11 replies to this topic

[BradP]

Hello all. I've been reading the forums for a while and I've noticed a lot of people trying to break into the game development market. I've also noticed some who put down and others who try to help.

I have a message to those who put down. <begin rant> Don't do it. There is NO right way to do anything and "can't" isn't a term you should throw around lightly. For all you know you could discourage someone from discovering the next best spacial partioning scene management system. Do not project your failures as a programmer and person on others. Just because something is difficult doesn't mean beginners shouldn't try and learn for themselves. Also it does NOT take an entire crew to build anything. Size only affects time, and time is a function of skill and skill a function of their ability and willingness to learn. Nothing is impossible.<end rant;>

My message to the beginner is simple. Sure it seems fun building games, but in reality the coding is a nightmare, the content easy to imagine but difficult to build and truely the only fun in building games is the design and the playing of said games. HOWEVER! Do not let this disuade you. Only accept that it will take a lot of effort and time to achieve your goals. Even John Carmack had to start somewhere. :)

Some suggestions for the early game developer might include the usual build small games and work your way up, or use existing engines to build your first game. My approach is much different. I call it prototyping. Don't try to build the biggest best engine/game ever. Build parts of it. Prototype your ideas in smaller demo programs. Doing that will allow you to learn and apply the theory behind these complex features. When you're ready you'll be able to apply all your prototyping into a single game.

You can also apply this procedure to building a game by starting with an empty screen and adding one SMALL feature at a time. If you take this approach however expect to scrap and rehash your previous code over and over. Why? Well simply put every implementation of a 'feature' has choices. Those choices affect other features and sometimes you'll need to revisit a dependant feature.

Play with it and have fun. It's easy to get discouraged and want to hang it up forever but if you have a drive to learn and have fun anything is possible in time.

Now you may be asking, 'Who is this guy?' The simple answer is i'm you. A beginner who has been playing and prototyping on and off since 1998. Am I a super fantastic programmer with the best engine/game ever? Not even close. Mostly because I have very little free time and a real life that demands my attention. I'll most likely be asking a lot of stupid questions myself in these forums. My goal is to learn and maybe one day finish a commercial title.

So to all, especially the helpful experts I mentioned earlier, I say hello and I hope this has been helpful to someone before this thread drifts off into obscurity.

Good coding all!

[mr_yeahman]

Very good advice u have there.
It that I wanna hear. By myself I just started learn program, python, coz I use blender to create games, and I wanna move to the next step as a gamedeveloper, moving out from the click&play-games, and start to code my own stuff.

The best tips for almost every developer is to not being afraid to use gameengines out there.
Why wasting lots of times coding on something u can get free?
Only if u want to learn to make ur own 3dengine, it is a good advice to code ur own, but If u,like me only want to create a nice game, just pick a free gameengine who fits ur project.

[rouncer]

im going to comment on the put down issue- im glad you brought it up...

alot what happens on forums to do with programming is to do with pointing
out losers. i dont like it either, its all pretty mean.

just remember, next time you give someone a piece of nasty, the naive one
you just dropped in the trash might make something so big hell wip everything
you did in one foul swoop.

what i mean is, some guys are smart they just come out a little dumb :)
so just watch out.

[dave_]

Quote

Hello all. I've been reading the forums for a while and I've noticed a lot of people trying to break into the game development market. I've also noticed some who put down and others who try to help.

I think thats unfair. I've not seen any put downs. Do you have an example?

Quote

I have a message to those who put down. <begin rant> Don't do it. There is NO right way to do anything and "can't" isn't a term you should throw around lightly. For all you know you could discourage someone from discovering the next best spacial partioning scene management system. Do not project your failures as a programmer and person on others. Just because something is difficult doesn't mean beginners shouldn't try and learn for themselves. Also it does NOT take an entire crew to build anything. Size only affects time, and time is a function of skill and skill a function of their ability and willingness to learn. Nothing is impossible.<end rant;>

I really haven't seen any put downs, but there are frequent referrals to Google. I'd say that anyone that's incapable of using google is very unlikely to create something brilliant.

Unfortunately your skill equation is a fallacy. The comes a point where skill becomes irrelevant. You can't take the worlds most skilled programmer and expect him to create a huge game, like WoW or Unreal Engine or whatever on his own.

