Making Games
etodd.io
etodd.io
Personally, I'm in the trenches and making games is _hard_! Sure we have faster computers and better tooling. We also have _much_ higher expectations... Still, it's incredible to make games. I'm so lucky to work on them each day.
If you feel what I feel you don't make excuses about "luck." What the hell is luck? Of course "success" is out of your control... But you control what you make. You can choose to make something beautiful, to hone your craft, to stir a feeling. What could be better than that?!
No business feature in my 15 year career has ever come close to the complexity of shaders, trig, and physics!
In the end whether I ship it to market or not I will always have the satisfaction that I literally achieved my childhood dream and, if I recall correctly, fame or riches was never part of that equation.
Yeah, it's wild how even simple-ish video games can put to shame reams and reams of "enterprise-y day job" code in terms of complexity and demands on you as a programmer. I love it (:
Aside: I wish DMs were a thing on this site; you should let me know your game if/when you make it public!
I don’t think anyone would claim the actual game design is much easier (and the marketing is probably more difficult now).
I’ve had an idea for a strategy game I’ve wanted to make for years, but a big reason I haven’t started it has been how much tuning of the mechanics I will need to do, and a distrust of my attention span being able to slog through that process. However the game I have planned, while doable by one person, is a much larger scale than some of the most famous and influential indie games
* Those who miss my own self-mocking should feel free to consult "Catullus 16" in lieu of submitting their critical commentary on my comment
Perhaps you're interpreting a general statement that means different things to different people through your own context and missing a bit of what they mean. It's easy to do something as a career and discount the non-career people doing it, but everyone has their own reasons do to things, and sometimes it's not external.
If we replace "games" with "art", then we get people saying "easy to make art". I'm sure professional artists trying to support themselves think similarly to you, that it's hard, and I'm sure it is. But they may not be talking about art the same way you are talking about art.
Making art for yourself can be fun, and relaxing, and even liberating. Making games for yourself can be too. In this context it can be very "easy", because you're only looking to please yourself. It's no less "real", it's just for a different purpose in some cases. They aren't adding noise, they're talking about a slightly different thing, but it's also an important thing, and also important for the other, professional context as well.
Do you really think professional game makers and art makers are making their profession better by telling laypeople that no, what they're doing is not the same at all and what you do is hard so they shouldn't relate their own experiences? Won't your profession be better served by instead of discounting their views discussing the differences of when it's done personally or as a hobby and when done for general consumption? Aren't many of these people the professionals of tomorrow, or maybe not, and you're helping some people realize they'd rather keep it personal and a hobby?
You have no idea how much harder I can be on the developer when I have a direct line to talk shit in his head
Making games is easy. Making a living making games is incredibly hard. Substitute "art", "music", "fiction", etc for "games".
As the article says, making stuff that satisfies your creative itch and also appeals to a mass market is like getting hit by lightning twice.
But as you say, this needn't be a discouragement for people who really want to try it. Because it's mostly luck whether your creative itch aligns with what people want to buy, so there's no harm in trying your luck.
For the rest of us, it's either the long meaningless slog of creating stuff we're not interested in creating but people are interested in buying, or of doing something completely different to make money while keeping the creative hobby.
It’s difficult to make good games. It’s difficult to make fun games. It’s difficult to make complex games.
But it’s easy to simply make games.
People make games in 48 hours. People make games with pencil and paper. People make games probably no one ever plays.
If a game is difficult to make, it’s because you have made it difficult: You’ve given in to scope creep. You’ve chosen an ambitious idea well beyond your abilities. You have complicated multiplayer network code where it’s hard to keep clients in sync. You’re writing everything from scratch…
But overall, if you can stick to something simple, manageable, and well within your ability to execute, you will realize it’s easy to make games.
Like writing a novel. You can do NanoWrimo and bash it out.
But it is incredibly hard to write a good, entertaining and successful novel.
Music and drawing or painting is similar.
They're clearly right about their point. You can make a shitty game in one sitting using today's tools; I've done so a bunch of times. My games all suck but they are games with art, music, sound, and gameplay that people can play and enjoy briefly. You are also clearly right that making good games is hard, and indeed getting harder. The quality bar for a AAA game is insanely high in 2023. I don't see these as being incompatible points, and I'm not sure the anger I sense in your post is warranted--was it necessary to suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a dilletante and that their posts are noise?
I'm skeptical but would be happy to be proven wrong. What are some games you've made that satisfy:
1. Made and published in one sitting
2. Have legally sourced assets and code
3. Have people who don't know you personally that have indicated enjoyment of it
If this is a regular occurrence for you, I'm curious about the level of experience that got you to this point.
http://electroly.com/games/parry1.html
Source code: https://github.com/electroly/games/blob/main/carts/parry1.p8
You can see it's not a very good or sophisticated game but it was done quickly and we had some fun on Twitch playing it. PICO-8 makes it easy to write tiny games. It's not so much about my skill but about the availability of streamlined indie game-making tools. The hard parts of getting a game initially up and running have been done for you. There are "fantasy console" products like PICO-8 and TIC-80, and tools like GameMaker and RPG Maker target modern systems. In the old days it would have been Flash.
When I was a kid, my older brother could reproduce any game he saw. He saw Tetris and he built it. I described a Mario game (well before Super Mario) and he built it. He wrote a text adventure. Later he learned proper programming and stopped making games. I don't think he can do it any more, but at that time, it seemed to be easy for him.
Of course games changed a lot since the early 1980s. But on the other hand, to make a game without all these modern frameworks and game engines, also adds an additional barrier that he easily overcame.
Too bad that the toolsets and skills available for games aren't pushed further into the computer ecosystem.
I think a linux desktop with UI elements from even a moderately basic game could be a better integration between humans and their work.
For example, most games have settings with options and keybindings right at the very start of your interaction with the system. At any point, you can get in and tweak them if they aren't efficient enough for you.
You can also adjust sound and display settings.
