How to take 7 years to ship a beta • Hacker News Board

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#21

Post by robertAngst » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 7:26 PM UTC

jfim wrote: post #9

> So how can you take 7 years to make your game? [...] Simply open up your code editor, download a basic windowing layer like SFML (we aren’t savages and this isn’t handmade hero), and then start writing your resource manager, event system, animation system, physics system (which you’ll ultimately throw out and replace with Box2D), scene manager, GUI code, serialisation framework, build tool-chain, entity-component s…

To be fair, if you google the first steps in choosing a library, you are going to get bombarded with people suggesting you do things from scratch avoiding any boilerplate that people before you worked on.

You know... for customization and some obscure problem that one person ran into...

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#22

Post by doitmw » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 7:40 PM UTC

jfim wrote: post #9

> So how can you take 7 years to make your game? [...] Simply open up your code editor, download a basic windowing layer like SFML (we aren’t savages and this isn’t handmade hero), and then start writing your resource manager, event system, animation system, physics system (which you’ll ultimately throw out and replace with Box2D), scene manager, GUI code, serialisation framework, build tool-chain, entity-component s…

And the alternative is to use a framework and sell your soul to it or, even worse, the company that makes it. In some cases that includes giving them a % of your revenue. If you ever ship, that is.

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#23

Post by Reedx » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 7:50 PM UTC

CM30 wrote: post #20

Just 7 years? That's surprisingly short in game development terms, especially where certain examples of vapourware/overly ambitious titles/indie games are concerned. I mean, this guy took 13 years to make his dream game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b0tSu0QDQ0 Duke Nukem Forever infamously took 15 years to make. And well, as Metacritic shows in this list, 5/6/7 year development times are not too uncommon in gener…

7 years is still very much an outlier though. It's certainly Very very few people and companies have that kind of runway and patience.

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#24

Post by kuroguro » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

qrian wrote: post #12

Reminds me of [this game]( http://tobiasgame.co.uk/about.php ) which also took a quite bit(13 years). They also have video presenting great tips for prolonged development such as ‘different mechanic for every rooms’ and ‘stick to your original plan’.

Btw where do you get the key in chapter 2?

_edit_

Nvm figured it out :3

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#25

Post by confiscate » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 8:13 PM UTC

doitmw wrote: post #22

jfim wrote: post #9

> So how can you take 7 years to make your game? [...] Simply open up your code editor, download a basic windowing layer like SFML (we aren’t savages and this isn’t handmade hero), and then start writing your resource manager, event system, animation system, physics system (which you’ll ultimately throw out and replace with Box2D), scene manager, GUI code, serialisation framework, build tool-chain, entity-component s…

And the alternative is to use a framework and sell your soul to it or, even worse, the company that makes it. In some cases that includes giving them a % of your revenue. If you ever ship, that is.

ya, but the game isn't going to launch for another 7 years, so you are worrying about % of revenue that is so far in the future, it might not even happen

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#26

Post by nitwit005 » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

Feels like he forgot the obvious: By having exactly one developer.

Although I see he got some freelancer artists and a musician. At least he didn't have to learn to compose music (people have done just that).

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#27

Post by jokoon » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 8:37 PM UTC

jfim wrote: post #9

> So how can you take 7 years to make your game? [...] Simply open up your code editor, download a basic windowing layer like SFML (we aren’t savages and this isn’t handmade hero), and then start writing your resource manager, event system, animation system, physics system (which you’ll ultimately throw out and replace with Box2D), scene manager, GUI code, serialisation framework, build tool-chain, entity-component s…

If you enjoy writing those things, it's actually better since you're getting more motivation to work on it. You actually like making it, so it's much less draining and much more satisfying.

Also, you only write what you need. Honestly I can never find a library that is good enough for what I want to do. Games have so many possible features that it's impossible to cover them all with good libraries.

So it's better to aim low, with simple enough features, and make them yourself so that it's tailored for your programming style, and for what you want to do. You're not reinventing the wheel (I'm not talking about making a graphics of physics engine).

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#28

Post by fritzy » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 9:05 PM UTC

robertAngst wrote: post #19

> I was a freshly baked postgraduate in Melbourne Oh man I knew this was going to be a disaster when I head they were going straight into a grad degree. I'm still on the fence about if CS students can actually program before working in industry, but doing a grad program that isnt paid for by Industry was a major red flag. On the bright side, it sounds like OP learned tons and tons and tons. While the game flopped, I…

OP's game hasn't flopped. The beta just launched yesterday and appears to be trending on steam and itch.

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#29

Post by HumanDrivenDev » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 9:13 PM UTC

jfim wrote: post #9

> So how can you take 7 years to make your game? [...] Simply open up your code editor, download a basic windowing layer like SFML (we aren’t savages and this isn’t handmade hero), and then start writing your resource manager, event system, animation system, physics system (which you’ll ultimately throw out and replace with Box2D), scene manager, GUI code, serialisation framework, build tool-chain, entity-component s…

That's the meta game, where the author of the game enjoys building the game as its own game. Not productive if you're trying to ship a game, but definitely sounds fun.

It's hard to stay focused on building a shippable product when you have no stakeholders. It's something I struggle with myself when I have 'build yourself a side-gig' time. At the end of the day, no one really cares if you fail.

Re: How to take 7 years to ship a beta

#30

Post by renox » Sun, Jul 15, 2018, 9:52 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #16

Ha, amateurs. The Haiku operating system project is almost seventeen years old and still hasn't shipped a beta. Finding excuses is vital, but it's important to have both excuses for not shipping the beta and excuses for why beta is almost here and there's no need to think the past history of delays bodes ill for the project. Here's a HN comment back in January where the poster says Haiku's beta will be out "this quar…

Well, developing an OS is more work than a game That said those working on Haiku suffer from the same NIH syndrome as the article's author but unfortunately all the efforts of the 'pragmatics' one who wanted to reimplement BeOS on top of Linux failed much earlier than Haiku.. New OS are in a bad situation: those build on top of Linux doesn't seemn to attract contributors (I blame personally a lack of imagination: a kernel isn't an OS!) but those who use their own kernel are doomed for the lack of drivers..