Did I just waste 3 years? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#301

Post by jvanderbot » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #282

LrnByTeach wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great analysis.. this applies to so many areas of software development. Building games, websites, any thing software .. > you spent optimizing some C++ function that does something already solved a hundred times in a hundred different game engines. It's a natural tendency for all programmers. > Making g a game in 2018 is far more of a creative endeavor than anything to do with programming really. > You need a massive…

You know, there's an interesting relationship between the graphic-novel industry and the TV/film industry at this point. Many TV/film screenplays are adapted from graphic novels, because a graphic novel is, in a sense, a "sketch" of a film—it's something that communicates most of the top-down spirit of the eventual work, while also being something that is able to be produced by a single creator, and so something that…

I'd buy three beers to hear more about this idea.

Current acquisition model by AAA is buy-kill, rather than buy-subsidize.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#302

Post by iliketosleep » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

Releasing a game is as much of a marketing exercise as it is a technical one. It appears that the author focused on the technical aspects and somewhat neglected the business/marketing side.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#303

Post by wolco » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:10 AM UTC

breabrea wrote: post #122

mypalmike wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring in both gaming and non-gaming is about your resume, phone screen, and interview. The first two are gating factors for the interview. The interview is how the actual decision is made. References are of much less significance, often go unchecked, and are usually focused on simply confirming the truthiness of your resume. If you spent 3 years of your life working on a game, it's not a gap on your resume. In fact,…

Yes and no. You are still at a disadvantaged even if you write a good resume. As an HR, when I need to fill a job, I search my existing database for candidates. I input keywords such as Unity3d, Unreal Engine, UI, etc. If I know another AAA studio has a specific department with those skillset, I input that studio name (disadvantage #1). Let's say the candidate pool comes back with 30+ results. I will only interview 1…

Do you ever suffer from the lack of resumes or are you always trying to filter people out?

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#304

Post by gspetr » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:12 AM UTC

lostgame wrote: post #107

notjustanymike wrote: post #104

The end user doesn't care you hand built your engine out of C and other beautiful technologies. They care if it's fun. Period. It's looks like way too much time was spent on an engine when off the shelf would have done better.

I couldn’t agree more. When I read the engine was built in C++ it absolutely knocked me flat. Why? With perfectly awesome and free technologies like Unity, you’re setting yourself up for failure by spending hundred hours putting together something that has already been created for you. It would allow you to focus on making the best game possible, instead of wasting countless hours re-inventing the wheel. IMHO, that’s…

Unity is anything BUT awesome if we are talking big RPGs. (Think Pillars of Eternity 1)

The loading times even on SSD are atrocious.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#305

Post by hannasanarion » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:14 AM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #254

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 62,176 lines of code then I watched the youtube video demo in 2017. A 2D gaming scroller that requires 62,126 lines of code written from scratch? There's tons of libraries out there, game engines you could adopt, etc. I would argue you could be an awful programmer and use prebuilt tools but have great design aesthetics, vision, music composition, and storytelling, and deliver something far better

How can you criticize the amount of code without knowing how much of that is generic engine code and how much of it is gameplay code (game logic, AI, event triggers...) that would have to exist regardless of the engine being used?

Because in the former case, it's a waste of time, duplicating work that others have done already available online for free, so of course there are no customers

And in the latter case, it's got to be a poorly written mess, no 2d platformer could need so much game logic. That's twice the size of the entire Super Metroid cartrige, engine and assets included.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#306

Post by drb91 » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:17 AM UTC

chongli wrote: post #181

Nokinside wrote: post #150

Game industry is the economics of superstars. The Macroeconomics of Superstars[1] >Abstract >Recent technological changes have transformed an increasing number of sectors of the economy into so-called superstars sectors, in which a small number of entrepreneurs or professionals distribute their output widely to the rest of the economy. Examples include the high-tech sector, sports, the music industry, management, fna…

Yes. At this point, recommending that a 9-5 programmer quit their job to work on an indie game is equivalent to suggesting a PR writer quit their job to write the next Great American Novel.

Well, making money just off of novels seems impossible these days (you gotta hold out for HBO); there’s still a good deal of difference.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#307

Post by woolvalley » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:18 AM UTC

echan00 wrote: post #279

woolvalley wrote: post #88

I learned this painful lesson 8 years ago indirectly, working a mobile app studio. The app store, like games and music are superstar markets and the vast majority will fail, even if you've spent 3000 hours on it. That what makes stardew valley so crazy, because the %99 outcome of someone who works like him is failure and wasting 3-4 years of your life. At this point, I would do the 'test if there is demand method' be…

Obviously, you've never made a game before. 'test if there is demand method' does not work for games.

Isn't that pretty much the early access model? I've seen indie games started that were mostly incomplete, started getting patreon / kickstarter traction and then fully developed over a few years. There are enough counterexamples out there to prove that it does work.

No traction? Then abandon the project.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#308

Post by gspetr » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

povertyworld wrote: post #85

5minbreak wrote: post #20

Game development always scared me as one of those studies that you hope your kids don't get interested in. Another one is manual drawing, especially when it is Anime (what are the chances that someone from a small European country is going to excel at such a job?). > Abandoning the game completely doesn’t seem like a sane option, after all the time I put in. Addictive games use the above cognitive bias to make you ke…

>in 3 years, you can: Learn TensorFlow. Publish an AI paper. Beat state of the art on a few datasets. As a low income indie dev without the academic credentials to get past HR gatekeepers for stable full time work, I can't help but feel studying ML is about as wishful as creating a hit game. I have started studying ML this summer, and although I find the NLP applications really interesting since I have a social scien…

> but I won't be able to honestly write a blog post about it

I'd read it in a heartbeat. Your vivid writing style is fascinating.

And once you learn to press Enter key more often[0], a literary career may not be out of the question.

[0]Walls of text are hard to read.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#309

Post by rasz » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:23 AM UTC

gmueckl wrote: post #254

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 62,176 lines of code then I watched the youtube video demo in 2017. A 2D gaming scroller that requires 62,126 lines of code written from scratch? There's tons of libraries out there, game engines you could adopt, etc. I would argue you could be an awful programmer and use prebuilt tools but have great design aesthetics, vision, music composition, and storytelling, and deliver something far better

How can you criticize the amount of code without knowing how much of that is generic engine code and how much of it is gameplay code (game logic, AI, event triggers...) that would have to exist regardless of the engine being used?

It doesnt matter, game is a generic 2D keep running right ~1986 Amiga with bits of Chip's Challenge thrown in piece.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#310

Post by gmueckl » Mon, Oct 01, 2018, 1:24 AM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #305

gmueckl wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you criticize the amount of code without knowing how much of that is generic engine code and how much of it is gameplay code (game logic, AI, event triggers...) that would have to exist regardless of the engine being used?

Because in the former case, it's a waste of time, duplicating work that others have done already available online for free, so of course there are no customers And in the latter case, it's got to be a poorly written mess, no 2d platformer could need so much game logic. That's twice the size of the entire Super Metroid cartrige, engine and assets included.

Wait... did you just compare lines of source code to the size of a compiled binary code of something that was written over 25 years ago and clearly optimized for the size of the deliverable? In that case you might just as well have compared an apple to the Apollo program LAM module. It is just not a valid comparison.

I am sure that if Super Metroid were to be developed today in a high level language with the exact same gameplay logic, the resulting code would be in at least the same ballpark.