Sorry but this is a Dunning-Kruger type of post. It's good that you're making progress on your game and increasing your knowledge but you're falling in the trap of thinking that you can guess what the entire picture looks like just because you've seen a glimpse of its corner. Some things are relatively simple to code by themselves but inserting them in a giant machine full of many different parts made by many different people and then ensuring that everything plays well with each other... well that's never easy. That's the kind of thing you don't learn to overcome by reading theory but can only be acquired through experience. I'm referring to software here since that's the focus of your post but the other point is that art/music/design is magnitude harder to learn and can also only be acquired by grinding a lot. You always have to "just put the time in" but it's called difficult because the vast majority of people attempting it fail.
At the end of the day, it's easy to tape up a simple game, alone, with store assets and a pre-made engine but making a good high quality game that can compete with what's out there on budget/time is difficult... If it wasn't, everyone would do it.
I agree that the big studios devs bitching on Twitter are stupid. Not only do they flip assets from megascan and others but they also contract 3rd world studios to fill the holes left by their unskilled diversity hires. The managers are selling you high poly photorealism because it's a deceptively cheap art style and no one's left at the top with the talent to have a real artistic vision. A game like Elden Ring is magnitude harder to make than Spiderman 2. If that's what you meant in your OP then we're in agreement. Sorry my reply was with the assumption that you were taking a slap at all game devs including the ones still trying to make good products.
Companies make their games exponentially harder to make by writing absolute messes in the programming. Some of the games I play are apparently so bad they have significant difficulty in doing basic bug fixes for things you would think are unrelated to any aspects of their gameplay (like sun glare for example) that then totally break the game and spring up a dozen new issues.
I think the issue is that as difficult as game design can be, it's still not as difficult as many within the industry make it out to be. And it should be noted that many of the biggest successes in recent history either started or were overwhelmingly single person efforts. Things like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Papers Please, Undertale, FNAF, Spelunky, Braid, and plenty more. And no, these games aren't the pinnacle of game design, and they're not for everyone. They're also the exception for success. But the idea that it's some gargantuan task that cannot be achieved, considering just how many have happened over the past 15+ years? Well, it's just a bit silly to discount it. And sure, many will fail. Most will probably barely get any traction (just take a look at itch.io to see what I mean there). But if you're a creative type and you want to make something, why not try? Hell, even if you're not a creative type, why not try something? There are more resources now than ever before. So why not cut your teeth on something and have a little fun making what you want?
All of these successes you named happened before the so called "indiepocalypse" and are the result of a decade of experience prior or from the project itself. This is survivorship bias. Success takes time, resilience, discipline, talent and a lot of luck but even then you'll still probably lose. Look, the vast majority of people fail to become marketable artists, musicians, writers, engineers.. why do you feel the need to claim that a task combining all of the above and more is "not that hard"? It's unrealistic. I encourage everyone that has the desire to do it and to support each other but never to lie to themselves and distort reality as a coping mechanism.. this path is a long road littered with the corpses of past failures. Most people don't find it fun (which is why they quit) and even those that do wouldn't dare to claim it's fun most of the time. Rewarding might be a better term but only if you can appreciate self growth more than materialistic rewards.. because even in success gatekeepers take a large cut of your usually small earnings, the audience loves you as much as they hate you while the rest of the world either doesn't get it or wants to use you. Dramatic? Yes lol. But am I wrong? No. This is how you present it. You still want to be a game dev after hearing that? Go for it you crazy mother fucker :D
Because "design" is the easiest part. You can do it in fucking excel. I know because I've done it.
Art direction is hard (can't do it) writing is hard (have done it) writing dialog is worse (only Tarantino does it)
The problem is with vision because of crisscrossed incentives. Wherever money conflicts with design money wins 7-3. The stronger the vison and the tighter your controls thereof the better you can do, but designing a "great X genre game" is relitively easy. Designing it within budget, space, time, licencing, producer demand, and purchasibiluty requirements is harder. Take X-Com. The best version of Xcom is Long War and Long War 2. Designed by unpaid amateurs. How can they manage it? Cause ALllllllll the bullshit disappears, from needing to appeal broadly, to having DLC hooks, to being "accesible" all of which throw numerous kinks in the process.
Or 40k. The rules are shackled by their archaic production model, as well as being hamstrung by a number of rules only kept around to keep the models selling. The fan versions beat it to pieces by virtually every metric.
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.
You get the point where you end up spending 30 minutes updating bug tracking and documentation for a one-line code change.
