Ask HN: What do you wish you knew before you developed your first video game? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What do you wish you knew before you developed your first video game?

1 pointSeanAnderson4 comments

I'm going to be taking some time off from work here at the end of the year to pursue some creative software development.

Although I have almost 15 years of industry experience I've never built a game. Up until about six months ago, I didn't think I was /that/ type of software developer, but now, here I am, interest piqued, reading up on all sorts of technology stacks and having my mind blown by the size of the knowledge space. I am especially excited to try and express logic using an ECS/DOTS approach!

I know I am building for desktop web. Leaning towards Rust + WebGPU and hoping to time an MVP around WebGPU general availability. I know I shouldn't be in this space for the money. I know to expect game programming to be significantly more challenging than whatever my intuition believes and that I should continually and aggressively prune away at scope creep. I know there's a LOT of math and that performance is frequently an issue.

What are some joys, or challenges, you unexpectedly encountered when developing your first game which you wish you'd known before breaking ground?

I never got into game dev. I bought a textbook and learnt a ton. the last chapter, which should have been the first chapter, was about intellectual property. Mainly trademarks and patents. You're making something new from scratch, so copyright isnt important.

But the main problem, most video game innovations have happened in the last 20 years. Probably lesser true today but still valid. All these innovations picked up patents. You are near certainly going to end up in violation of many of these. Not to mention super overly broad trademarks. Sonic ought to be a blue hedgehog. No, you basically cant have a rodent in your game. Their trademark was issued real early in video game history and they established the right to be the only video game with a rodent in it. Seriously.

They likely don't go suing people over it, but when you actually try not to violate other people's rights. You have no video game left.

This is the beauty of godot/unity era we are entering now. Many of these patents are expiring now. Now people can make the video games of their dream.

But now we're going to have a huge surplus of video games for the next few decades.

Hah. My last major project was shut down due to legal issues, so I'm not entirely surprised this space is also laden with legal traps, but meh. It's art. If it's popular enough to attract bad attention then it's succeeding in its own way.

I'm sorry to hear you took away that impression from the game development space, though. It's not clear to me what innovations you're specifically referencing, though. Are you just worried about media trademarks? Or are there more technical tricks of the trade which are off-limits?

Thankfully my game is going to involve ants, not rodents :p I should probably look into what SimAnt's lawyers got up to, though.

Good architecture is key, just building will lead you into pain very quickly.

I've read that good games create emergence through the combinatorial interactions of entwined game mechanics. The more loosely coupled a mechanic is from the rest of the system the less likely it is to generate emergence (while still asking the same learning of the player).

This makes building and maintaining game architecture especially challenging compared to CRUD forms because loose coupling isn't very interesting.

Is this something like what you're implying? Or are you saying more like "You can't iteratively pivot from a roguelike to an RPG. If you don't establish the basic architecture of your game, and commit to that architecture as you add mechanics, you won't benefit from the flexibility of your indecision and you will pay even more in development cost" ?

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