, and then, like, literally drive a heavy machine! And still, there are animals and other “human beings on machine” that can hit you anytime! But it doesn’t happen that we. Most of us, do the “driving” activity on “reflex”. Like brain driving on Auto-Pilot, while our main focus is toward the other stuff, “how I can lose weight faster…”.

The above paragraphs can point us to the enemy of our creativity. Is that the public we are feared of? Or is that the “fear” itself that blocks our ability to find creative solutions? Let’s continue this in some other post. But… remember that most adults say, they were happy in their childhood. So what’s the point of being an adult if it’s sad? Aren’t we supposed to strive for joy?

Anyways, I tried this “being intelligent by not instructing what to do” thing and started writing this article. Because my brain was like driving the car, where to start and when to end writing. Yes yes, I am convinced that, this is not a masterpiece, but again, when you know that, you are not “publically performing”, writing this article, on its own, as my hands typed on their own, really made me feel like enjoying a shower anyway.

And I ended up writing 1000 words for “writing” itself and enjoyed it. Most probably because I wrote it as a way of self-expression, and individuality is something that makes artists uncomparable among themselves. Isn’t that so? Therefore, I did end up writing a masterpiece, but… even if not, how would you even compare “ART”?

My biggest responsibility as an artist now is that this “masterpiece” of a thousand words seems to be going everywhere, how to give it a heading that makes sense!

Try it, to do things without thinking… UNDER‌ PROPER SUPERVISION!

Thanks for reading. And as always, stay connected :)

Shubham Ramdeo

Yes you get it right, it is a lead generator email optin lead generator box. It’s work is to bait your readers to let them give you their email address in exchange of something valuable. Like an e-book, or checklist.

Such content are called gateway products. A quality content or product is locked behind a form. A form which asks you your email address as a key to provide what’s meant for them.

I was no revolutionary yet, as I was developing the same thing for my programming blog.

I worked on a book to help you decide which programming languages and technologies you should be learning in order to proceed further in your dream field of computer science.

I was going to offer that book for free in exchange of email address.

But then it hits me. I honestly started what I would do if were would look at this email optin.

1. Subscribe to the email list.
2. Confirm and download the PDF if I can get it immediately.
3. Forgot the whole story!
4. Occasionally deleting and unsubscribing from the email list near the end of the month.

If I really do love a blog, then this is what I do.

1. Bookmark it.
2. Drop the articles links to my friend’s chats so that we can discuss.
3. And remember it as “that guy wrote a nice article on that blog”.
4. Still have no memory about the email optins and PDF etc.

Exactly this is what I am doing with hundreds of other blogs I read from!

The main thing is that, it’s the content of the article which makes decide “oh that’s nice”.

And once it hits, my mind becomes a subscriber. They no longer need my email or anything. I keep visiting those sites by myself.

So I was a bit confused. Should I bother building popups and forms after forms to just grab the email addresses of the users?

So I searched for the views of the bloggers I believe in, and these were the articles which inspired me.

• I’m killing most of my email capture. Here’s why.
• How to Generate Leads Online Without Forms

The above two articles were enough for me to let me understand. You don’t need to read them, I will be covering up here, just for reference.

After then sharing these links with you, it became more clear! Let me tell you.

I am not their email subscriber. I googled and as I saw their name, I read the whole article. Because my mind was subscribed to their content. I know they write honest and useful posts.

And then I shared these same articles with you. I simply explosed their posts to my viewers. And the same thing might have been repeated for them.

I usually reach these wonderful articles mostly by SEO, and then by social media. But never through email.

I went on to confirm the same with a dozen friends of mine, and they all do the same thing. Download the PDF for email optin, and then forget the story.

Not at all. It is very true that emails are the currency of the internet and is required to send your users the updates.

But the difference is, grabbing their email by force VS they want to give you their email.

And even if you grab it anyhow, like they are fool enough, truely not. They will download the stuff and forget you if you want.

Instead of this, if they like your work, they will be more than pleased to give you their email because they want future updates from you.

So this is what I am going to do now!

By the time you have read this post, you will see a email subscription box below.