Additionally, most games have a sort of "soft start" to help you learn the user interface, and navigate through the game world. Games have to attract the player and get them up to speed.
It would be very cool to promote these sorts of things up in a desktop UI.
The worst part about that phenomenon in online fora is the scores of equally oblivious people itching to click that reply link and confidently back up the first ignorant comment with their equally uninformed suppositions presented as fact. I wonder how they'd react if Joe from sales interrupted them at every meeting confidently declaring that they were doing their jobs wrong, "backing it up" with assumptions and misgivings that any developer could instantly identify? I wonder how they'd react if after calling him out, he justified it by saying he should know because he's worked with developers for years?
That is why designers don't contribute to open source projects.
>If you feel what I feel you don't make excuses about "luck."
one of my favorite quotes:
“Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" - Roman philosopher Seneca
And I think it bridges both people's feelings on the term. Yes, to some extent you do need to just be in the right place at the right time. Or create that right place/time yourself (which I argue is harder than even making a game). But your own quality of work and talent will be a factor in if you are "lucky". A genius who never leaves their home or never communicates will never get lucky, but someone hard working with a plan to get themselves out there will create multiple portions of luck. Which of course contrasts to the rich but lazy heir who will have opporttunities out the nose but almost no genuine interest in them.
>You can choose to make something beautiful, to hone your craft, to stir a feeling. What could be better than that?!
based on this website, making 300k at Apple or something.
Many of the indie darlings from that era would be lost in the noise now, and the quality bar expected of even an indie game is insane. Outside of Jonathan Blow and Pope, I struggle to think of game creators that would stand out of the crowd nowadays.
By all measures, I had pretty good success shipping an indie VR game in 2016. Competition was low and our low poly art style was passable because the game had personality to make up for it. I am 100% confident that even a few years later the game would’ve sold 4 digit copies. Even with the success, I still would have made more money as an engineer elsewhere. Of course having successfully “done the indie thing” has a high non-monetary reward that made it worth it for me, but I was also financially well off and could afford that loss.
I’d counsel anyone at this point to find a AA indie team or even go AAA and consider just working on something you have passion for on the side. Drastically less risk if you go that route, as you can quit when you know you “have something”. Or just enjoy throwing your game up on itch or Steam and have fun seeing other people play.
What to make of the absence of A-lister game development personalities? There are maybe exactly zero. Notch disgraced himself, and he may be the single only person to have ever gotten into the regular person popular consciousness enough. In the near past, Sid Meier and Will Wright had their names on games, but I guess not in a memorable enough way. I'm not sure anyone watched the three or so TV series about John Carmack and John Romero. Gabe Newell, Shigeru Miyamoto, Sam Houser, Tim Schafer, Hideo Kojima... A baby boomer is not going to recognize any of these names. None of these names pass the "Mom, have you heard of..." test.
So there will be lots of noise.
There are benefits to this - the absence of a system - though.
- no institutional power: As you may have experienced, there's no one taste maker. When you are trying to market for $0, it's literally all serendipity.
- the heritage: There's no such thing as a nepo baby in game development. All those ex-Blizzard people have just as little chance of making something anyone plays as you do, even as they finance 8 digit budgets to your 0.
- the data: Valve, benevolently, shares the data that movie, TV, music and book financiers hoard, allowing any 1 smart person to correctly play the role of the 10,000 studio executives at Disney.
- there's even some up front money, for nothing: Facebook, also benevolently, gave out lots of development checks for games, expecting basically nothing in return; Epic Mega Grants similarly.
One exception I can think of is influential business people like CEOs and founders of large companies.
I can tell you the name of (most of) the characters of the Avengers movies. I can also tell you the name of some of the actors who play those characters. I have absolutely no idea who directed them (nor do I really care that much). I can't tell you the names of anyone involved in the production (art/music/cgi etc). I can tell you it came from Marvell Studios via Disney.
I can tell you the names of the characters of HalfLife series. I can't tell you the names of the voice actors (apart from the fact nobody voiced Gordon (lol)). I can't tell you the name of the guy who wrote the story, other than he left Valve and published a story outline for HalfLife 3. I can't tell you the name of a single programmer, visual or level designer, artist, musician etc. I can tell you Valve made it.
So yeah, unless your character also shares your name, and as you point out, unless the game is titled "John Smith presents a John Smith game directed by and starring John Smith: JOHN SMITH THE GAME" you can all but forget about me knowing your name.
Games are a hugely collaborative effort, unlike books (which are just a collaborative effort).
Music is also collaborative, but there's way more people involved in making most games, than the people whose names end up on an album cover.
Movies are also a highly collaborative effort, but even there, there's usually one 'czar' - often the director, that gets to stand behind nearly every creative decision made in the film (Even if they weren't the one who made it). Again, no such thing usually exists with games. There's just too many parts to them, no one person owns all of them, and the costs of making 'cuts' preclude a single opinionated personality from doing an eleventh-hour pass on it in post-production.
Which series were these? I'd love to watch them but can't find any information. From googling they shot a pilot for a Masters of Doom series in 2019 but it seems to have never been released.
do they need to? I'm sure a boomer wouldn't recognize Linus Torvald either. They may not even have Tim Cook ring the bell as they type on the very device he likely helped design.
Games are much more popular but they are still a young medium. We don't know who or what will be the supposed Quinin Tarentino or James Cameron of games 50 years from now. because millenials are just starting to give that prestige to games.
> There's no such thing as a nepo baby in game development.
I'm not sure I really buy this angle. Sure, Blizzard can bomb on a game, but if we suppose it's the product of some trust fund son of a CEO; they definitely had a LOT more chances and resources to work with than some indie dev in a basement.
Edit: I have a US-centric viewpoint and I can’t speak to other countries.
Indie games - once established anyway - seem like a better bet, some of the bigger titles in the space nowadays in terms of sale - I'm thinking Hollow Knight, Hades - seem all right, in that their current games are still a steady income stream, allowing them to take the time with the - guaranteed successful - sequels.