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.
The more complex the software becomes, the higher the chance of some unintended interaction. And it isn't linear. It's exponential. And as the complexity grows you start shifting the time burden from dev to QA.
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.
making a circle go around shooting other circles is easy, takes no time, agreed.
speaking from experience, the last 10% that makes your game not more dogshit trash on the market is what takes 90% of the time. yea, if you wanna make another rpgmaker visual novel or make an army move on a map or whatever the fuck, sure, easy to do, but nobody's gonna care. it's all the togetherness and polish that takes time.
Nintendo exposed a lot of them with what they are able to do with the Switch by using efficient, well written code. Tears of the Kingdom simply couldn't be made by any western studio, but Nintendo is still able to get most of the top talent in Japan under one roof without worrying about diversity.
Considering how easy RPGMaker is to use these days and how flexible it is in terms of "what kind of RPG" you make with it, even an absolute moron can shit out a complete game in relative ease. If he has passion and creativity behind him, it'll probably fly by. For all the shit you can fling at the mass amount of porn games on Steam, each of those is proof of just how easy it is when you actually want to do it.
Most of the people whining about it are either whining about stuff not inherent to the process, aka corporations making the job miserable, or their own idea of what something should be instead of reality, like the UI designers whining about how Elden Ring proved all their work was useless.
The hard part about developing porn games is commissioning the art (at commercial rates, to boot) and finding an artist that's both willing to do it and won't flake on you.
Honestly, if you are trying to create a porn game you should probably have an artist on retainer just in general. Probably having enough art done as a guarantee before you even start making the game.
High-detailed art is expensive, building systems that are easy to expand in the future, without major bugs, is difficult, and balancing the various elements of gameplay to make a fun experience is a skill that takes lots of experience to develop. All of these things cost time and money.
AAA budgets are mostly wasted, though. There's a few major elements to it:
Meetings. So many fucking meetings. Getting things designed, examined, redesigned, discussed in committee, approved, estimated, re-approved, and then assigned for development takes weeks. Then implementation might start, if the leadership's priorities don't change before that point.
Speaking of leadership's priorities, so much wasted work because a feature that's 3/4 done is no longer the most important thing to build. Better scrap it or leave it to rot in a branch forever, because by the time you return to it everything around it has changed so you need to rewrite it anyway.
Marketing, HR, way more QA people than are necessary, and just hundreds of people who make things slower with no material benefit to the quality of the product, but they're happy to take salaries while they do it.
And plenty more besides, before even factoring in any of the modern culture war crap.
The flipside, indie games, is shit as well because the skills needed to make the game are very different from the ones needed to get people to play it. I said marketing is a waste above, and that's mostly because marketing departments waste shittons of money on counterproductive crap, but marketing is still necessary to get any income whatsoever. Also, the indie space is 99% populated by people who think it's easy to make a fun game.
The good news is, distributed patronage is possible. It's most advanced in the comics space, and it's use in the games space is mostly related to porn games right now. However, if gamers are willing to go back to a subscription model, but subscribe to an independent developer instead of a corporate GaaS account, they can bypass the corrupt institutions and lay a foundation for a better industry. I'm betting my life's savings on it right now as I work on my own project with that ambition.
I'm a veteran of the old Heroes of the Storm dev team, and I've hated to see that game abandoned by Blizzard. So I decided to make a better version of it that avoids the technical and design pitfalls that Heroes fell into.
It's early days yet, definitely not presentable for a few months. But we'll see how I and my friends do with it.
In my experience, polish has an exponential cost in terms of time and complexity. Gameplay scripting can be taught to young children. Pioneering solutions to rendering and physics problems reserved for offline computation in a real-time field to provide that extra layer of polish only seen in AAA? Often exceptionally hard.
Engines like Unreal betray the complexity of what, at least when I was part of the industry, constituted "game programming". Most common use cases have already been accounted for, all of the complex work already done for you. This is similarly true for algorithm design in game dev with every indie parroting the same decades old industry tricks. The illusion lasts as long as you don't do anything too interesting or orthogonal to the design of the engine that's doing all of the heavy lifting.
Game programming isn't just performing a navmesh query, it's implementing recast. It isn't prototyping with horrendously inefficient post-process materials. It's adding, albeit fairly straight forward, custom shaders. Or not so straight forward.
It's like the Roller Coaster Tycoon meme about how if you think you're a bad programmer, remember RCT was written by one guy in assembly, then you'll realize you're even worse than you thought.
