21–30 of 56 posts
Apart from that it poses many interesting technical challenges and will make your a better programmer.
I made games for 30+ years and I had this exact question about year 4. I was sitting at home, writing some 6502 I think, and my cousin called. She had to call to tell me about a Commodore 64 game she bought from FisherPrice. She started to describe it to me, an educational game where you controlled a penguin who dropped letters down a chute to form words. I had to interrupt her to explain, I had written that game. Sh…
Come in the next day, the CEO and all the head devs are crowed around the server console, watching the stats after release, this conversation happens, verbatim (I still remember every detail):
CEO: "Time for my favourite question - How long has the longest
player online been playing?"
HeadDev: "Lets see .. 12 hours since we launched, longest active
session is .. 11 hours, 45 minutes. No pause."
CEO: "HOORAY!! CELEBRATION! WE GOT OUR FIRST ADDICT!!!!"
HeadDev: "Yay!"
CEO: "Wait .. how old is he.. ?"
HeadDev: "Profile says: 12"
CEO: "YAY, he'll be with us for years!"
Me: "Isn't that a bit .. unhealthy .. for a 12 year old? Its summer,
schools out, the kid should be .. enjoying some weather?"
CEO: "We don't like that thinking here .. are you sure you
know who you work for?"
TL;DR: The people behind the curtain do not have your best interests in minds, kidz ..
While it's true that games don't necessarily have the same impact on people's lives as other, more "important" work, for me, making a game or studying how a game works is such a fun process that it's worth doing anyway. I spent some time trying to make games in my high school years (NeHe's tutorials helped me a lot)and trying to understand how other games work (I remember the sense of achievement when I managed to sw…
> games don't necessarily have the same impact on people's lives as other, more "important" work This is honestly more for lack of trying than because it just doesn't. Some people are trying, but game development has the disadvantage of coming into its own after the ascent of capitalism and thus most people have been introduced to it as a cash cow rather than as an artistic medium.
As I write this, I think this is the utopian vision of crowd sourcing. Creating a new class of patrons of the arts.
Don't forget the stress relief video games can give. Society managed to make even sheltered 1st world lives stressful thanks to unrealistic expectations imposed on a personal and professional level. We're all apes though, despite all that's expected of us. And these apes love to wonder about their world and explore its every corner. Video games satiate this desire somewhat - and that will do, on a fucking Monday nigh…
And as the gaming population becomes older, gaming will account for a larger and larger percent of human play.
While it's true that games don't necessarily have the same impact on people's lives as other, more "important" work, for me, making a game or studying how a game works is such a fun process that it's worth doing anyway. I spent some time trying to make games in my high school years (NeHe's tutorials helped me a lot)and trying to understand how other games work (I remember the sense of achievement when I managed to sw…
I think I'd put games in the same category as music and painting and novels and all the other pleasures that make us human. What are we solving all those other problems for if not to make more time for things like games?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been playing around with MonoGame and it's not too bad. Considering Microsoft has stopped developing for XNA, it might be time to look into it. I've been using a component based approach to building my game from scratch and it's been an excellent development experience. Too often I feel like I'm in the deep end and unsure if I'll sink or swim. So I try, sometimes an idea works, sometimes it fails but it's all fu…
I'd strongly recommend starting at a lower level than MonoGame. OpenGL isn't conceptually difficult (at least through vertex buffer objects) and encourages you to understand the actual process of what you're doing. I find it enlightening and it makes me better able to work in higher-level systems as well.