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.
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.