Some things are impossible.

Quote

My message to the beginner is simple. Sure it seems fun building games, but in reality the coding is a nightmare, the content easy to imagine but difficult to build and truely the only fun in building games is the design and the playing of said games.

Coding is not a nightmare, if it is you're doing it wrong ;)
Coding is not easy, but personally I always enjoy it.

Quote

HOWEVER! Do not let this disuade you. Only accept that it will take a lot of effort and time to achieve your goals. Even John Carmack had to start somewhere.

I don't think John Carmack started with posts like, "I have an idea, can you maek me a MMORPGFPSRTS?"
You could probably do some searching on newsgroups. You might be able to find John Carmack starting out. I've not tried but it might be possible. But one thing is sure. He has never created a game entirely on his own.

Quote

Some suggestions for the early game developer might include the usual build small games and work your way up, or use existing engines to build your first game. My approach is much different. I call it prototyping. Don't try to build the biggest best engine/game ever. Build parts of it. Prototype your ideas in smaller demo programs. Doing that will allow you to learn and apply the theory behind these complex features. When you're ready you'll be able to apply all your prototyping into a single game.

You can also apply this procedure to building a game by starting with an empty screen and adding one SMALL feature at a time. If you take this approach however expect to scrap and rehash your previous code over and over. Why? Well simply put every implementation of a 'feature' has choices. Those choices affect other features and sometimes you'll need to revisit a dependant feature.

Play with it and have fun. It's easy to get discouraged and want to hang it up forever but if you have a drive to learn and have fun anything is possible in time.

That's sound advice. On an MMORPG project I worked on we had a first pass at designing the combat system using playing cards. We were quickly able to iterate the rules and ensure the system worked and had strategy.

[Rofar]

Since everything is so readily available via Google and the answer to most every question can be "try google", then there is no reason for these forums as far as technical content goes. Of course, google relies on good sources of information which is shared in forums as these.

I see a future where when I google a subject I get a link to a forum post telling me to go google the answer.

[dave_]

Welcome to the future ;)
Devmaster has a pretty high page rank and that does happen.

[SigKILL]

Rofar: This is not the future, when I put "cylinder drawing algorithm" into google then the first hit is a thread located here telling someone to google...

That said, I typically refer to google whenever google will give me the answer on the first search page.

[BradP]

dave_ said:

I think thats unfair. I've not seen any put downs. Do you have an example?

I don't want to get into examples, but I have seen it happen. Usually in response to the very inexpereinced "I want to make the best game ever" threads and especially to the MMOG threads. Put-downs aren't always insults. They can be negative discouragement as well.

It feels to me like everyone is tired of answering to the hype of MMOGs in particular. Discouraging any attemps and throwing negative short quips wrapped in the guise of realism. Perhaps those of us who have tried and failed at MMOGs are projecting our feelings of inadequacy on others in those threads. ;) - Alright, I'll shut up now. LOL

The people here are great. Don't get me wrong, compared to other sites like GameDev this one is very civil and helpful. Flipcode veterans forever! He he.

Main Point - We shouldn't put-down an idea simply because it's difficult.

dave_ said:

Unfortunately your skill equation is a fallacy. The comes a point where skill becomes irrelevant. You can't take the worlds most skilled programmer and expect him to create a huge game, like WoW or Unreal Engine or whatever on his own.

Some things are impossible.

I would have to disagree here. Anyone who is willing to learn can achieve anything they are serious about finishing. It may take forever but it IS possible. To think otherwise is to lose faith in the human spirit. :)

dave_ said:

Coding is not a nightmare, if it is you're doing it wrong ;)

LOL Well even I have nightmare days where I forget how to use a function and then realise later what a moron I was. Somedays are more difficult than others...Programming may not be a nightmare for you but designing a large octree on disk data structure for the first time is for me. :)

dave_ said:

I don't think John Carmack started with posts like, "I have an idea, can you maek me a MMORPGFPSRTS?"
You could probably do some searching on newsgroups. You might be able to find John Carmack starting out. I've not tried but it might be possible. But one thing is sure. He has never created a game entirely on his own.