Only a matter of time before they get bought up by a bigger studio / publisher though, one big payout. Happened to KSP, and while I had faith in the new developer studio, the sequel is off to a disappointing start.
Average pay for the average employee is slowly improving too, and getting more evenly spread, though still a lot lower than equivalent jobs in other tech sectors. Better pay for most, but fewer Ferraris in the car park.
This isn't specific to games. I doubt many dot-com millionaires would have the same success with the web if they were born today.
Since I was doing it for fun, I decided to make the game free (this meant I missed out on learning if people liked the idea enough to pay, and also I couldn’t use sales to drive interest).
I grudgingly set up a Discord server and released the game.
I was lucky that someone with millions of followers recommended my game, and that the overall response was positive (“very positive” on Steam, briefly), but what did I really get in the end? A couple of fans, a few hours of talking about my game with strangers, an interesting story (“a billionaire beat my game!”), and witnessing people beat me (handily) at my own game.
Was it all worth it? Should I do it again? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m still processing it all. I do have a nagging feeling that my tech skills could be put to better use, or at least help people I know, instead of strangers.
Like I said: still processing :)
It seems like most of the industry is pushing bits around or trying to make specific shareholders rich at the cost of everyone else.
Rambling, but it you get any good insights I'm definitely interested in hearing them
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36508063
It seems so obvious, but it’s also easy to lose sight of, especially when technology is so interesting!
My co-worker from a decade ago named it "shovelling virtual gravel" and I think this expression really catches the spirit of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh0QiXyZSk
Tennessee Ernie Ford - Sixteen Tons
I haven't worked in a single company that have succeeded in making their owners rich without giving the clients what they want. Have you? The only entities I know that do that are organised crime and governments.
Well, that's kind of a mix of both categories, to be fair
- Everything Microsoft has been doing to windows: adding ads, shuffling the UI around, resetting the defaults every update
- see also: reddit, facebook, everything else in it's "enshitification" phase
- Anything involving ads is (imo) polluting the world
- Things that are literally polluting the world (usually not tech, but sometimes)
do on net these companies do more good for the world than bad? maybe, but certainly most of the work going into them seems to be in "capturing value" which is of no use to me. Most of the proprietary software I've used has slowly gotten worse over time.
I think that's a little sad.
Not saying anything else.
I didn’t think the specific game was super relevant to the story, so I decided to leave it out. I also wanted to avoid the HN trope of “cool story! I’m working on this thing that’s only tangentially related: …” :)
How many concurrent players did you have on steam? This seems low unless the only monetization you're thinking of is a purchase price.
As far as monetization on Steam, what are you getting at? DLC? I'll admit to not knowing (mostly as a player and, more recently, as a developer) of any other way to spend money on games besides buying them or DLC on Steam. Edit: I'm ignoring "free to play" since I don't like that model (as a player or developer).
Edit: Wow, looks like the median indie game makes barely $1k: https://howtomarketagame.com/2023/04/25/what-if-steam-didnt-...
I agree that for most games, the difference in installs between free and not-free is many orders of magnitude.
What did I miss? You did it because it was fun. And… it was fun? Then just because you release it and share it with others, now only external validation counts?
I think this is a trap I fall in all the time as well. I make something, and as long as I keep it to myself, only my own experience with it determines if it was a success or not. As soon as others get to see it… what I think of it doesn’t matter anymore. Only their reaction.
Having said that: you’re right that once I released it, I suddenly had thoughts about how well I thought it should do, and those were hard to quell.
Edit: Discord did end up being the right thing to do, however. That’s how I was able to connect with many of the players (that I probably wouldn’t have gotten a chance to talk to otherwise). My only gripe with Discord is the “walled garden, but somehow de facto communication medium” aspect.
Enter Godot. I have LOVED it. It has absolutely changed the way I think about game dev, and the journey with it so far has been refreshing. It feels natural to code in, things are organized in a way that I don't need a degree in the engine to understand, and the UI is simple and clean. This post inspired me even more to keep going full bore with Godot. Thanks man.
Heads up that a majority of these are “fake”, and/or stretch the truth considerably. There was one where in one video they had made a fully realized open world in Unity and in the second they implemented flying.
It’s all smoke and mirrors. These creators have spent weeks getting these games to the point at which they’re at. Whether it’s in training, or in previous failed games, or in creating templates to make future games, it’s never that easy. There are so many nuances to these engines that you can easily lose an entire day just fiddling with one feature or fixing a bug.
So take it with a grain of salt.
That, and I my mind usually loses focus at some point in the video and I lose track easily switching between the video and whatever I'm trying to do.
“An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”
These "real life in the world of game development" pieces are usually the kind that serve only to discourage a kid from wanting to write games (and really any other software for that matter) which is not really what I'm aiming for. I simply want him to have a more realistic view of what game development really is and I suspect he'd be interested in a lot of other corners of software development.
You basically nailed it, here[1]. In fact, as I read it, I imagined my son writing something like this in the future -- albiet with some details changed. He's an incredibly intelligent 15-year old kid who has pretty serious ADHD and struggles due to family circumstances. He had similar issues with friends -- mostly related to being homeschooled until last year[2].
[0] Looks like submitter is the author assuming the HN profile is accurate.
[1] As a fellow Christian who was praying about his son this morning, I suspect this was something He sent my way ;).
[2] He's got friends and makes friends easily but the school he was put in was a small (unfortunately awful) Christian school with kids who had attended since Kindergarten ... it was hard to break into.
All of these things led me down rabbit holes that gave a wealth of knowledge and experience, many of which I apply to my day job (or let me be in a position to move up). In 20+ years, I've made hundreds of prototypes, engines, and demos. I've only fully released a handful of games, and for the most part they were a slog to complete.
For the longest time I thought it was something wrong with me, just "too lazy" to complete something or I needed to "try harder." I've since come to learn more about ADHD and see it's an expected result as dopamine levels change throughout the project. So I've changed my expectations from "I'm going to run my own indie studio someday" to "I'm going to work on whatever moves me right now and use it as a fun learning experience."
