No, there were quite a few tools and third party engines available as long as you can remember. Deluxe Paint was, for many years, the industry standard for art editing in the 16-bit era, and tUME, the universal map editor, was a tool that provided a framework for tons and tons of 3rd party applications. You had licensed engines, too, like the SlaveDriver engine for the Saturn, or the Quake 2 engine which South Park on the N64 used. But today's engines are more user friendly, for sure. And wisely used. The main difference these days is that major engines are available for free to download and play with. UE4 and Unity dominate the market now because everyone can go and start developing with them in like 1 hour after setting up. They also have built in asset stores and thousands of tutorials on youtube.
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Waypoint: "Why Its So Hard to Make a Video Game"
- Thread starter Lime
- Start date
No, there were quite a few tools and third party engines available as long as you can remember. Deluxe Paint was, for many years, the industry standard for art editing in the 16-bit era, and tUME, the universal map editor, was a tool that provided a framework for tons and tons of 3rd party applications. You had licensed engines, too, like the SlaveDriver engine for the Saturn, or the Quake 2 engine which South Park on the N64 used. But today's engines are more user friendly, for sure. And wisely used. The main difference these days is that major engines are available for free to download and play with. UE4 and Unity dominate the market now because everyone can go and start developing with them in like 1 hour after setting up. They also have built in asset stores and thousands of tutorials on youtube.
BocoDragon
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
All this talk, when we know the real reason is lazy devs.
Cabbagehead
Member
Does this get banned or is this a real joke with a laugh track?
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
!
Laughing Banana
Weeping Pickle
Well, how would you recommend we, as gamers, comment on games that are riddled with bugs or technical performance or major bugs? Like, should we just shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, they work hard for this so I should just enjoy it regardless"?
thomasmahler
Member
I think a lot of these complaints actually stem from studios being very inefficient, as most out there are. It's annoying to me how many of the higher up game designers don't understand any programming and can't do anything by themselves at all. How difficult is it to keep improving, keep learning, so you're not constantly dependent on other departments to do even the simplest of tasks? If you're a designer and you can't show your team what you want to make, why would they put any confidence in you? Talk is cheap...
At Moon, we also spend a ton of time grayboxing, but usually we're working out our core gameplay pretty quickly. It's insane to me how publishers now accept that they'll only see a Vertical Slice of a game often times YEARS into the production. That's utter madness - Making a good game is hard, but the sooner you get to play 1+ hours of your actual game with all the core systems implemented and can then just polish the crap out of it and scale up, the easier your time will be. I would absolutely bet that all the shitty games out there that released recently had no proper playable builds in pre-pro or the prototyping stage, but that's exactly where you SHOULD have a proper playable. As a publisher, I'd never even greenlight a project without seeing a proper playable first.
I think most developers are scared to bet their company on getting a playable out in the first year of a production, something that can be judged and evaluated - Cause it's tough to make something good in a short period of time that's pushing the envelope forward. But that's the absolute best way to judge what you have - If you don't know from early on what it is exactly that you're going to build and you're not already confident that it could be insanely interesting and good, don't go into production.
To me, any developer who has their employees working in blind for an extended period of time just doesn't understand what it takes to make a great game. There's tons of level designers and so on out there who create work on a daily basis without even having a profound understanding of how exactly the core gameplay mechanics will work within these levels, they're just building stuff based on spec. And I don't care how good of a designer you are, nobody out there can build something amazing with that constraint - and yet, it happens every day.
At Moon, we also spend a ton of time grayboxing, but usually we're working out our core gameplay pretty quickly. It's insane to me how publishers now accept that they'll only see a Vertical Slice of a game often times YEARS into the production. That's utter madness - Making a good game is hard, but the sooner you get to play 1+ hours of your actual game with all the core systems implemented and can then just polish the crap out of it and scale up, the easier your time will be. I would absolutely bet that all the shitty games out there that released recently had no proper playable builds in pre-pro or the prototyping stage, but that's exactly where you SHOULD have a proper playable. As a publisher, I'd never even greenlight a project without seeing a proper playable first.
I think most developers are scared to bet their company on getting a playable out in the first year of a production, something that can be judged and evaluated - Cause it's tough to make something good in a short period of time that's pushing the envelope forward. But that's the absolute best way to judge what you have - If you don't know from early on what it is exactly that you're going to build and you're not already confident that it could be insanely interesting and good, don't go into production.
To me, any developer who has their employees working in blind for an extended period of time just doesn't understand what it takes to make a great game. There's tons of level designers and so on out there who create work on a daily basis without even having a profound understanding of how exactly the core gameplay mechanics will work within these levels, they're just building stuff based on spec. And I don't care how good of a designer you are, nobody out there can build something amazing with that constraint - and yet, it happens every day.
Maybe find out what the reason for those bugs was? The devs being lazy is highly unlikely in this field and business. Production issues and impossible deadlines are more often the cause. Even saying that the devs were too inexperienced is better to just label them "lazy".
