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What it takes to make a game by yourself

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Re: What it takes to make a game by yourself

#161

Post by intelVISA »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #155
intelVISA wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't speak for Unity but you can make a pretty complete Unreal game solo in around a month or so if you've done it before. I'd love to release some of my work (for free ofc) but I'm never truly happy with how limited my 3D art skills are so I always shelf it after finishing all the fun programming bits.

I am in the camp of "if a game is fun then I don't care what it looks like" but also of the "I could not possibly publish a piece of art that looks like shit" personality type. IOW, I generally demand more perfection of myself than I would ever require of someone else. So I think I feel where you are coming from. :)

It's genuinely not great, mostly placeholder stuff to convey aesthetic & mechanics so I can continue coding. I always toy with just bankrolling a skilled 3D artist to craft all the pieces to spec but then it becomes a quandary: is it really 'my' game at that point?

Re: What it takes to make a game by yourself

#162

Post by archagon »

gmueckl wrote: post #159
archagon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can taking actions that obey a premade set of rules communicate something to the player? I think it can. For example, Jonathan Blow has played around with this notion in Braid and The Witness.

You must separate the game from its presentation when considering game as art. Chess figurines can be artful, but that does not mean that the act of playing them becomes art. That same separation translates to Braid and The Witness: how is requiring to press a button to reverse the player actions in a specific way in itself art? I'm deliberately separating that from the notion of "time reversal" here because that's h…

How do you define art, then? What is the art in a Kandinsky painting?

In my opinion, the art in these games is the beautiful intersection of a set of puzzle rules with the world they inhabit. In The Witness, the world is additionally constructed to be thematically interesting, and I think that the set pieces on the island are intrinsically connected to the puzzles next to them. The island by itself would not make for very interesting art: it’s the game element that brings the art to life.

Also, “pressing a button to reverse time” feels very reductive. By playing the game, the player learns, and this learning leads to understanding. Usually, this understanding is tied solely to the game world and is used to tackle new and more complex challenges in later areas, but maybe it can also lead to extra-game insight. Even a tiny game like Passage makes powerful gestures in this direction.

Re: What it takes to make a game by yourself

#163

Post by checkyoursudo »

intelVISA wrote: post #161
checkyoursudo wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the camp of "if a game is fun then I don't care what it looks like" but also of the "I could not possibly publish a piece of art that looks like shit" personality type. IOW, I generally demand more perfection of myself than I would ever require of someone else. So I think I feel where you are coming from. :)

It's genuinely not great, mostly placeholder stuff to convey aesthetic & mechanics so I can continue coding. I always toy with just bankrolling a skilled 3D artist to craft all the pieces to spec but then it becomes a quandary: is it really 'my' game at that point?

Consider that you don't have to create the universe from the beginning to make something from scratch (Sagan). If the art is work-for-hire and you own all the rights, then I think the game is truly yours. Just like most of us don't write compilers or hand-make all the computer components ourselves. I didn't even build my own chair or desk! :)

Well, I sort of did build my own chair and desk, since they come from Ikea.

Re: What it takes to make a game by yourself

#164

Post by gmueckl »

archagon wrote: post #162
gmueckl wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must separate the game from its presentation when considering game as art. Chess figurines can be artful, but that does not mean that the act of playing them becomes art. That same separation translates to Braid and The Witness: how is requiring to press a button to reverse the player actions in a specific way in itself art? I'm deliberately separating that from the notion of "time reversal" here because that's h…

How do you define art, then? What is the art in a Kandinsky painting? In my opinion, the art in these games is the beautiful intersection of a set of puzzle rules with the world they inhabit. In The Witness, the world is additionally constructed to be thematically interesting, and I think that the set pieces on the island are intrinsically connected to the puzzles next to them. The island by itself would not make for…

My position is mostly based on Brian Moriarty's Apology for Roger Ebert, by the way. I also define art mostly the presence of an intent that an artist wants to convey to the audience that goes beyond the immediate form.

Somewhere along the path towards modern computer games, a conflation happened between the game and its presentation. My intention here is to point this out. If you retain the meaning of the word "game" from its pre-computer origin, you arrive at the reduction that I outlined and the question whether you can convey artistic intent solely in a set of game rules.

Artistic intent is always somehow relying on a certain level of control over an artwork's presentation. What is (or isn't) shown in painting, how is it represented and where is it on the canvas relative to everything else? Music, film and video have a temporal aspect under the control of the artist. In that sense, Kandinsky paintings can be art under the assumption that the compositions of these paintings are very deliberate.