Gotta say, though, like the name :)
But like the author I came to see my writing of games as satisfying an artistic (and also a technical need) I suppose I have. Why express yourself artistically in software? Maybe because I am not as skilled at painting or music to hope to express myself in that regard.
And I think early on, perhaps still, I wrote games to make tangible the idea for a game that I would like to play. (That others might also enjoy the game should not come as a surprise.)
In fact, plenty of times when learning I can program, I have had non-programmers tell me about their own great idea for a game and ask if I could write it. I feel a little uncomfortable when they do because frankly it's difficult for me to be inspired by someone else's idea. Often, I tell them, "Why don't you teach yourself to program?" I know how dickish that sounds but in fact I am essentially telling them to take the exact path that I took myself, ha ha.
:
I agree indie game writing is art.
When I first wrote shareware when I was in college any money that showed up (maybe $10 a month) went directly to buying a pizza and two cokes for my then-girlfriend and I that Friday night. It just seemed like gravy.
But when programming became a career for me, and the internet added a more realistic means to monetize software, there did come in this creeping expectation of making enough to "live on" from games. I am coming to see now that this kind of ruins it for me.
Having recently retired, I used my time to rewrite one of my early shareware games for Steam. It was fun to go back to C for the nostalgia, fun to modernize the game using a cross-platform library (SDL), fun to see 60 fps so easy....
But I sunk $1000 into the thing if you count buying a Steam Deck, paying Steam $100, and the various controllers and such I purchased (for the oft-neglected PC's I pressed into game-development service — I am normally a Mac guy but I wanted to try cross-platform). All told I have made about $570 from the game and I don't expect to make much more.
I think I'll write another game or two for Steam but, and perhaps this is a healthy mindset, I don't expect to make any money doing it. But in a way I feel I am slowly coming back to my college days and can begin to look at any sort of recompense as ... having paid for the Steam Deck at least.
I am glad the author has come around to a similar conclusion. I think it can make game-writing fun again. (I am also glad the author seems to have exorcised some childhood demons in the process — congrats.)
Would buy it again on GOG, but Steam I kinda try to avoid these days.
Why do you feel you need to be skilled in either to express oneself? The expression is the goal, not the perfection.
I also don't believe that you have to let go of the expectation of compensation. You can have both compensation and expression, just maybe use a little more time/money towards marketing.
You don't need to be a world-class master, but there are minimums.
It's frustrating and most people quit at this part, but this journey is also an expression. You look back on that old raggedy drawing or whatever it is, and understand exactly what you were wanting to express and how you just couldn't. That piece becomes a symbol of your persistence and effort, and winds up meaning far more to you than most of your other work that has far better detail or granted you far more money.
So I wound up agreeing with you, it's correct that below the minimum you struggle to express yourself the way you intended, but that is perfectly normal. Embrace it, don't let it become your limitation on why you refuse to learn to make music or games or create pottery or what have you.
I think gamedev was also a very big escape for me since middle school, and your post reminded me a lot of those dark times.
I also agree that games are an art, I went from drawing -> modeling -> rendering -> programming, so it was easier for me to reach those conclusions.
Making a game to show off your cleverness is definitely not the best motivation, but I have found that it can improve the game's "experience" if you can harness that feeling. Straddling the line between personal interest, feasibility, and market value is maybe the most important thing to get right as a solo developer in my opinion. I could see developers who got lucky with their obsessions getting absolutely devastated with their lack of hits afterwards (something I'm afraid of doing myself!).
The comment about the twitter gamedev scene being driven by terminally online people is very accurate, although I still admire some of the more educational/resource oriented ones for their sheer willpower.
I read tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow w my girlfriend. She didn’t understand why building an engine is such a bad idea (for a modern pc game). I compared it to a hobbyist car designer starting to design a car by formulating his own rubber for the tires, and building the engine and transmission and wiring from scratch.
Shader compilation has more to do with dx12 than it does game engines. Game engines try to encourage developers to handle this appropriately, but there is no one button automatic handling yet. You would also run into this issue in your custom game engine unless you avoid vulkan/dx12 entirely.
Technically, from what little I know about these I don't see why you couldn't make a game look exactly the same in both. But I guess what's easy to do and what the respective community commonly does have a notable impact? Or maybe people self select for one or the other based on what games that align with their sense of aesthetics use one or the other?
The tipoffs you are detecting are those game engine default settings. One distinction between them is that Unreal has motion blur, camera aperture effects, and some fancy lighting configured by default. Unity is more "basic" by default. For small projects, a dev is focusing on other things rather than pouring a lot of energy into how light reflects off surfaces or whatever. Each engine is capable of really unique looks, but they also look pretty good even if a dev doesn't touch it.
I thought you were going to say that Unreal games max out their settings at "Epic" :)
You are on the money regarding self-selection as well. A small team is probably going to pick Unity due to all the preconceived notions, and alongside this will probably create similar looking visuals to other Unity games due to a reliance on the asset store if their team isn't heavy on visuals. It might seem like I'm focusing too much on the asset store, but it goes for custom assets too where even if you're working smartly, you have to blend those premade assets with custom ones. If you're on a large team working on an Unreal game, it's probably going to be realistic looking for example so you're limited based on what lighting makes the skin look good, what particles make sense in a grounded world, and so on.
It's technically possible, you're only going to run into problems when you then try sharing assets from different stores (audio and textures excluded), where you now have to recreate it from the ground up to match in that other engine. So you're also right about that aspect!
As real examples of the flexibility of modern game engines, Octopath Traveller Yoshi's World, and Arkham Knight were made on UE4. For Unity; Cuphead and Escape from Tarkov.
