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How I tried to get into game development and failed

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Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#161

Post by jliptzin »

sago wrote: post #136
WalterBright wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was unexpectedly successful in the gaming business (Empire). All I did was make the game I wanted to play, but couldn't find.

... in 1977. You're a legend Walter, but there are millions of games available to play now. The days when a title circulated around university PDP-10s are gone. The dynamics of virality are very different.

It's especially difficult when the game you want to play is probably out there, but impossible to find because it's buried by tons of other crap. So do you build the game only to find that the one you're looking for was there all along, then have everyone call you a copycat?

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#162

Post by throwaway7645 »

pjmlp wrote: post #153
throwaway7645 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks Walter! It looks like there might be a Empires port in D as well. I'm sure that was much easier than C.

There is a FPGA port presented at this year's DConf. http://dconf.org/2017/talks/marques.html

I read that as a D DSL for FPGA's, not D used for a game right? Did I miss something?

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#163

Post by pjmlp »

throwaway7645 wrote: post #162
pjmlp wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a FPGA port presented at this year's DConf. http://dconf.org/2017/talks/marques.html

I read that as a D DSL for FPGA's, not D used for a game right? Did I miss something?

If you watch the presentation, he shows how he used it to port Empire into a FPGA and plays with it for a bit.

That is on the 2nd part of the presentation, because he had some issues initially.

EDIT: Here is the Empire demo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjaKFTHQSxQ&index=4

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#164

Post by sago »

TillE wrote: post #158
sago wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... in 1977. You're a legend Walter, but there are millions of games available to play now. The days when a title circulated around university PDP-10s are gone. The dynamics of virality are very different.

Look at the vast majority of successful indie games on Steam produced by, say, no more than five people. They're basically all labors of love, the missing niche game that they wanted to make and play. I can't think of a single independent success story that involved someone doing careful market research and engineering a product. There's a reason only big companies take that approach.

As in all such things, you must count the negatives (failures) as well as the positives.

It is a common problem to look at what successes do, and ignore what failures don't. See the Watson selection task[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#165

Post by louithethrid »

zebraflask wrote: post #86
bartread wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the one hand that's sort of mindblowing, on the other not that surprising, and reading the original article just underscores my (thankfully brief) experience of working in a large enterprise: the one thing you can absolutely trust is that when it comes to product development a senior enterprise developer or architect will always focus on the wrong problem. I find their approach to software development in general,…

@bartread That's an awfully high and mighty opinion, don't you think? Sounds like annoyance over the fact that things that work reliably aren't "cool" enough.

if you make a game, you make a playable proto-type first. And that proto-type must be fun. Period. Can be horri-bad in every other aspect. Can be even bad regarding the architecture years after you went to market. Notch, we are still looking at you here! And if the game is fun- it will still sell. If Tech would attack that core-value, then changes are very much in order - but building the perfect system, before you know the game you do it for is fun- that is creating blueprintporn, with no value for the players.

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#166

Post by louithethrid »

bartread wrote: post #139
zebraflask wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@bartread That's an awfully high and mighty opinion, don't you think? Sounds like annoyance over the fact that things that work reliably aren't "cool" enough.

It's certainly annoyance - and a good amount of it - but cool doesn't come into it. What I'm really railing against is people who talk a good game but seem to be incapable of delivering anything but bad software (regardless of whether what it does is supposed to be "cool", whatever that might mean when taken in context), and includes unreliable. I have to admit that it may not be entirely they're fault: organisationa…

Thanks for those words.

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#167

Post by zebraflask »

bartread wrote: post #139
zebraflask wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@bartread That's an awfully high and mighty opinion, don't you think? Sounds like annoyance over the fact that things that work reliably aren't "cool" enough.

It's certainly annoyance - and a good amount of it - but cool doesn't come into it. What I'm really railing against is people who talk a good game but seem to be incapable of delivering anything but bad software (regardless of whether what it does is supposed to be "cool", whatever that might mean when taken in context), and includes unreliable. I have to admit that it may not be entirely they're fault: organisationa…

With that extra context, I agree. It can be quite frustrating to work with people who don't perform, or who don't understand where to focus their work.

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#168

Post by dkersten »

TillE wrote: post #158
sago wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... in 1977. You're a legend Walter, but there are millions of games available to play now. The days when a title circulated around university PDP-10s are gone. The dynamics of virality are very different.

Look at the vast majority of successful indie games on Steam produced by, say, no more than five people. They're basically all labors of love, the missing niche game that they wanted to make and play. I can't think of a single independent success story that involved someone doing careful market research and engineering a product. There's a reason only big companies take that approach.

Competition is very tough nowadays though, while in 1977, not so much. For every successful indie game on Steam, there’s dozens of unsuccessful ones.

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#169

Post by patrickg_zill »

georgeecollins wrote: post #65

This is a great example of the fallacy that if you like games and can program a game, you can be a game developer and get any traction. Programming isn't really the hard part, and it gets easier every day. It is true if you can do something technically bleeding edge you will be sought after by game companies and other companies as well. Imagine: I have liked movies my whole life. I read that Paranormal Activity was m…

If you made a film, then you're a film maker. But success in films and in games, is not evenly distributed.

Re: How I tried to get into game development and failed

#170

Post by jmatthews »

vkhorikov wrote: post #79
CM30 wrote: post #74

Well, congrats on creating and publishing your game! That alone is far further than most people get, and you should be proud of your work. Good job on the coding side of things too. I'm not exactly an expert programmer myself, but it seems like you found some good solutions to the problems you were having with lag and what not there too. As you say yourself, they're all things you can learn from and reuse in future p…

Actually, we figured the Youtubers thing pretty quickly, I just didn't emphasize this stage in the blog. We did try to reach out to them for about a month. With no luck. Only one more or less famous Youtuber posted a video about the game. Another one agreed to take our money and posted a video. Others just didn't respond. I don't know how others manage to market to Youtubers.

Your product is unremarkable, in the strictest sense of the word. That's your issue. What might one say about it that would be provocative or interesting to one's fans and subscribers?

You can tackle this issue with a re-skin. The other issue is your control scheme. You need to make it configurable and you need to iterate on it until it is fluid.

Here is a quick example of how a re-skin might work. You contract an artist to make Halloween-based art. Pumpkins and witches etc.. You re-skin the game and market it as a Halloween shoot-em-up. You get seasonal income.

Same engine, different graphics for Christmas.

You've created a digital asset, albeit a flawed one. Kudos for that milestone but you've essentially stopped at the 90% done and written a postmortem.

Finish the job or at least recognize that you ran out of steam short of the goal line.

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