As I actually get through stuff with my own project ( yay by the way ) and I'm sort of unlocking progress as I go along I thought I'd share a bit of perspective with people who may or may not be considering doing their own project. Don't get me wrong there are some things that will always be perhaps time consuming, but difficult? No it's not impossible, you just have to study the theory behind it pretty heavily. Being someone who's doing it myself I can list perhaps three things I've done with my project or am planning to do which I've considered nightmarish and it's probably not even what most people think of.
AI is a great example of this and why I reeeee about it so much trying to point out how full of shit the discussion surrounding it is and that basically quite a few people pushing AI so much are just scam artists overselling their AI as if it's skynet. What a crock of shit, it's going to get exploited within five seconds and the whole infrastructure will come crumbling down.
Many game ideas I've seen especially the ones recently posted are not complicated to put in. Even though some games are tricky to implement don't get me wrong. Thanks to the wonders of modern software and pathfinding algorithms even getting AI setup is not that difficult.
As an example most turn based games now even stuff like Total War are just using your standard pathfinding for a campaign map. You know those army stacks you're moving around? It's simple point and click behaviour but there's a limit on the distance you can travel per turn. I could probably write up a whole thread on this if people are curious.
I was having something of an epiphany on this as I was playing older Total War games but even the older ones are very much like this. The average 4x strategy game simply relies on button input to make stuff happens. Your army size and what units is all setup using UI buttons much like an inventory, all this shit ties together.
So when you see all these devs trying to circle jerk each other through their propaganda talking about how hard game dev is don't believe them. You don't need to be someone making 100,000 polygon models and have an entire studio of 300 people to make a game, it's a fucking lie. I haven't even gone into the space sim stuff either which in reality the basic controller is just your standard FPS one without gravity depending on how simple or complex you want to make it. I'm convinced it's all something of a scam by them and journalists to get investor and ad money.
Oh and it is absolutely propaganda when they post up the cost of creating a game and the time taken, don't believe a word of it.
This. I got into a debate with Lethn a couple months ago on this subject and they kept trying to tell me to "just make my own games" when I'm completely happy just modding. I don't want to do game design, development, management and anything else involved in a project. I just want to do a little bit coding and scripting for a game that's already finished to improve my own experience. It is easier than ever nowadays but it is a commitment of time and that's the most finite resource any of us have.
There's actually quite a big modding community outside the Nexus hive mind but it's incredibly fragmented among Discord servers, obscure web forums and non-english websites. You kind of have to know where to look or just be there at the right time because mod creators do disappear frequently taking down all their work.
Bethesda games have the biggest footprint because of its ease to mod (If you can mod Morrowind, you can mod Fallout 4, it's the same engine) but there are pretty big scenes for anything Command & Conquer and anything Bioware/CD Projeckt.
If you're lucky. You might end up spending days going through an approval process getting the third degree from managers who dont know the code at all giving you crap for a bug that wasn't your fault to begin with.
I've worked as a software engineer in a couple of fields and most of the legitimately challenging tasks I've encountered where as a game dev. These usually stemmed from the severe resource constraints implied with real-time. A naïve solution can be trivial while delivering comparable results in orders of magnitude less time can be extremely hard, often requiring novel solutions. The sheer amount of fuckery required to make shiny things work on potato hardware is almost always underestimated.
Large scale crowd avoidance, as an essential feature, on meagre consoles with tight production schedules and a myriad other responsibilities still haunts me.
I've made a couple of games. None of them were even approaching the complexity of your average Super Nintendo game. I still spent probably 90% of my time testing and bug fixing. Hell, 90% may be underselling it.
As you go through the dev cycle, the work quickly shifts from adding new stuff to testing and un-breaking the existing stuff. And it never goes the other way. You spend more and more time testing and fixing and you only stop when the project is completed. And these days, not even then.
The hard part isn't making a game, it's making a finished game.