I recall Ori and the Will of the Wisps being particularly bad for this. It was unplayable when it was installed on a HDD, and when I moved it to SSD it still had major stutters during racing segments where the goal is to traverse the map quickly (and presumably, load a lot of assets on the way).
sure they do. Like anything else in software, what defaults you set will drive the course for a lot of user behavior. You make a downvote button and users will start to use it to say "I disagree" or "I don't like this comment", even if you remind them everytime that the downvote button is not a disagree button.
Of course you can dig deep and change every default, but few studios in the grand scheme of things will bother if the default is good enough.
This is especially so with 3D games. 2D games has less of this problem, as you tend to rely more on the assets for art direction than fancy lighting or in-engine geometry creation and the default lightings for 2D stuff is simply your basic shaders with sprite textures.
I agree with you in spirit, but reality tends to show otherwise.
If your goal is to release as fast as possible or create as many games (for some definition of game) in your lifetime, then I guess there's a case against building your own engine or - as I would call it - using libraries.
But big engines definitely have distinct "feels" and can't quite hit certain gamefeels.
There's also the long view: What if I spend 5 years making an engine, learning gamedev and computer graphics, and come out highly expert with an engine built to my tastes? At that 5 year mark, suddenly my engine is better for me than the generic ones.
You may say - there's no guarantee! True. But what if I know I'm technically excellent and that I'd be wasted that advantage of mine by _not_ going that route?
What if I really only want to make a handful of games in my lifetime. Maybe I'll release smaller ones along the way as learning exercises, but I'm fine with spending 5-20 years in the dirt growing and come out the other side with something truly special?
Tools affect your art. Especially programming & gamedev which is so psychic. I may not want my mind tainted by engines with product-mindset values I don't agree with.
The reasons go on.
There's a list are great reasons to make a new engine, but making a great game is not on it.
Viewing things like this as zero sum is a bad mindset imo and not one I want affecting my art.
But like with any software development, technological self-gratification doesn't make a product. Every programmer loves writing code, but you need to be aware whether you're writing code for writing's sake or if it has an objective.
If you want to develop games, develop games; focus on results first, only when you've proven to yourself that it's games you want to develop instead of the technology behind them can you start to think about what the existing engines are lacking that your custom engine would do better.
It has the same energy as PHP developers from a decade ago that for some reason all insisted on writing their own frameworks, CMSes, etc.
I have my boring software career to make me money. I am seeking higher satisfaction at this point in my life.
So I get it. These engines are made to help medium-large scale studios create high profile games, collaborated on by dozens, hundreds over a few years. An single dev doesn't need all that tech but it's tech that bloats down their iteration cycles. Especially if your goals are a small 2D game.
And regardless, a few counterexamples aren't gonna get me to use trash.
As a guy who started 14 games (most with a custom engine, some not) and released none of them, I think both approaches can keep you from shipping in their own unique ways if you're not focused enough on _what_ you're building :)
Teardown [1] was developed by one guy, custom engine, and sold over a million copies. The technology is so unique that it wouldn't be possible to implement in an existing engine, at least not without significant rewrites.
You'll learn a lot from writing things from scratch, and likely come out of that a much better programmer. This experience can lead you to making a more interesting game.
The difficulty of writing a custom engine is also overblown, you don't need to (or should) implement a general purpose engine. Just implement exactly what you need for your game.
Anyways there are plenty of recent examples of very successful indie games using custom engines, often from a single dev or small team. Sure you may be able to get your game finished faster with Unity, but there are thousands of garbage Unity games on Steam, you can always add one more to the pile.
My first game (not available anymore, but it was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQfMHzbFL-w) sold maybe a few thousand copies, but it briefly hit the front page of reddit, indirectly led to some other fun opportunities, and got the chance to get a feature on the App Store (...though I didn't see the email until way too late), which was probably some of the most fulfilling stuff that has happened to me online, as someone that keeps a minimal online presence otherwise. But commercially? It would be considered an abject failure by any studio that had to keep the lights on. As far as hobbies you don't have to leave your desk for, game development carries with it so much possibility. Which is also what makes it so dangerous and alluring for so many, I think.
I’ve found a few people online say that they don’t understand why their game did really poorly even though it’s like X and does Y AND Z. So I ask them to show me their game. I haven’t found a single scenario where the game wasn’t unfinished, janky and/or just plain unfun.
I want to go against the grain here and say if you have a game idea, just make it. But don’t expect people to buy it if it sucks. Like with all good artists, you have to be conscious of whether the thing you’re making is a good product or not. I think the author of this article realized that eventually.
You can see a ton of polished, fun games that weren't successful by just skimming over lists of games on phones, Steam, or Nintendo Switch. I'm not going to bother linking any of them, since you're just going to nitpick and insult the work of random people you don't know, and it won't be a productive path of conversation.
That said, you can redefine your idea of "success" a little and make a comfortable living: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmwbYl6f11c
Sorry, but this is disingenuous. Valid criticism is not "insulting". Additionally I've already watched that video. That developer purposefully made an extremely niche product that only a fraction of people wanted and was able to make a living doing that.
Which... proves my point. His games don't have mass appeal at all, so they don't make money.
I've been through the Switch catalog. There is so much trash on there that it's unbelievable. In fact, most people will agree that these App Stores are chock full of garbage games. I get ads for garbage mobile games on my Instagram feed all the time.
Making a playable game and making a good game are two different things. Most games are simply not good games.
Edit: I'd argue that you can't give me a good example because they don't exist. If there was a game you truly loved that was an underrated gem, you'd be super quick to show it. And that's what I'm trying to say: this concept of a polished, good game that is inundated and skipped on by the sheer amount of volume of good games, in my view, simply doesn't exist.
> I haven’t found a single scenario where the game wasn’t unfinished, janky and/or just plain unfun.
You could easily find lots of problems even with hugely successful games like Vampire Survivors or Enter the Gungeon. I'm fully confident that given a random assortment of fun, polished, shipped games that didn't go viral, you'll be able to come up with a long list of complaints.
