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Why I started (and stopped) making games

austinhenley.com

51–60 of 77 posts

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#51
post #3

Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?

I do, but only as a hobby. I could have taken it as a career choice but the fun is in pursuing my own ideas, designing my own characters, design the cinematics, the dialogue, their equipment and how they use it...and of course the code and visuals to make it happen. The idea of working on someone else's design seems atrocious.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#52

The reason I stopped making games... The tooling! It takes way too long to open Unreal Engine, or to do anything within its UI, and Unity gives me "bad vibes" (technical term) any time I open it. I know these days there are other engines, but I started my programming journey by learning game engines, and perhaps I should have learned programming properly before jumping into game programming.

Come now, this is complete anecdotal nonsense. Unity had unreal are both excellent million $$ packages you can use for free(ish) that come with integrated editors and asset pipelines, massive plugin/package ecosystems and even one click playable templates . What more do you want? It takes too long to open the editor? Cry me a river! What do you want, a lean editor / hit code reloading / functional code only / truely…

> I mean come on, this is the golden age of indie development for games, where literally anyone can make a game in like a days effort following a YouTube tutorial.

Yeah but will it be good? I'm betting on no.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#53

The reason I stopped making games... The tooling! It takes way too long to open Unreal Engine, or to do anything within its UI, and Unity gives me "bad vibes" (technical term) any time I open it. I know these days there are other engines, but I started my programming journey by learning game engines, and perhaps I should have learned programming properly before jumping into game programming.

Come now, this is complete anecdotal nonsense. Unity had unreal are both excellent million $$ packages you can use for free(ish) that come with integrated editors and asset pipelines, massive plugin/package ecosystems and even one click playable templates . What more do you want? It takes too long to open the editor? Cry me a river! What do you want, a lean editor / hit code reloading / functional code only / truely…

Kind remind that the audience on Hacker News are Vim users who prefer a custom X Windows manager with a tile layout for four terminals.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#54
post #3

Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?

Yeah. And no, I'm not linking them for anyone for two reasons:

  -I value the tiny shred of anonymity I have here so I can continue to express stupid opinions without being too self conscious about it.

  -Honestly they just aren't very good, at least not in any traditional sense. I find that I am not passionate enough about most of my ideas to expend the time that seems necessary to flesh them out into a coherent and worthwhile experience.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#55

The reason I stopped making games... The tooling! It takes way too long to open Unreal Engine, or to do anything within its UI, and Unity gives me "bad vibes" (technical term) any time I open it. I know these days there are other engines, but I started my programming journey by learning game engines, and perhaps I should have learned programming properly before jumping into game programming.

Same, I'm waiting for someone to make a game engine for programmers. Most seem aimed at designers. I don't want low code no code tools... I want to get into code asap.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#56

The reason I stopped making games... The tooling! It takes way too long to open Unreal Engine, or to do anything within its UI, and Unity gives me "bad vibes" (technical term) any time I open it. I know these days there are other engines, but I started my programming journey by learning game engines, and perhaps I should have learned programming properly before jumping into game programming.

Come now, this is complete anecdotal nonsense. Unity had unreal are both excellent million $$ packages you can use for free(ish) that come with integrated editors and asset pipelines, massive plugin/package ecosystems and even one click playable templates . What more do you want? It takes too long to open the editor? Cry me a river! What do you want, a lean editor / hit code reloading / functional code only / truely…

The tooling is great, don't get me wrong. But as soon as you need to do anything that slightly deviates the norm in Unreal engine, you're constantly butted up against broken features, or terrible performance. I can't count the number of times we had to fix a feature or some silly performance problem that was broken in the engine itself.

The latest of which was Iris (to be fair, it is in an early state, but it is a major improvement to ue4's replication), there are some baffling design choices that deliberately made it way harder to make custom serializers for networking.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows. It mostly depends on if you walk the well trodden path or not.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#57
post #3

Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?

On the side using Unity as a family activity. The kids love the official demo projects, and I'm slowly teaching them code.

My dreams of opening a wife and husband studio are dead dead dead after seeing all the failed hopes and dreams of indie developers on reddit, discord, etc.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#58
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made this sprite scaler game here https://eri0o.itch.io/dont-give-up-the-cat I usually make these small games because I find easier to scope and plan and finish. Some I attempted with bigger scope remain unfinished.

nice I like it

Thank you. I am making a new sprite scaler adventure in the same sense, but it's a bit bigger area with more things to explore and all, I hope to have at least something of it released this Sunday or maybe in the next week.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#59
post #55

The reason I stopped making games... The tooling! It takes way too long to open Unreal Engine, or to do anything within its UI, and Unity gives me "bad vibes" (technical term) any time I open it. I know these days there are other engines, but I started my programming journey by learning game engines, and perhaps I should have learned programming properly before jumping into game programming.

Same, I'm waiting for someone to make a game engine for programmers. Most seem aimed at designers. I don't want low code no code tools... I want to get into code asap.

I had the most fun on this using löve (love2d), it is pretty sweet. Just a text editor of your choice and you are good to go - you can also connect it to an ide for debugging if needed.

I am not a super fan of C# but if you are more into that there is also Monogame/FNA, but I haven't used those - I did use XNA back in the day and they seem very similar.

I actually use AGS though.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#60
post #3

Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?

Yes, and no? I work in professional spaces as an engine/graphics programmer for some 7 years now. But I've also been doing stuff on the side. Nothing serious tho, so no links to show you. Thing is, the kind of game I want requires some competent art and at this point I think it's better for me to learn that. So while (very very slowly) planning my game and learning knowledge professional, I want to do some classes in…

Did you consider using placeholder art, or paying a real artist? I don't think the prices would be exorbitant if you don't need gigabytes of art.
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