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Did I just waste 3 years?

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#351

Post by hannasanarion »

Theodores wrote: post #334
hannasanarion wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because a "winner take all" industry is one that trends towards monopoly, that's not the same thing. No one person will ever have the entire video game pie. "Superstar industries" follow extreme power law distributions, where, due to the low barrier to entry, high ceilings, and limited consumer base (there are only so many hours people can spend on entertainment), the pie isn't growing and new entrants aren't goi…

Adele? Nearest example I can think of, mySpace was where she got noticed so that dates her breakthrough to a good decade ago. Adele was legitimate however others have pretended to have an Adele grade story. Lily Allen also claimed to have been discovered on mySpace but her dad was rock and roll celebrity so her efforts can be dismissed as nepotism. Often these links to rock and roll celebrity are not obvious because…

Adele wasn't self-published though, right? I'm not super familiar, but based on the wikipedia page she got picked up by an XL Recordings talent scout who put her on other albums associated with that label, including appearances on BBC, before even her first album, which had 32 credits.

Being really good and self publishing helps you build your resume in a superstar industry, but it's nearly impossible to actually achieve commercial success without a well-established sponsor. Adele probably wouldn't have gotten far on her own if XL or some other label hadn't picked her up. Her accomplishment before then was a really good resume.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#352

Post by giobox »

yoz-y wrote: post #324
ReverseCold wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is why minigame-style games (battle royale, fighting games, first person shooter competitive, etc) are so common. You can implement a simple version of your game idea in a weekend and, if your idea was good, people would likely already have fun playing it.

Never really did modern game development, but can you really implement a first person shooter with a twist over a weekend? How would you go about it, create a mod for an existing game?

Almost no one writes their own FPS entirely from scratch in the past decade outside of a handful truly enormous industry players, much as no one really writes the entirety of a web app themselves.

You choose one of the many existing game development frameworks and rapidly prototype a concept, if it works you keep iterating on it etc etc. This works in games as well as any other major software endeavour.

The matter of having the talent to produce a new idea that’s actually fun to play and marketing it successfully is arguably the hard bit here, rather than the technical implementation details. I’d make the argument today that the technical barriers to entry for game development are almost _too_ low now, which is why partly why Steam is filled with so much “indie” junk.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#353

Post by projektir »

BigJono wrote: post #293
projektir wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, didn't Factorio start out with poor graphics and improved them over time?

Factorio also has some of the most compelling gameplay that almost perfectly fills a niche I've ever seen. OP's game is a Metroidvania in 2018...

I don't disagree, but I'm responding to the parent, which does not mention gameplay.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#354

Post by kiostech »

18pfsmt wrote: post #344
kiostech wrote: post #328

Dear all, I am the guy who shares this post on Hacker News. First and foremost, I wanna said that I am NOT the original author of the blog. Also, I am NOT advertising for the original author. As a software developer in Hong Kong, I am researching articles about game dev and find this interesting case. Therefore, I just wanna share on HN. The discussion about this blog is really overwhelming. I hope that everybody can…

Please don't take offense: Just FYI, 'wanna' is a contraction of 'want to,' so writing 'wanna to' is redundant.

Thanks for your suggestions. I just amend my grammatical mistake.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#355

Post by gmueckl »

hannasanarion wrote: post #345
gmueckl wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is practically always the smallest part of the final product. What do you base this statement on? There are several classes of games where this is definitely not true.

In what class of game?

Adventures and RPGs are the most obvious ones. There, the story-based interactions quickly turn into tons of game logic corner cases that must be handled. Also, the rule sets for RPG character stats and fighting interactions (strengths, weaknesses, immunities, temporary effects, combos...) generally are pretty insane.

Oh, and lest we forget: game logic does not stop once you figured out at a high level that X has to happen. It still needs to set up and drive all the presentation that goes with it on top of the pure bookkeeping. The subtleties of this can be really amazing. To just name some trivial things that come to my mind: doors and elevators should stop when players stand in the way, players and objects should move with the platforms they're standing on (harder than it looks, esp. in 3D), enemies can't just be deleted from memory when their health goes below 0 (but their hitboxes might still go away immediately) and so on.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#356

Post by alanz1223 »

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…

Sure but I think this really applies to industries under a free market in general however the dynamics in the tech sector are such that a single person with little to no startup capital can create something with paranormal returns and that is really what indies are after (perhaps after having their idea come to life). I wonder if there any other industries that have this same allure

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#357

Post by vankessel »

earenndil wrote: post #346
18pfsmt wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take offense: Just FYI, 'wanna' is a contraction of 'want to,' so writing 'wanna to' is redundant.

Please do don't take offense: Just FYI, calling out random strangers on the internet for improper or redundant grammar is a waste of your time and theirs.

It's not necessarily a waste of time. The poster says they're from Hong Kong, English could be their second language. They may not realize the mistake and if no one points it out they may never have the chance to learn.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#358

Post by user68858788 »

randombrea wrote: post #32
gambiting wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a AAA games studio and if this guy came to us with nothing else on his resume but this game he would definitely get a chance. I mean, in terms of chances in the industry - I got in by completing a 4 year CS degree. If he gets in by spending 3 years building his own game then I'd say it was worth it.

That's great, but would you say its industry wide? Because I have also heard (non-gaming) the exact opposite. Also, would he get through HR? They are more often than not, the real gatekeepers. It would require someone to vouch for him personally to go through, and that isn't very scalable when applying for jobs.

I used to work at Blizzard. A designer found an app store game he liked and reached out to the dev with an interview offer. Attending GDC, I've heard from at least a dozen hiring managers that personal projects look better than degrees.

Not sure about how big gaps in employment are.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#360

Post by gnulinux »

earenndil wrote: post #347
gnulinux wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose that's true. But one can imagine a game just like nethack except it's not as easy to die so after, say 20 run, you learn the ropes and can enjoy the game every time you play it. Obviously, eventually you'll get bored (unlike playing 100 times and losing every time) but that few times you beat the game would be enjoyable.

I don't know about the getting bored part. Some people have been playing nethack for several decades (without winning!).

Not nethack, I was talking about a hypothetical clone of nethack where you can supposedly make a whole run without "surprises" that can randomly kill you, like floating eyes (or Jelly monsters in brogue). I think such a game would be very enjoyable first few times you play, but then since not challenging would be boring. Entirely different genre but Universal Paperclip might be a good example, extremely interesting story but the game is almost too easy after you learn to reliably win it. I think nethack is "boredom proof" because it's so challenging. I must be honest, I never finished brogue nor nethack (but I suck at video games because I play them once a year or so) but every game still gives the same rush of enjoyment every time. Still, though I don't keep playing it because the "demotivation" thing I was talking about earlier stops me from starting a new game (I'll lose anyway).
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