Sorry but this is a Dunning-Kruger type of post. It's good that you're making progress on your game and increasing your knowledge but you're falling in the trap of thinking that you can guess what the entire picture looks like just because you've seen a glimpse of its corner. Some things are relatively simple to code by themselves but inserting them in a giant machine full of many different parts made by many different people and then ensuring that everything plays well with each other... well that's never easy. That's the kind of thing you don't learn to overcome by reading theory but can only be acquired through experience. I'm referring to software here since that's the focus of your post but the other point is that art/music/design is magnitude harder to learn and can also only be acquired by grinding a lot. You always have to "just put the time in" but it's called difficult because the vast majority of people attempting it fail.
At the end of the day, it's easy to tape up a simple game, alone, with store assets and a pre-made engine but making a good high quality game that can compete with what's out there on budget/time is difficult... If it wasn't, everyone would do it.
I agree that the big studios devs bitching on Twitter are stupid. Not only do they flip assets from megascan and others but they also contract 3rd world studios to fill the holes left by their unskilled diversity hires. The managers are selling you high poly photorealism because it's a deceptively cheap art style and no one's left at the top with the talent to have a real artistic vision. A game like Elden Ring is magnitude harder to make than Spiderman 2. If that's what you meant in your OP then we're in agreement. Sorry my reply was with the assumption that you were taking a slap at all game devs including the ones still trying to make good products.
Companies make their games exponentially harder to make by writing absolute messes in the programming. Some of the games I play are apparently so bad they have significant difficulty in doing basic bug fixes for things you would think are unrelated to any aspects of their gameplay (like sun glare for example) that then totally break the game and spring up a dozen new issues.
I think the issue is that as difficult as game design can be, it's still not as difficult as many within the industry make it out to be. And it should be noted that many of the biggest successes in recent history either started or were overwhelmingly single person efforts. Things like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Papers Please, Undertale, FNAF, Spelunky, Braid, and plenty more. And no, these games aren't the pinnacle of game design, and they're not for everyone. They're also the exception for success. But the idea that it's some gargantuan task that cannot be achieved, considering just how many have happened over the past 15+ years? Well, it's just a bit silly to discount it. And sure, many will fail. Most will probably barely get any traction (just take a look at itch.io to see what I mean there). But if you're a creative type and you want to make something, why not try? Hell, even if you're not a creative type, why not try something? There are more resources now than ever before. So why not cut your teeth on something and have a little fun making what you want?
All of these successes you named happened before the so called "indiepocalypse" and are the result of a decade of experience prior or from the project itself. This is survivorship bias. Success takes time, resilience, discipline, talent and a lot of luck but even then you'll still probably lose. Look, the vast majority of people fail to become marketable artists, musicians, writers, engineers.. why do you feel the need to claim that a task combining all of the above and more is "not that hard"? It's unrealistic. I encourage everyone that has the desire to do it and to support each other but never to lie to themselves and distort reality as a coping mechanism.. this path is a long road littered with the corpses of past failures. Most people don't find it fun (which is why they quit) and even those that do wouldn't dare to claim it's fun most of the time. Rewarding might be a better term but only if you can appreciate self growth more than materialistic rewards.. because even in success gatekeepers take a large cut of your usually small earnings, the audience loves you as much as they hate you while the rest of the world either doesn't get it or wants to use you. Dramatic? Yes lol. But am I wrong? No. This is how you present it. You still want to be a game dev after hearing that? Go for it you crazy mother fucker :D
Because "design" is the easiest part. You can do it in fucking excel. I know because I've done it.
Art direction is hard (can't do it) writing is hard (have done it) writing dialog is worse (only Tarantino does it)
The problem is with vision because of crisscrossed incentives. Wherever money conflicts with design money wins 7-3. The stronger the vison and the tighter your controls thereof the better you can do, but designing a "great X genre game" is relitively easy. Designing it within budget, space, time, licencing, producer demand, and purchasibiluty requirements is harder. Take X-Com. The best version of Xcom is Long War and Long War 2. Designed by unpaid amateurs. How can they manage it? Cause ALllllllll the bullshit disappears, from needing to appeal broadly, to having DLC hooks, to being "accesible" all of which throw numerous kinks in the process.
Or 40k. The rules are shackled by their archaic production model, as well as being hamstrung by a number of rules only kept around to keep the models selling. The fan versions beat it to pieces by virtually every metric.
Yup.
Among writers the joke goes, "the writing is easy, the editing is the terrible part" it's not difficult, just time consuming.
