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.
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.
The only thing you're right about that with is in terms of graphics, because producing AAA quality graphics is pretty time consuming, that's something else I've been experimenting with. However I'm writing mainly in terms of gameplay. The difficulty of game dev is hugely exaggerated by a lot of people in the games industry. I'm often heavily biased these days even with my own purchasing habits against high fidelity. If I see high detail in a game I immediately assume it's going to be boring and run like shit and I'm usually right.
The joke is though, with regards to 3D modelling, most of the big studios are cheating fucks anyway and make heavy use of pre-made assets themselves and NPC generators. Which by the way is also why they happen to look so weird nowadays. Depending on the studio I can even point to specific software which I have done in the past that these guys are using.
Fight me lol.
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.
Oh no absolutely not, no my beef is with what I have no problem calling outright scammers that you're mentioning, like you point out many of them may as well be asset flips. Unfortunately good indie devs who put even a decent amount of effort are few and far between.
You look at their work and especially if you've had any experience doing what they do you know they took 5 minutes at a bare minimum creating some shitty generated 4k texture pattern they made for a gun that they're selling on their marketplace at $4. It's such an insult to anyone that puts proper time into their game or even 3D work generally because the market is just flooded with crap right now and I feel like it needs to be called out.
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
i might wanna become a dev. your insight is very useful old man.
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.
got it. it's easier when you have all the control and making something from the heart. only when it becomes weighed down by appealing to everyone does things get complicated... good to know.
Yup.
Among writers the joke goes, "the writing is easy, the editing is the terrible part" it's not difficult, just time consuming.
Thanks for reminding me I need to get to writing more lore about the universes that I have planned :P
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.
Highly recommend checking out Godot if you haven't already.
My own workflow is:
Krita > Blender > Godot
I have tried Godot but haven't done it seriously
don't know what Krita is, fuck Blender my pc probably wouldn't be able to run it. and Godot just crashes whenever i open the application... i hate my life.
keep us posted. we need more... i don't wanna say right wing devs. buuuut. atleast right leaning devs like yourself atleast know what fun is so... i hope your better then what were getting now.
what's the lore?
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.
fair enough. i recently got back into pc gaming and i was shocked! to see how little mods their were for older games... ya know except for bethesda games. guess modding isn't all that easy. so i can understand why your happy just modding instead of game making.
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.
that explains alot. well thanks for the info man.
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.
sounds rough man
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.
well i thank you for trying my guy. if wasn't for dev's like you i wouldn't be able to some of these pc games on my potato pc and console. your effort is much appreciated
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.
thanks for the insight
i like you. not that your in the business but if i make a game i would love to hire your ass.
It is easier to do now, plenty of tools exist to make it easier. 25 years ago, when devs had to make all the assets as well as the engine to display them, things were much harder. Hardly anyone makes a FPS on a custom engine they made themselves anymore. In fact, the only one I can think of that still do this is the group that made STALKER, GSC Game World.
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.
Definitely the case, software has made a huge difference especially lately, what I hate is how they insist on larping like it's the 90's and they're coding everything from scratch which they're obviously not. Most modern releases are shameless copy-paste jobs from previous titles.
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.
true
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...
do you speak from experience?
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.
damn, kinda sounds like were fucked from both ends huh
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.
then you may have an investor on your hands. while i may enjoy my porn games. i do like my gaming games more. (non porn games being gaming games) so what are you working on?
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.
reminds of this other game i played. it's called smite i never played LOL but... those type of games are middling to me. however. once i get a beefer pc. i wanna test it out. and if it's fun... i may consider donating money to you and your friends.
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.
mind telling us about your past in the gaming industry?
Blud never had to learn low level driver APIs to do engine development
My point is that modern devs don't have to do it either yet they larp like they do. I think that pretty soon there are going to be indie devs coming out of the woodworks with their projects that are going to make them look really really bad. Battlebit is a great example of this, three guys making a Battlefield game and embarassing the fuck out of DICE who whine about Battlefield 2042 and how difficult it is constantly.
who's Blud?
I mean I agree with some of what you say and good for you and all, but I'm not holding my breath until you actually finish what you make.
Anyone can start a game development project and even make decent progress on it, but few can actually finish what they set out to do.
Game development is easily the most difficult to create of any entertainment media pursuit.
To make a good one by yourself you would need knowledge of things like coding and programming (or at the very least scripting), along with both audio and visual asset creation (often including some form of animation skills), writing skills (if you intend to make a game with a story), game design knowledge, an understanding of what "fun" is in the genre of game you intend to create, and so much more.
Its not like just writing a book or making a movie which are much, much simpler.
All of which I've been studying for about 5 years or longer :P Now I've got my own place I'm even getting a look into setting up my own little bits of foley for when I have a more functional game and will be adding in the sounds myself where I can. Foley is fun, also one of those things that's not as difficult as people might make it out to be, it does take some detailed work to make something really good though, there are some amazing examples out there.
interesting... so all of those are just fucking us over. interesting
game dev's are liars. seems to check out.