Well I had the pleasure of exchanging a few emails with the man in 1996 or so. Brilliant man, but even I impressed him with how I modified his quake engine to do something he thought was impossible. A great imspiration for a novice like me. :) Back to the point, Carmack and Hall in a day or two built an incomplete ripoff of Mario Brothers 3 as a demo of his breakthrough side-scroller code. Later they finished it and pitched it to Nintendo proving small teams and even a single person CAN build games.

Further to my point, iD software was founded by only 4 people. Everyone said they couldn't do it and they did it anyway, releasing Commander Keen and later Wolfenstein. I am convinced any of them, with enough drive, could build an entire game by themselves. It would take a lot of time and effort but it IS possible.

Also remember that back then there were NO(or few) libraries, and the Internet was in its infancy. Now we have DirectX, OpenGL, oodles of libraries, free engines, experts everywhere sharing ideas and most of the work done for us! So what's stopping us? Skill and drive.

Drive is the result of ambition and kept alive by achievement. This is why so many recommend small projects to get you on your way, and why I recommend prototyping for those who want to get started now.

These days anyone can do it. It's only a question of if you have what it takes to learn and stay with it long enough to realise your goal.

IMO, game engines aren't the biggest challenge. The biggest obstacle is game content. GOOD graphics, models, story and design are hard to produce for a single person.

while FAILED(Try()) Learn();

return SUCCESS;

That's my str2cents.

[kusma]

dave_ said:

I don't think John Carmack started with posts like, "I have an idea, can you maek me a MMORPGFPSRTS?"
You could probably do some searching on newsgroups. You might be able to find John Carmack starting out. I've not tried but it might be possible. But one thing is sure. He has never created a game entirely on his own.

Actually, it's quite possible that he was the only developer on DoomRPG ;)

[dave_]

kusma said:

Actually, it's quite possible that he was the only developer on DoomRPG ;)

Thats not true. http://www.eurogamer...rticle_id=62343

Quote

I wrote a proof-of-concept demo of the basic rendering and play style, and then turned it over to Fountainhead Entertainment to develop into a full game. I did some additional programming work when we started on the BREW version, and I acted as the producer for the project.

But I suppose never is to strong a word. I meant since id.

[Reedbeta]

BradP said:

Carmack and Hall in a day or two built an incomplete ripoff of Mario Brothers 3 as a demo of his breakthrough side-scroller code. Later they finished it and pitched it to Nintendo proving small teams and even a single person CAN build games.

Further to my point, iD software was founded by only 4 people. Everyone said they couldn't do it and they did it anyway, releasing Commander Keen and later Wolfenstein. I am convinced any of them, with enough drive, could build an entire game by themselves. It would take a lot of time and effort but it IS possible.

You can indeed make a simple game by yourself, like a sidescroller (Mario, Keen) or very simple FPS (Wolfenstein). But today's top-end games are much more complex - not only in code, but in ART. One person can't possibly produce all the art assets for a single game - it would take them 50 years. Most game companies have a 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 ratio of artists to programmers, simply because art takes a heck of a lot more time than programming.

Now it's true that there are some great free/cheap art sources out there where you can get prefab models, textures, and so forth. These are great for the hobbyists since we don't have to rely so much on 'programmer art', but really you can't develop a complete game using nothing but prefab-art.

You can still build a sidescroller or worms-clone or tetris-clone or any of a dozen other types of small game by yourself, but it's simply not possible for one person to make the likes of Doom 3 or Half-Life 2, or a MMOG.

[BradP]

I'm sorry, let me be more clear. I was asking people to stop saying games can't be built by small teams. Perhaps I should not have made such a large umbrella. :)

What I meant was the programming could be done by a small team. I admit, and have said before, that content is by far the most time consuming and team intensive.

But who's to say you can't build a solid engine yourself to base your game on and call on a community to supply the art. I think the internet and its wealth of communities and those willing to help are the strongest resource and asset a lonely developer could ask for. Hey and give free subscriptions to those who supply art that is accepted for use in the game. :)

But if you're a beginner solo developer please don't go for the chicken before the egg and post help wanted ads everywhere for art when you don't have a working engine yet. Baby steps... Cheers!