I aim to please. Also, I intend to see how fast I can get a game working using AI after my master's is finished.
I have tried Godot but haven't done it seriously
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.
making a circle go around shooting other circles is easy, takes no time, agreed.
speaking from experience, the last 10% that makes your game not more dogshit trash on the market is what takes 90% of the time. yea, if you wanna make another rpgmaker visual novel or make an army move on a map or whatever the fuck, sure, easy to do, but nobody's gonna care. it's all the togetherness and polish that takes time.
Nintendo exposed a lot of them with what they are able to do with the Switch by using efficient, well written code. Tears of the Kingdom simply couldn't be made by any western studio, but Nintendo is still able to get most of the top talent in Japan under one roof without worrying about diversity.
Agreed.
Considering how easy RPGMaker is to use these days and how flexible it is in terms of "what kind of RPG" you make with it, even an absolute moron can shit out a complete game in relative ease. If he has passion and creativity behind him, it'll probably fly by. For all the shit you can fling at the mass amount of porn games on Steam, each of those is proof of just how easy it is when you actually want to do it.
Most of the people whining about it are either whining about stuff not inherent to the process, aka corporations making the job miserable, or their own idea of what something should be instead of reality, like the UI designers whining about how Elden Ring proved all their work was useless.
The hard part about developing porn games is commissioning the art (at commercial rates, to boot) and finding an artist that's both willing to do it and won't flake on you.
Honestly, if you are trying to create a porn game you should probably have an artist on retainer just in general. Probably having enough art done as a guarantee before you even start making the game.
There's always MidJourney...
And then Kemco will publish it.
I would imagine that politics-free game dev is much lower in friction than situations where 50+ percent of your team’s energy is spent on The Message.
High-detailed art is expensive, building systems that are easy to expand in the future, without major bugs, is difficult, and balancing the various elements of gameplay to make a fun experience is a skill that takes lots of experience to develop. All of these things cost time and money.
AAA budgets are mostly wasted, though. There's a few major elements to it:
And plenty more besides, before even factoring in any of the modern culture war crap.
The flipside, indie games, is shit as well because the skills needed to make the game are very different from the ones needed to get people to play it. I said marketing is a waste above, and that's mostly because marketing departments waste shittons of money on counterproductive crap, but marketing is still necessary to get any income whatsoever. Also, the indie space is 99% populated by people who think it's easy to make a fun game.
The good news is, distributed patronage is possible. It's most advanced in the comics space, and it's use in the games space is mostly related to porn games right now. However, if gamers are willing to go back to a subscription model, but subscribe to an independent developer instead of a corporate GaaS account, they can bypass the corrupt institutions and lay a foundation for a better industry. I'm betting my life's savings on it right now as I work on my own project with that ambition.
I'm a veteran of the old Heroes of the Storm dev team, and I've hated to see that game abandoned by Blizzard. So I decided to make a better version of it that avoids the technical and design pitfalls that Heroes fell into.
It's early days yet, definitely not presentable for a few months. But we'll see how I and my friends do with it.
YOU are assuming that their difficulties come from technology and not people.
I have enough experience with programming to know that "it's difficult" is polite for "I don't care enough to fight for it".
Yahtzee is correct that the novel and auteur games are typically a one-man show. Because they're not accountable to anyone for decisions.
Making games is easy. If it wasn't game jams wouldn't be so popular.
Making a product and bringing it to market is hard.
In my experience, polish has an exponential cost in terms of time and complexity. Gameplay scripting can be taught to young children. Pioneering solutions to rendering and physics problems reserved for offline computation in a real-time field to provide that extra layer of polish only seen in AAA? Often exceptionally hard.
Engines like Unreal betray the complexity of what, at least when I was part of the industry, constituted "game programming". Most common use cases have already been accounted for, all of the complex work already done for you. This is similarly true for algorithm design in game dev with every indie parroting the same decades old industry tricks. The illusion lasts as long as you don't do anything too interesting or orthogonal to the design of the engine that's doing all of the heavy lifting.
Game programming isn't just performing a navmesh query, it's implementing recast. It isn't prototyping with horrendously inefficient post-process materials. It's adding, albeit fairly straight forward, custom shaders. Or not so straight forward.
Blud never had to learn low level driver APIs to do engine development
It's like the Roller Coaster Tycoon meme about how if you think you're a bad programmer, remember RCT was written by one guy in assembly, then you'll realize you're even worse than you thought.