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Comment by aphextron | Hacker News Reader

The biggest mistake for first time game devs (who are already coders) is thinking that making a game is a programming problem. It's not. It's an art/music/sfx/design problem. Unless you are crafting some crazy new shader, there is no new cutting edge code to write in a game. You use a commercial engine, third party libraries, etc. to the point that your game code is nothing but a collection of scripts essentially. The heavy lift for making a game is entirely in the creative side.

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Why not both? Back in 2006 I helped someone complete a Flash puzzle game. The whole thing was a an interesting programming experience. His lead developer had family issues to tend to and I stepped in. He would come up with game-play ideas and I would prototype them while also working completing the whole game. It was a blast. The ideas that he would bring to me were greatly influenced by what he thought I could pull off in the alotted time. After I was done, he later hired some other devs and told me he found himself limiting his ideas because those guys weren't as good at implementing them. In that respect he definitely hit technical limitations even though he was working on non-technically challenging games on a well known platform.

Similarly, there was no state-of-the-art coding in this game:

* http://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

They had plenty of technical challenges pushing the performance of ActionScript in browsers at the time in order to keep the game moving smoothly.

While I generally agree with the sentiment, there certainly are some good counterexamples of games that are almost purely programming problems. Games with mostly procedural content and/or novel gameplay - Minecraft would be a good example.

I'm not sure how true that is; procedural games I think tend to come up with a core formula once, and stick to it pretty hard. The rest is just playing with numbers, and presets. Like for minecraft, there's a bit of complexity involved to it's procedural generation, but in general I imagine it hasn't changed much since its inception, with possibly two, maybe three, rewrites to its map generation logic.

Most of the "real" updates to minecraft are in regards to enemies, item recipes, "biomes" (which presumably don't change the generation logic much, just the spawn rates), etc.

Roguelikes I imagine are also in the same vein; it's all just fiddling with the numbers, for balance and "fun"

Simulation focused games on the hand are probably a better candidate for "purely programming" programs, but even then, the complex stuff is probably in the vein of emergent behavior; something you don't at all strive for in normal programming. And they still presumably make a large chunk of their decisions based on "fun" instead of reality. The harder you strive for reality, the less a game it becomes... Maybe Grand Strategies then; they pretend to simulate a pre-generated complex environment, but avoid emergent behavior for the most part.

Really the only thing I could safely call a "pure programming" problem is a tech demo that happens to be a video game, ie Carmack's stuff. But even then...

I think it might just boil down to that very few video games are both good, and disinterested in player enjoyment. The key distinguishing feature of video games as a media is human interaction; it's difficult to imagine a good game where this is not the predominant motivator. Even Dwarf Fortress keeps it in mind pretty strongly.

Spot on. I would add that there seems to be a focus on original ideas. This makes it harder to sell. Sticking with proven ideas and then slapping a creative twist is a safer sell.

Yeah, and don't get too creative with your characters either. Have a cool anime-inspired protagonist with a unique look? Don't use him. Your name isn't Hayao Miyazaki, and the player base can't relate. There are probably hundreds of Joe McBuzzcut models in your favorite asset store you can tweak to purpose.

Also, don't forget to hire a sweatshop full of eager kids fresh out of high school or junior college and make them work 60-80 (or more) hour weeks for peanuts to hit those Christmas deadlines. They probably know more about the ins and outs of the third-party middleware you licensed than you do, since it's literally all they do, morning, noon, and night. Granted, this bit may be difficult on a $85,000 budget -- if you plan on hiring developers from the first world, that is. You could probably hire a team twenty strong from China or the Ukraine for less than half that money and keep them busy for a year. After which you'll have a beta with a few bugs, some of them showstoppers, but still good enough to ship as the final game while you ready a day-one patch.

I mean if we're going to regurgitate "industry best practice" into this thread, why not go whole hog?

You forgot to include loot boxes. The game better include loot boxes that turn users into mindless casino players.

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