Flaws or not, Vampire Survivors and Enter the Gungeon found a market because they were fun games that had some redeeming qualities that wasn't widely available on the market at the time. Other examples: Project Zomboid, Shovel Knight, etc.
Edit: still waiting on ONE game. Just one. Feel free to edit your comment with a game that deserves more recognition.
Send me an e-mail and I'll just message you every game I come across that should have been a hit and wasn't, once you get tired of it you can block me
care to share a few of those on here?
What you're actually getting at here is a hypothesis that success for a game isn't contingent on circumstances, a variant on the "a truly good game, will sell" hypothesis.
Among Us is a very clear case study to the contrary; it's a clear example that success, even for "truly good games" -- IS contingent on circumstances. Being a good game -- whatever that means -- is necessary, but not sufficient.
Among US was released in 2018 and it was a flop. I know the development team, and before the game released they were ready to call it quits any day.
It wasn't until 2020 that a particular streamer picked it up and that, combined with the pandemic, vaulted it to mega success. If that hadn't happened, it would have been a flop to this day.
This was a multiplayer game, and so if at ANY POINT they had given up the ghost and just shut the servers down -- as they very well could have totally rationally done -- it would have never taken out, and if I were to have shown you Among Us as a game that was good but didn't succeed, I'm sure you'd pick it apart and say, well of course it wouldn't succeed, look how much it sucks.
Altho, actually going to check my assumptions.. I found that out of 200-ish randomly selected steam games. I could find about 5 that were singleplayer, genuinely unpopular and looked good in screenshots/descriptions. Out of those only 2 didn't review poor to middling, and 1 of those passed the subjective test of "Would I play this?".
(The game was rotatePDF: a corporate tale)
I'm sceptical of the assumption that "you can make a truly good game and there's a good chance that it won't sell at all" that can be found in online discussions. Instead, Ryan Clark's approach to consistently make profitable indie games seems very plausible to me.
So I would add a few caveats to the hypothesis that "a truly good game will sell", such as the importance of selecting a viable genre and ensuring that development costs are not overly high, but otherwise I still believe in it...
I have to say that although I agree with this example here, I've seen lots of examples of games that, for all intents and purposes, became successful simply because they were good. Games like Stardew Valley, Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, Project Zomboid, Factorio, Hyper Light Drifter, etc. A lot of these games had insanely small budgets, horrible conditions and/or adversity and yet their creators persevered.
If you make a good product, you will eventually find a market for it. At least, that's my take. But I totally get the other perspective. There's definitely an element of survivorship bias here.
It also really depends how you define "successful". I've put out 3 mobile games in the last few years as a solo or mostly-solo game dev[1]. Each one has been game of the day on iOS and received other prominent featuring. From a critical and editorial standpoint my games were successful. From a "is this a sustainable career that supports me financially" standpoint, not so much.
[1] You can find my games at https://birdcartel.com Let me know if you think they fall into the unfun/janky bucket.
Mobile is much harder. I think that is one medium where I agree that the OP is right. Because the games tend to be simpler, the barrier of entry is reduced drastically, so it's much harder to have sucecss. Serious gamers won't play mobile game and casual gamers are fickle, so just making a "good game" on mobile doesn't apply. I think it's especially true for word games (I saw you made two).
Nonetheless, your games look cool! I don't think they're games I'd spend more than a couple of minutes on (much less spend money on), but who knows? I think you should keep making more. The last word/numbers game I spent money on was Threes, and that was only because I heard about how 2048 stole the concept from that game. Not sure if that context even helps.
Thanks for sharing and providing some concrete examples.
I won't bore you all with the full tale of my similar story arc, but, in short: physically moving away from the scene, eventually mustering the courage to kill the full-time indie gamedev dream for good (after a few increasingly desperate attempts and monetizing this thing I spent my whole life working toward), and then finally finding myself slowly progressing elsewhere in life as a result (meeting the woman who I would go on to marry and start a family with; starting a career working a mundane but decently-paying programming-ish job for my hometown school system) has been one hell of a ride, to say the least.
I eventually reached conclusions that are very, very similar to those that the author reached: game development was, as it turns out, almost entirely a coping mechanism for avoiding progressing forward in life, by maintaining an internal illusion that someone, somewhere would care about the cool stuff I was making, such that it would all be worth it in the end—all the while giving me the feeling of control over something, even if basically nobody else in the world cared about it but me.
I still make games, but I've fully come to terms with the fact that it's almost certainly never going to be more than an interesting and fun hobby. this might not end up being the same conclusion someone else treading more or less the same path comes to, but, it's where I ended up, and I'm much better for it.
A long time ago, I got interested in computers to make games but immediately veered into other kinds of software. No worries - I always planned that once I was "done" in the application/startup space, I'd head back and make those games.
Sadly - I waited too long. Like music, books, or photography - the supply-side is so inundated with content that the market is more about marketing than creation or merit. Mind you, never did I expect or even care if I made money. That was never the goal. But now I realize just to get some people to play my game would be a huge undertaking requiring tons of luck - just to rise above the noise. That was the deal breaker - I don't care about making money - but I do care about eventual players, at least if something will take months or years* to create. I wanted to make games, not do marketing.
The bright side is there's no shortage of fun games to play. I'll stay on the player side of the equation!
*Wouldn't be surprised if something like ChatGPT allows games to be made in days in the semi-near future. If so, I just might make games anyway - still not for money, and now not for players - but just to finally let those ideas out of my head.
If that's your response to my statement, all I can say is: you're not owed an audience and your tone is a great way to have people ignore what may or may not be "the right answer".
But no, ironically enough you're proving my point. I'm simply saying to clarify what's on the users mind before going on a rant about what you assume they mean. There's no point in arguing about an aquatic fowl's eating when the user was talking about DuckDuckGo. And then doubling down by saying "but it's true ducks eat too much bread". At this point It's clear your conversation is a tangent no one is interested in taking.