Laughing Banana
Weeping Pickle
Well, I just want to emphasize that we also need to be careful that we don't make "Devs are hard workers" as a shield to not criticize their games when the situation warrant it, like for example when you are playing a game with severe technical issue (such as PS4's Firewatch, Broforce, XCOM2..... urgh.)
Instead critiquing the devs why not just focus on the game? If the game runs like shit than just say that, no need to take it an extra step and make a terrible assumptions about dev work habits.
Maybe that's not the fault of the people making the game, but the publisher who want to push out the game for their fiscal quarter.
Yeah like I said, sometimes the team cannot handle the project, it was too ambitious for them. That still doesn't make them lazy.
Maybe try saying they are riddled with technical performance and major bugs instead of blaming laziness? Because you have absolutely no idea if laziness is the reason for those problems? I mean, if you are going to just make up what you think is the cause of the problem from your gut, why not go the extra mile and say the game devs were heroin junkies, and thats why it has bugs? I mean, you have just as much evidence of them being heroin junkies as you have of them being lazy...
So "The Idea Man" really does exist?
Thanks for weighing in. Really complements the article.
Almost def joke
Been working on a software rasterizer for the past few months when school doesnt get in the way. Trying to use it to make a game. The whole process has been super interesting. On many occasions I had to rewrite large chunks of code because it wasn't very modular in nature, and adding new features got pretty nasty. Just makes me really appreciate how much planning actually goes into making everything work. More recently I've tried to add some multithreading....dont get me started on that...
OpenMP?
orthodoxy1095
Banned
The publisher defense is fine for big titles that ship with problems, but let's not try to pin everything on them. There are plenty of independent games that ship in various stages of brokenness.
I don't think lazy ends up being the right word though anyways. There are all kinds of more fun words.
I don't think lazy ends up being the right word though anyways. There are all kinds of more fun words.
Im avoiding any third party libraries. I want to do everything from scratch mostly for learning purposes lol. I pretty much just use what the OS provides me.
petran79
Banned
This too. Quake engine was also used for Turok 2
I meant that regarding higher budget games, developing your own engine was also a matter of pride. Eg Gremlin Interactive 3d engine, one of the last to use pixels, gave their games that unique look. It was developed by one person.
Had no idea Unreal and Unity would dominate the market so fast,even in high budget games
thepenguin55
Member
Oh shit! Tina Amini is there too? Having said that, I always wonder what the point that's trying made here. No Man's Sky is an impressive feat when you consider the size of Hello Games, but knowing that doesn't magically make the game good. I would like to enjoy NMS but I don't. Knowing that the team is small and worked really hard on it doesn't change that.
By saying things that are factually correct, which "lazy devs" almost never is.
Drakendodertje
Member
Thank you for sharing this article, very insightful. I actually think articles like these should be a mandatory read to gamers everywhere, to get some sense of what it takes to deliver a polished well-rounded title on any given system.
As for me, i know i was quite angry around the release of the first Watch Dogs, and the massive downgrade in graphics it had undergone. Partly because i upgraded my entire PC in anticipation of that game. Articles like these give me a better perspective. The fault lies probably most with the publisher who demand a vertical slice so pretty that expectations go through the roof, and the value of the stock rises as a result. In the end everybody dumps their shit on the developers for not delivering set by the standard of that slice, but they are hardly to blame. It must a fucking shitty feeling after all the years of hard work when that happens.
As for me, i know i was quite angry around the release of the first Watch Dogs, and the massive downgrade in graphics it had undergone. Partly because i upgraded my entire PC in anticipation of that game. Articles like these give me a better perspective. The fault lies probably most with the publisher who demand a vertical slice so pretty that expectations go through the roof, and the value of the stock rises as a result. In the end everybody dumps their shit on the developers for not delivering set by the standard of that slice, but they are hardly to blame. It must a fucking shitty feeling after all the years of hard work when that happens.
MrCunningham
Member
Kickstarter, Indigogo and Fig (though Fig still needs to fully prove itself as a platform, IMO) have all opened doors to bring back mid-tier budget games through crowdfunding and now personal investment. It is filling in a gap that had been widening between indie games and AAA game development, and this is a good thing overall given the results that a lot of these crowd funding sites has been producing.
Before the Kickstarter boom, we generally had two markets of games. The AAA developer/ retail/ digital market and the indie scene which saw a boom with the App-store initially.
The App store was a major game changer in my opinion. It gave smaller developers a large platform to publish just about anything on with little to no restrictions, which was a big deal back in 2008 . During that time period, digital platforms like Steam were very strict with their submission processes and would be very selective with the software that they would put up on their store front. Same went for PSN and XBLA.
But the "We don't care what you have, we'll take it" attitude of the App-store opened up a huge floodgate for indie developers to drop anything they had in development. This led to a lot of surprise new hits and million seller games that came out of nowhere. Apples earlier Ipod Touch advertisements from 2008 featured a non stop stream of indie games. They weren't advertising software from major game publishers. There was a huge call to arms from Apple to populate their new App-Store with as much software as possible.