No gateway contents from now. If I want to give something, I will give it right away. Because it costs my creativity.

I have to think like “What if I build it this way, so that I can get more subs?”. This sucks!

It is going to be simple. If a reader of my content wants weekly updates about all the content I have done for the week, they can go on and sign in. If they don’t want, then it’s no problem. The free ebooks, will remain free, and will not cost even your email address.

honesty is the best policy! And grabbing emails is the worst one!!!

So the bet I am making is that, I will try going the no-form method. No popups, no lead generator. And see challenge myself to write good things so that my content also get shared by genuine readers with theirs friends.

I will focus more on the writing and content, and technically on SEO and Social Media Marketing.

Let us see what comes out in the future. I will keep this post updated with the results.

What’s your point about this whole story? Do you still believe email popups are necessary? Comment below! And yep… Stay connected :)

Suppose there is a problem. You have a folder containing a lot of HTML files. Now to upload it, you want to change the extensions of all the hundreds of files from .html to .php. Let’s see how can you do it windows quickly.

First, open the folder which contains all the files.

Then at the top left corner of the directory explorer, you can see the File Menu. Click and select Powershell.

Now simply enter the following command:

Dir *.html | rename-item -newname { [io.path]::ChangeExtension($_.name, "php") }

That’s it!

Be sure to change html and php to those you want to change. A more general command would be like:

Dir *.old_extension | rename-item -newname { [io.path]::ChangeExtension($_.name, "new_extension") }

Where the old_extension and new_extension are to be replaced with the real extension of your case.

Of course, you can directly run PowerShell from the start menu and use cd command to move across directory.

I hope this little trick might save some time for you :)

For creating games in LibGdx you have to write your code in JAVA or Kotlin and then you have to compile them (converting your code into Bytecode) and pack the codes and libraries for running your program on particular JAVA Virtual Machine (JVM) which is basically your smartphone and your PC.

So for doing all this compiling and running stuff, we will use the Android Studio but using android studio is not compulsory you can also use Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA or even Command Line gradle for compiling and running your Game.

So Now let’s discuss Android Studio in brief.

What is Android Studio and Why we use Android Studio?

Android Studio is an IDE which stands for Integrated Development Environment. It is a software application that provides various facilities to programmers and developers for their software development.

An IDE consists of an intelligent source code editor which helps you to write your code faster, better and errorless. It also has building tool with debuggers that help you to run your code on any platform and debug it easily and it will have so many other facilities like import and exporting your code and etc.

It has its own specification requirement for working so you can match your pc specification at click here.

Why we use Android Studio? Well as explained above, as an IDE, it is a smart, better and faster way, as well as libgdx allows direct usage and production of games through the android studio, we also have a big community online to help us. So, we should use it.

Another question is that comes to mind is as follows.

What if we want to create games for other platforms also like desktop or ios and not only android?

Well, that’s not a problem because we are using LibGdx which is a platform-independent development framework. It consists of several libraries for platform independence so you can write code once and it will work on every platform of this world.

One more thing, Android Studio is not for creating an app on Android only it can also be used for deploying your projects for every platform. It will help you to run your code on desktop and ios or on other platforms too. So, your game will work everywhere.

Now let’s start!

Installing libGdx

Step 1 - IDE and download libGDX

You can begin by Downloading Android Studio. This tutorial is about libgdx so we won’t get more into the ide stuff.

After downloading and installing android studio or any other IDE of your wish. Download the libGdx jar package.

After downloading the libGdx jar file, just open it.

If you are not able to open the file then install JDK and setup your environment variable for JAVA. Learn more about installing java on your system

After opening libGdx, you will get this user interface as shown below:

Step 2 - Set up a game project

This is a user interface to create a project for libGdx. First, you have to write the name and the package name of your project and then the name of the main game class.

Then you have to give the location of your project where the created project will be stored then you have to give your SDK path where SDK is installed.

if you don’t know the path then go to the android studio > configure > SDK manager and just copy paste the Android SDK location here or you can set SDK environment variable.

Then you just have to select your games platform for working and select his extra extensions if you want to add in your project what is the use of these extensions is we further discuss.