I broadly agree but I think you're being too pessimistic about not having players. If your game is not novel (or maybe even if it is), I'm sure you can find a community that would enjoy it. Maybe participating in that community counts as marketing to you but I feel like sharing what you have created and marketing what you have created are separate.
Reddit is a good place for this type of discovery. Discords of other niche games in similar/adjacent genres would be another one. I feel like it's not as hopeless as you make it seem!
I'm currently doing exactly this. There's some games I never finished and released back in the 2009-2011 period when I tried self employment, so I'm using ChatGPT to build me a javascript game engine and Stable Diffusion to make some art.
The world doesn't need another vertical scrolling shooter, but I'd like games that don't waste time on loading screens and have nothing to do with the evil that is 'analytics'.
But there is still plenty of room for ambitious, beautiful, complicated or thought provoking games. That's what's hard now. It used to be hard to make good pathing AI or a performant 3D renderer or real time physics. Now the challenges are different but still very hard.
A majority of the time, this just isn't true. I'd like to see a single example of a game that wasn't successful but was legitimately a good game.
And yes, I think making a completely derivative and uninspired game that works well is not the mark of making a good game, even if it technically works.
After all, any form of expression can be seen as art, be it music production or games, and the constant battle we feel as artists can be overwhelming at times, especially when you want others to acknowledge and validate you.
Wouldn't it be cool if your son and his son could look back and say, "Look what my dad/grandfather created". For me, that thought is a-lot more full-filling than worrying about what the rest of the world thinks.
This is somewhat where I am now, working on an indie game that I must realistically guess will not pay the bills, once I release it.
I took a somewhat backwards/opposite approach, though: worked at a "real job" for decades, got some savings, and now am finally scratching that itch. If it fails financially, it will still be an emotionally and personally satisfying journey for me (also painful, but that's what happens when you care about things :)
I appreciate this post for its honesty, and it's presentation of issues as the author's own experiences and self-discovery, not trying to wrap it up as advice per-se. I find it much easier to take advice from people who aren't pushing it as such.
I think there are plenty of artists that make money. I think there are plenty of spaces where people are known inside the space but unknown outside. I don't know whether most indie developers want to be "known" or not, but obviously the vast majority of people in any space are not known, inside or out.
I don't know. Indie game dev is a niche profession with a low success rate, and even those that have some success often leave.
All the turmoils and joys of art bundled into one.
The guys who can do that stuff are wizards
I think if you're building a traditional game (with no money component), you have to go into as a labor of love. You're competing for attention among a _vast_ canvas of alternatives. That is so hard to do.
My dream is to one day build a command and conquer successor. That market is tiny and the whole genre has pretty much moved on. The people who'd want to play it are millennials like me. I'd need to completely alter my motivations and expectations going into it.
I think as more people are wide eyed about this, we'll see less of the "punch in the gut" stories like these.
It does, and like you said, it attracts a specific kind of user. Not for everyone.
so why not both? a few years on, a few years off, repeat. remote work makes this even easier.
i’m just starting gamedev, and am building just to see if i can.
i like the game i’m playing, but i feel like it could be better. i’m impressed with what’s possible, but wonder if current technical limitations are surpassable. i accept that industry sees odd things as cost centers, but how would things change if they didn’t?
individuals will make the next breakthroughs in every field. software is unique in how powerful an individual can be.
gamedev is probably the hardest thing there is. it combines everything. your bank account will grow smaller, but you will grow bigger.
failure isn’t just an option. failure is the plan. what an amazing opportunity. what a time to be curious and to wonder.
last nights vid:
I've made my peace with the idea that I love making games but do not want to participate in the game industry. If my games remain forever outsider art, so be it... at least I made them. Little worlds for me and anyone interested to play in, ships in a bottle for my shelf.
I did this once, at work. Worked on a passion project that I poured my sweat and soul into, didn't even receive a 'good job' (this team had some organization issues and I wasn't even on the radar of almost anyone who worked there). It was truly demoralizing but a necessary dose of reality for me. Probably working at an early stage startup or small independent team where everyone who works there is actually best friends with everyone else is the only way this would really pay off.
I too had the unfulfilled need to be "known" when I was a child, which was impossible because my traumas were so far from any normal child's experience, realizing the futility of ever being "fully" known or "fully knowing" someone coincided with the concept of Sonder fully sinking in, that's also when I realized empathy was a red herring and thoughtful sympathy was the strongest possible outcome outside of perhaps a twins experience (which I can't even begin to speak to).
Nothing as infinitely complex as an individual can ever be fully known for any non-arbitrary definition of fully, most -- if not all -- people won't ever even fully know themselves. Appreciating life and the mystery of individuals is something to bring awe. People who think an individual can be "fully" known have a very low view of the complexity of individuals.
The official Touhou circle table is just a table like every artist in the hall (well, maybe positioned to accommodate the wait line). People will have favorites, but it's an equalizer. Touhou itself is that root - some drunk programmer releases his random game with memes in it and ends up being The Guy.
Western indie gaming... kind of lost that spirit.
I vibe more with the meritous sort of game more than some elements of WIG - there's no profit, it's just some guy that busted out libSDL and other free software and made a game with it. He even released the source GPL'd eventually.
Meanwhile California has been working on its interstate railway for... 25 years now? Still a long ways to go too. And that's a single state housing ~16% of a single country, a country some 25x larger in land.
Games are complex creations. I didn’t fully understand what I didn’t know until I started programming games. Learning has made me a much better software engineer.
There’s also too much noise and too little signal in the game pedagogy space. I spend a lot of time synthesizing information to really understand how to make a game because I have to.
I’m excited to unveil my current project as it’ll represent a release of the type of software I wanted to be making from the start of my game dev journey: multiplayer experiences.
I made a multiplayer game for a game jam and I had to setup alerts on my phone for when people joined just to ensure they had someone to play against (although I didn't get it setup properly until after the voting period ended). Even that didn't work because many of the players were in a timezone opposite mine, so I was asleep when they connected.
For my current project that isn't as big of a deal because its a playground meant to be used IRL.
