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.
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.