After deciding your configuration (do as shown in the next pic for simplicity), just click on Generate and accept all alerts.

Your project will start setting itself but it will download its libraries and some more packages so it will take a few minutes to set up.

if you get something this:

Then Congrats your first game project is now created!

Open android studio and import your project to it and wait for a few minutes so the android studio will create your Gradle project.

After the import process finishes the Gradle build, you have to open the main class inside your core folder of your project tab like this:

If you get an error like this “configuration on demand is not Supported” then:

1. goto files > settings > build, execution, deployment > compiler
2. uncheck configure on demand
3. apply the changes and press ok

Now go to “build and make your project”. Or else you can press ctrl + f9 shortcut key and wait for Gradle build.

In this core file, you can write the whole game and you can see the code which is default given by the libgdx.

Step 3 - Running our game on desktop

Now we have to run and test the code on the desktop. Just click on the run (toolbar, a play icon) and then click on edit configuration after that you have to add a new configuration so that click on + (plus) icon then you will get this.

Click on the application and then fill the application like this:

then apply and click OK. Finally click again on run to get your final result. It will take time for the first run due to compilation and output will be as shown below.

if you got an error and don’t get this window then don’t be panic. Sometimes this will happen due to the syncing of different files. So just try to run again. If you still have any issue, comment below. I will answer back!

This is the result of the default libgdx sample application, where the image you are seeing is the logo of badlogic games. Now you have learned how to run begin writing libgdx code and how to create a libgdx project.

Thanks for reading up to here. This was all about the first step in LibGdx game development. If you have any questions then comment below and don’t forget to give your reactions stay tuned for the next tutorial in the series!

Creating games is one of the coolest things ever, but it is very hard too. If you are a beginner and you are thinking to create a game, even a huge one, like God Of War, PUBG, Tekken etc., then you might require almost 10 years of dedication to create these type of games! You might require a full team of graphics designers and developers to create such beautiful graphics and realistic physical simulations. These types of games require time and patience to create.

But luckily that bulky studio is not the only way! Now the side of the gaming world is Indie Development which is becoming more and more prominent nowadays.

It stands for Independent Development Studios. It’s a development process of creating games in which a small team, even just with one or a few team members can create games with less financial support. These Indie Games are known to have artistic values so they are very popular on all platforms. So to create a game it doesn’t matter whether you are alone or own a fully geared studio. You too can create a game right away!

Let’s get more into the steps.

What type of game can I create?

First, you have to limit the dimensions in which you want to create your game. Two-Dimensional (2-D) like Mario or a Three-Dimensional (3-D) like Minecraft and you can also create a 2.5-D game like Worms.

After deciding the dimension of your game find which genre of game you want to create. If you want to create a 2-D game then there are many genres like you can create a platform game such as Mario, or puzzle games like candy crush, casual games like 2048, hypercasual games like Helix, then comes action games, adventure games, Role Playing Games (RPGs) like Pokemon Red. You can use 2D as a canvas for your imagination.

If you want to create a 3-D game then you can create First Person Games (FPGs) like Counter-Strike or Minecraft and Third Person Games like Tomb Raider or Grand Theft Auto. There are many more genres you can create. So you see there are so many genres of the games. It’s all about using the dimensions as per your imagination.

But first, you have to create your idea of the game then you can find your game’s genre.

Now the main question is…

What software do I require to make a game?

To create a game there are three popular options:

1. Using a Game Development Engine
2. Using a Game Development Framework
3. Without using anything!

1) Create a game using a Game Development Engine

To create a game using a game engine is the easiest and fastest option. But first, you have to know what is a game engine?

A Game Development Engine is a Game development environment designed to build video games. These game engines provide you a user interface to create a game using many services, for example, Drag and drop your game assets for level editing. These engines make your game platform independent so your game will work everywhere be it a PC or consoles or on smartphones. The main thing is that most the game engines do not require any coding you can create your games by either by scripting if you want to or by just using blueprints.

There are so many Game engines and most of them are completely free, to begin with. The engines like Unity and Unreal but some of their features of unity is paid also if you want to create a 2-D game you can use the Stencyl, Game Maker Studio, and Unity or if you want to create a 3-D game you can use Unreal and Unity and there are many more engines you can use.