For my next planned project the network effect of players will have to be a bigger consideration. It'll be a MOBA except different ^_^
I believe that the mistake is to expect that you will be rewarded for your efforts just because you created something that resonates with you. It might happen, it might not. On average, I think that game developers make less money than food servers at McDonald's. And it was always like that, someone creating speculative work and trying to probe the market almost always makes less money than someone working on a guaranteed, time-honored market need.
The question is - was the trip worth it? Lots of times, it isn't. But let's take someone who spends a year of their life backpacking around Europe or wherever. Was it worth it? Moneywise, it was a huge loss of money, not "profitable". But it could have been personally profitable, it could have been the best thing this person has done in their life and one of those "deathbed joys".
If you approach hobbies and game development this way, I think it's much easier to accept a market failure. It must be worth it to YOU, otherwise you're in for very likely disappointment.
Art can be made by people who wish to make it, and it doesn't have to be some "do art or make money" choice. Plenty of people who aren't filthy rich have leisure time and artistic desires.
Because that's the kind of thing I come up with and would be making if I had a life situation where I didn't have to sell entirely too much of my time for food, shelter, and health care.
So I guess what I'm asking (genuinely) is, is that the kind of art you really want to see a lot more of[0], and filter through, and one way or another pay for? Or is it perhaps better the production of such things is the domain of people who do not require such support?
[0] I do, but I'm clearly biased. Count me among the people who want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less.
In times of patronage, even being able to obtain the instruments of your art was a substantial (though even then - not insurmountable) obstacle. Now? You can buy a saxophone for 20-30 minimum wage hours, same for something like an electric guitar + amp. The cost for other arts tend to be downward from there. In modern times programmers have it the easiest. Free IDEs, free libraries, free tutorials, free everything - you just need a computer and you instantly have access to resources that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars, at one time, for free.
(under our current system, people pay money for art that they want to consume, and so art that most people don't want to consume doesn't get made very much - but it still gets made)
And I think that era is completely dead, if it ever really existed at all. What I mean is somebody might see a game like the Binding of Isaac sell a zillion copies and think to themselves, 'Wow - I could make that game. I could even make it better!' And they're probably right, but with that game already released to massive popularity, creating a clone just isn't going to resonate with anybody unless it takes it to a whole new level, which clones essentially by definition don't do. You can see this exact attitude in this author with his 3d renderer. He expected people to appreciate it because he spent thousands of hours on it. But people don't care about stuff like that, they care about what's in front of their eyes - and what was probably a few poorly lit textured polygons moving around is not going to inspire fanfare.
Ironically low-effort clones also work as an example on this front. Vampire Survivor is another game, technically trivial, which has sold about a zillion copies. And it's little more than a reskin of 'Magic Survival' [1]. But the author clearly saw the potential in that game that nobody else did (including its own author), so he deserves all the credit and reward he's received. It just feels like if we viewed game development as a market, it's full of people buying high, selling low, and then becoming all philosophical when looking for why things didn't turn out as they planned, as if there was some deeper meaning or lesson to be learned.
So, Farmhand just exists as a free open source game that I love making and handful of people enjoy playing. And I hope it continues on like that for the rest of my life. I think I'll reflect positively on that choice on my deathbed.
- [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2080880/Farmhand_Go/
People who play real games (rather than addiction-driven phone games) are willing to pay to get what they want, within reason of course.
Well, do a before/after comparison of profits after changing the price, and running a few sales (like thanksgiving), and come back to tell us how that went :).
Thanks for the suggestion! I don't expect to start making significant money with this change, but it will be an interesting learning opportunity if nothing else.
I'll update this thread if we see a meaningful change in sales! :)
Common failure mode for a lot of people in such a crisis is they try to go to the other extreme of who they are. A better way to deal with this is to just deal with the pain points, instead of trying to be the opposite of who you are. So I'm glad the author is still making games, but has a healthier outlook towards them.
As someone who always wanted to get into game dev, but saw it as something that was continually further and further from my reach, I was expecting a primer and got more than I thought. Thanks!
So it's really difficult for me to see myself, so to speak in a lot of writing about gamedev. Which mostly-and especially here centers around the coding.
Sometimes I wonder if I have more the soul of like a webcomic artist but games are just so much extra clickety clackety...
I don't really have a point to make, but I thought I'd share.
- Convincing a publisher to sign your game takes a lot of marketing skill that an engineer like myself isn't used to, it can be harder than finding an audience of players, since you have to set up a meeting for each one person you're trying to convince to give your game a chance
- Or your can go Kickstarter, but then you're committing to basically being a publisher yourself, and not designing/developing games
- Board game publishers are also having a rough time since there's been so many issues and sudden surprises with shipping because of the pandemic. That's calmed down a bit but it's still putting publishers in a precarious state, and they tend to have fairly thin margins to begin with.
- Board game designers also tend not to get paid very well unless they land on an evergreen title, like Dominion, Ticket to Ride, etc, and/or have a constant pipeline of games (which takes making great relationships with publishers and convincing them to sign a bunch of games you churn out) and people in the industry in general tend to get paid less (can be 50% less) than the already underpaid people in the video game industry. I keep looking at salaries in job postings and going "No way I could take that much of a pay cut, as much as I'd probably enjoy the work more"
I know one guy that worked on a game for two years, made a game that was successful by the publisher's standards (it was in Barnes and Noble) and only received $9,000 in royalties ($18k split in half with a designer). He quit and started a marketing company and is a lot happier now. A few others I know are taking long breaks because they're just burnt out from the constant grind.
That being said I did have a burst of motivation a few months ago and designed a few small games and tried pitching them at a board game convention this past weekend. One meeting (with the largest publisher, even) went pretty well, the others didn't.
If nothing else, I can always code a web version of the games and release them without needing a publisher, eventually, or at least make Tabletop Simulator versions of the games.
I ask this as someone who doesn't play video games (never played any of these so called "Art Games").