This huge change led other platforms like Steam to open up their storefront with the Steam Green Light program. Sony to take a "Sony loves indie" stance and even affected the Google Play Store as well as many other platforms.
The App Store also gave birth to the Unity Engine, where it started life as a development tool for mobile games on the App Store. But that engine has grown to the point where it is competitive with UE4. Epic had to change their business model for UE4 to compete with Unity. Another major game changer for developers.
But during this indie developer boom there was a gap between indie games and AAA games. Going back to what I said before, crowdfunding has been taking indie development one step further by allowing them to be elevated to mid tier developers. Indie developers with budgets and money.
Pre-2008, indie developers were very limited in their tool sets and platforms. Sure there were mobile phones, but those didn't have the exposure that the smart phones did, or the App-store in particular. For an indie developer back then, your hope was to make a game in flash and upload it to new grounds, mod an existing game as a TC, grab some RPG Maker tool kit (Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden) or something simple like Game Maker. Or if you had the skills, make your own game engine, which was very time consuming and led to a lot of unfinished projects that could only survive through being Open Source.
It was very rare to find break out hits during this point in time. One of the few and only real examples that I can think of was Minecraft, which started as a pet project by Notch and they independently started selling it on their own website/ servers.
But generally, it was so much harder to gain a foothold in game development 8 years ago than it is now. These days with the freemium tools, platforms, and funding services and it so much easier to jump into game development than it ever has been before.
More_Badass
Member
^^^Related to that, I feel that indie games going mainstream thanks to XBLA had a significant effect too. Positive of course, but also negative too, since it cemented that mindset of $10-20 being the "indie price" through many people's first exposure to the indie scene. Today, indie pricing is much wider, especially thanks to the return of that mid-tier AA category and the ease that devs can use Unity and Unreal, but it took a while for indie games to break past that price ceiling into the $20+ range
I'm still annoyed that No Man's Sky probably poisoned the well for a long long time for $60 indie games
I'm still annoyed that No Man's Sky probably poisoned the well for a long long time for $60 indie games
piratepwnsninja
Member
There is much truth here. I went to school for game design in the early 00's, and maybe the thing I'm most grateful for was that the degree required me to take a lot of different classes. I learned some programming, some animation, audio design. It was useful because having knowledge of how things work is super important when talking to other disciplines.
It's dying. Fairly fast in my experience, too. I'm a design lead, and apart from having to make sure things are lined up for my group to do their work, I'm also making missions, abilities, etc. I still say that public speaking is perhaps the most important class someone interested in game design can take, but that is because you need to be able to communicate clearly when you do need things from other people. However, the second thing I tell people who are interested in game design is to make something. There are too many good tools available, with readily available information on how to use them, that there is no excuse to just come to me with ideas.
MrCunningham
Member
You're right about XBLA being another avenue that opened up the indie scene. Microsoft even has their own toolkit with XNA, I should not discredit that either. For me, I find that the real floodgate for indie games was opened with the iOS App store.
But the other point that I was trying to make was the gap that we were seeing between big budget games and the smaller independent titles. A gap that was widening before the intervention of crowd sourcing that really opened up a new avenue when Double Fine showed that they could generate over a million dollars on Kickstarter back in 2012. These days it is not that crazy to see an independent developer pull $25k, $50k, $100k to $500k from a crowd sourcing website to budget their games with. But before 2012, this was unthinkable.
DJ Lushious
Member
Cabbagehead
Member
I like this. I think this should be our new go-to reason!
Yep perfect.
Totally agree with you here. We have made 2 games in the past plus Rise & Shine that we are finishing up right now and in all of them we first had the core gameplay totally nailed before even thinking about going any further.
Then, you can go to a demo/vertical slice from there and eventually onto the full game.
SolVanderlyn
Thanos acquires the fully powered Infinity Gauntlet in The Avengers: Infinity War, but loses when all the superheroes team up together to stop him.
Great article. It's always good to see what goes on behind the scenes and to get a more humanized look at the creative process.
. That hits a little bit hard.
I read somewhere that Guild Wars 2 and Lords of Shadow 2's development were hell. GW2 turned out ok in the end, but LoS2 isn't even a well-liked game
even though I liked it well enough
Milly Osworth
Member
We have a basic webapp that we develop and exploit, that's already a challenge. A videogame must be hell.
Just because smaller devs don't necessarily have publishers doesn't mean they are answerable to *anybody*. Some will have external financial backing that is tied to deadlines or other agreements. Others might simply run out of money, either because the project budget is gone or they have, ya know, literally gone broke. Regardless, not all indie devs are running off their own coin.
Cabbagehead
Member
Imagine that with 100 or 200 more people on a bigger platform and fairly incompetent focus breathing down your neck, yikes.
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