The game engines work best for 3-D game development cause most of their design ideas are mostly similar like FPS or Open World so engines can be used easily you will get modules for most of the stuff to plug and play right away!

But if you want to create a 2-D game then my suggestion is to use a game development framework because if you create a game in Unity or Game Maker Studio then the game size will be more than double the size of using a game development framework. There are many other advantages which we are discussing below.

2) Create a Game Using Game Development Framework

Game Development Framework is a collection of several libraries that help you to code a whole game all from scratch.

Game development frameworks are not about drag and drop interface. They are about modularity and programming. You have to write the code of your game but the framework makes your coding easy in a way that you will focus on building the game itself, without any need to go into hardware-software management.

They are libraries that have inbuilt elements and functions so you can use them directly without writing much code for obvious things as a game developer. For example, if you want to render an image on the screen, you can directly use the image processing classes available in the framework and also use its methods like rotating and changing positions. You don’t have to write such an image class yourself.

These frameworks are fully optimized, they produce what’s necessary, and are better from the performance point of view. They are made to be used with programming skills. If you want to use them, then you need to have good skills in the language they support. This is why most of the game frameworks support multiple languages to help out most developers. But C++ and Java are the most popular.

Almost all game development frameworks free to use and they are open-source. The popular ones are LibGDX and Cocos2d.

With game development framework, as you are writing the code, you are free to build any concept or logic. You don’t have to limit yourself with ready-made modules of the engine. You can create 2-D as well as 3-D games but they are best suited for 2-D games.

They are also platform independent and work on any platform, any OS.

If you are creating a 2-D game then LibGDX is the best framework out there. It supports the JVM languages like JAVA and Kotlin. It also has many useful functionalities embedded into itself like Box2D for physics, inbuilt AI system. Being open source and completely free, LibGDX has a very large community of advanced developers that are ready to assist you with their code.

3. Create a Game without using Anything!

This is the hardest method in which you create a game with full of your own hardcoded stuff! In this, you have to create your own libraries of several lines of codes or you have to create your own personal game engine.

In old times all the large game development studios first create their own engine, then creates the games in them. So it’s a very time-consuming process. But nowadays, many developers are shifting their games from their custom engines to other game engines to save time and focus more on the game itself.

If you have an expert level knowledge of particular programming language than it is beneficial for you. If you are a beginner to game programming, then this is the hardest process.

Traditionally, the way is to use super-efficient languages like C or C++, with a hardware and graphics manipulation library like SDL and OpenGL, and end up building your own game development framework or engine.

What other skills do we need to build a game?

Well, this is a good question! Because of the indie game developers tends to be multi-talented!

Music

You might need to have good sound and music sense to provide cool sound effects in your game. There are a lot of tools to build your own, like bfxr or you can also buy them on the internet.

Art

If are creating a 2-D game then you have to be a good pixel artist because the most of 2-D games are designed as Pixel art which is used to create character, scenes, and animations in your game. If you creating a game in 3-D then you have to learn 3-D modeling and 3-D animation.

To create pixel arts for 2-D you can use almost any paint software or paint.net as I use. To create 3-D models you can use Blender which is an open-source software for 3-D modeling.

Market

The main and most important skill you need after creating a game is marketing and promotion. You come from a “who the hell are you” world even if your game shows your super creative talent. Who will be the first users of that game on the launch day? That’s play a huge role in a game’s commercial success.

Game industries spend millions of dollars on marketing to make their games popular. Well as a beginner, with your first game, this is not that much of importance because you must focus on creating it first. But if you have created a finished game product then you might consider knowing the basics of marketing also.

Conclusion

Hence we can see that beginning a game development journey is not that hard, but it does need a lot of dedication. This is where everything comes together. Programming, physics, imagination, art, and creativity!

So this is all about the basics of beginning your game development journey. If you have more questions, please be sure to comment below and don’t forget to give your reactions to this article! Stay tuned for the upcoming articles on game development only at ramdeoshubham.com.