In a computer game, there is always tension between the game elements which give agency to the recipient and the presentational aspects for which the creator has to assert control from the player in some form to ensure that they are conveyed with the proper intent.

This tension makes any answer to whether video games can be art nontrivial.

Re: What it takes to make a game by yourself

#165

Post by darkteflon »

notduncansmith wrote: post #85
darkteflon wrote: post #48

This is timely. Since I’m on sabbatical, I decided to spend 6 months cramming Unreal Engine 5 and Blender to see if I could cobble together enough expertise and the bones of a project to work on together with my now five-year old son over the coming years. I always loved gaming growing up and I figured it would be a great way to get him interested in, and learning, a broad range of skills that might help him along th…

I’m working on a 2D game conceived by my 9-year-old who had played enough games that he was inspired to make one. He was thrilled as soon as the first animated graphics came onscreen. More valuable than my programming skills have been my project management skills: keeping the scope achievable and focusing on realistic milestones is a little harder when working with a 4th grader. It’s been a great learning and bonding…

Absolutely agreed, and best of luck to you also!

Re: What it takes to make a game by yourself

#166

Post by bullen »

piinecone wrote: post #105

I love reading these kinds of posts. Whenever I’m reminded that I’m not alone, I get a little bit more self-compassion and that makes me more excited to release my game and helps me appreciate all the progress and hard work to date. I’ve been working on King of Kalimpong [0] on and off since playtesting a one-week prototype of it in 2014. I had no idea how much work a networked physics vehicle/movement shooter game w…

What engine are you using. Did you go for tick based and/or deterministic physics?

Re: What it takes to make a game by yourself

#167

Post by piinecone »

bullen wrote: post #166
piinecone wrote: post #105

I love reading these kinds of posts. Whenever I’m reminded that I’m not alone, I get a little bit more self-compassion and that makes me more excited to release my game and helps me appreciate all the progress and hard work to date. I’ve been working on King of Kalimpong [0] on and off since playtesting a one-week prototype of it in 2014. I had no idea how much work a networked physics vehicle/movement shooter game w…

What engine are you using. Did you go for tick based and/or deterministic physics?

I'm using a fork of Unreal Engine 4.20, and I'm using the substepped physics that UE ships with. I have a fixed timestep PR simmering for if and when it's time to implement a proper rewind/replay system for all vehicle movement.

I attempted the standard prediction/correction implementation used for deterministic movement systems and got it working for the deterministic aspects of the vehicle's movement system, but naturally couldn't make it work for the core, non-deterministic physics, as that will require fixing the timestep and probably doing other things I haven't thought about / don't understand yet.

For now, the system works like this:

- basic client vehicle movement is non-deterministic physx + deterministic overrides

- special moves are deterministic but client-predicted

- weapons systems are deterministic but client-predicted

- server-side anticheat model is derived from me moving around and generating believable movement curves so the server can check that any given client move it receives is appropriate given its history / state of the world

- server also (supposedly!) handles noclip and flying cheats (this was a fun month)

- clients predict hits, server authorizes them

- simulated proxies (other clients in your world) mostly move according to projective velocity blending[0], though there are special cases for some of the special moves (spins)

- collisions are blended between the replicated state of the world and the client's local simulation [1]

- probably most importantly, the server creates replay files during matches which the game coordinator/serving system scoops up and saves, so I can (at some point) generate useful statistics and review matches to detect and improve cheat handling

I would have loved to do the networked physics really right, like Rocket League did, but I couldn't quite pull it off (I'm one guy with kids and a job and just not enough brainpower!), so I opted for what I hope is "good enough" for a small project like this: give the client a great experience, put all vehicles and projectiles in mostly the same position at the same time in all worlds (since they're momentum-based entities latency-based predictions are usually quite accurate), run an anticheat model on the server, and save replays to find and review anomalies.

If the game does okay and people are enjoying it I will get that fixed timestep/rewind replay PR done.

I hope that was a good answer! Let me know if I can tell you anything else. Something I didn't mention here is the networked projectile movement, which was the most fun to work on. I plan to write about that, too, at some point.

[0]: https://www-inf.telecom-sudparis.eu/COURS/MultiplayerCourse/...

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPRK5J5-3QQ&list=PLpE81hvqYF...

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