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Did I just waste 3 years?

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Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#381

Post by seventhtiger »

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?

Asset stores allow you to have placeholder mechanics like you used to have placeholder art. So placeholder camera, controller, collision detection, and a placeholder level. Then you get to rig what you want to test on top of that, or just sell it as is which is called an "asset flip".

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#382

Post by erik »

chii wrote: post #366
kiostech wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, marketing is very important!

But is standing out _just_ marketing? Or is standing out something that requires originality in idea (as well as marketing to allow buyers to see the originality)?

Promoting a game isn't enough on it's own. To succeed today a game needs to have quality, market fit, promotion, luck, and probably a number of other factors as well.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#383

Post by eksemplar »

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.

It was always like that though. Game programming had always been the worst field for programmers, and the industry had and is exploiting the fact that some people like games enough to work on them under horrible conditions.

I don’t think it’s the equivalent to writing the great American novel though, because programming is just a minor part of game creating and arguably one of the least important. Design I’d the most important.

The author of this article rants about the swarm of unity games, but some of those unity games are better than what the author made exactly because they took design seriously.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#384

Post by bemmu »

gmueckl wrote: post #253
Nokinside wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a lone programmer wants to write tight code for games, they should build game engines or libraries that games can use and then sell those to game developers. There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.

Except that it turns out that artists and game programmers are too cheap to pay for tools, even if you can present them with a clear benefit in terms of productivity gain vs. sales price. To make matters worse, big companies that could afford those tools will generally only buy exceptionally well established tools and rebuild the rest from scratch in-house. The only way to make money with games is to sell games.

I might be abnormal, but I've bought Asesprite, Tayasui Sketches and Ableton Live just to get better at making games for free for Ludum Dare.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#385

Post by gameswithgo »

gmueckl wrote: post #253
Nokinside wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a lone programmer wants to write tight code for games, they should build game engines or libraries that games can use and then sell those to game developers. There exists large value added chain for specialized tools, arts and libraries.

Except that it turns out that artists and game programmers are too cheap to pay for tools, even if you can present them with a clear benefit in terms of productivity gain vs. sales price. To make matters worse, big companies that could afford those tools will generally only buy exceptionally well established tools and rebuild the rest from scratch in-house. The only way to make money with games is to sell games.

RAD Game Tools has people with ferraris

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#386

Post by gameswithgo »

orangecat wrote: post #156
sweden wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consider myself as a big fan of Metroidvanias, I'm even the kind of person who actively looks for new games in this genre, and those were my thoughts as well. I would even say that this game manages to hit the 3 points in which I avoid on a Metroidvania: 1. Rogue-like. I really dislike rogue-like, no special reason, just a personal preference 2. Lack of a plot. I appreciate the feeling of exploring a world the feel…

#1 and #2 are strongly related. Procedural generation makes it much harder to create a sense of a coherent world, rather than a series of disconnected mini-games.

minecraft

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#388

Post by volkl48 »

reaperducer wrote: post #291
WalterBright wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't new. It happened before the internet to books, music and film. The internet has just amplified it.

It's 1983 all over again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Not really. The market is large and fairly mature, it's doing fine and continuing to grow. The video game crash is titled that for a reason, the market shrunk by 97% in a short period.

There are a large number of amateur creators who are trying to win the lottery (either from a fame or monetary perspective), and most won't and will see little recognition and remain obscure or very niche.

This is seen in basically every area of media. Music, books, movies, etc and is perfectly normal.

Re: Did I just waste 3 years?

#390

Post by int_19h »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #363
int_19h wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to think more along these lines in general; it's going to be needed a lot. This is the ongoing march towards post-scarcity. We now have enough people with skills, experience and tools necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero. Essentially, these developers are spending (resources: time etc…

But... you still gotta pay for food and a place to live, start with, at the moment. If we didn't have to worry about money, then fewer of us would have to... worry about money when making art.

In general, that is true. I should have been more specific:

> We now have enough people with skills, experience, tools, and free time necessary to produce a quality indie game and a desire to make one, that the market price is far below the cost of production, and rapidly approaching zero.

Where "free time" is that not used up by work that pays for food etc.

Which does mean that people for whom art is a hobby are destroying the market the people for whom art is all they want to do, except for truly great artists where the quality of the art is so exemplary that hobby artists just can't compete.

But I'm not sure why it's a bad thing in and of itself - nobody has a fundamental right to earn a living by performing some specific activity and no other. The job market defines what activities translate to paid jobs, and which ones can only be hobbies, and that is going to change over time. At the point of a true post-scarcity, everything becomes a hobby, but it doesn't matter because you no longer need a job.

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