You Can Make Video Games • Hacker News Board

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#31

Post by jamesbritt » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #7

The problem with making video games is that it is long not hard . Designing your game is about 3-5% of the time spent making it. The rest is in tweaking animations, inverting arrays for better performance, refactoring, adjusting physics, fixing weird bugs, creating metaformats, and wishing desperately that floating point numbers did a bit less floating.

Or you can go for art, fun, raw passion, and a novel point-of-view.

There's an interesting take on this in the book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form

http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Videogame-Zinesters-Drop-outs-Hou...

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#32

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 5:17 PM UTC

GavinB wrote: post #26

For the total novice: http://www.unity3dstudent.com/category/modules/ Start with Essentials, then do Beginner, then Intermediate. I ran through these and it got me up to speed very quickly.

I'd wish people made normal tutorials (text + screenshots) instead of video ones. It's difficult to make a good one (that won't distract because of noise / recording quality / speaker without annoying voice), and at the same time you sacrifice low-bandwidth users and lots of time for the high-bandwidth ones - the important feature of a written document is that one can skim it, skipping the parts one doesn't need, focusing only on parts one doesn't know, while being able to see the entire context for the whole time.

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#33

Post by mkr-hn » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 5:33 PM UTC

D3lt4 wrote: post #30

djtumolo wrote: post #6

a few things that are worth checking out: - gamedev subreddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/ - python game engine - http://www.pygame.org/news.html - sprite builder so you don't have to worry about art - http://charas-project.net/charas2/index.php

It seems that pygame has last been updated in 2009, that killed my desire to work with python and game dev.

Where'd you get that idea?

https://bitbucket.org/pygame/pygame/changesets

11 changes in the last 30 days. And it looks like pygame has an active community: http://www.pygame.org/wiki/info

The site could be more coherent, but I didn't have to look hard to find those things.

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#34

Post by jwingy » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 5:42 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #32

GavinB wrote: post #26

For the total novice: http://www.unity3dstudent.com/category/modules/ Start with Essentials, then do Beginner, then Intermediate. I ran through these and it got me up to speed very quickly.

I'd wish people made normal tutorials (text + screenshots) instead of video ones. It's difficult to make a good one (that won't distract because of noise / recording quality / speaker without annoying voice), and at the same time you sacrifice low-bandwidth users and lots of time for the high-bandwidth ones - the important feature of a written document is that one can skim it, skipping the parts one doesn't need, foc…

It's also much quicker to parse through text than to wait for someone to say it, even if they are a fast speaker.

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#35

Post by dacilselig » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 5:44 PM UTC

I have had a lot of fun working with Unity but not for making a game. I have actually been using it at work to use as the platform for an experiment which is being done in our Universities Geography department. what it truly taught me was how much scripting can save you a lot of time in the tweaking department. As this is my first real project that I'm doing on my own, it really helped in understanding how important making your scripting generic really is. It also has shown me the weakness of Unity's GUI library as there are some limitations with it.

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#36

Post by rprasad » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 6:08 PM UTC

chc wrote: post #14

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #9

I know that stealing content happens, but as a developer that wants to stay on the up-and-up (read:not steal the hard work of others), I don't wan't to rely on a resource that has this sort of attitude on stealing others content. From the 2D Art section[1]: "If you really don’t want to make your own art, steal it! There are a ton of sites with sprite rips of classic 2D games. You can’t make a career on stolen game sp…

Not a lawyer, but using a couple of sprite rips in the process of learning sounds like it ought to be fair use to me. Are you a lawyer?

It may be fair use, if you do not distribute the game. Once you distribute it, all bets are off, and fair use would almost certainly not apply.

Many media companies have staff lawyers to police their IP, so it does not usually cost them any (additional) money to send out copyright notices.

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#37

Post by rprasad » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 6:10 PM UTC

Jach wrote: post #15

JoeCortopassi wrote: post #9

I know that stealing content happens, but as a developer that wants to stay on the up-and-up (read:not steal the hard work of others), I don't wan't to rely on a resource that has this sort of attitude on stealing others content. From the 2D Art section[1]: "If you really don’t want to make your own art, steal it! There are a ton of sites with sprite rips of classic 2D games. You can’t make a career on stolen game sp…

So presumably you're against fanfics and sprite comics too? As with everything that can be copied (digitally or otherwise) and used in derivative works, fair use et al. concerns apply. (Hence the other commenters noting that it's common and fine to do this for self-education.)

That's not how fair use works. Simply making a derivative work is not enough to take advantage of fair use. The derivative work must fall into certain categories of use. A lot of fanfic and sprite comics would not fit into fair use, though many would. It is a very fact-specific analysis.

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#38

Post by CodeMage » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 8:10 PM UTC

debacle wrote: post #7

The problem with making video games is that it is long not hard . Designing your game is about 3-5% of the time spent making it. The rest is in tweaking animations, inverting arrays for better performance, refactoring, adjusting physics, fixing weird bugs, creating metaformats, and wishing desperately that floating point numbers did a bit less floating.

From my personal experience, the two main challenges when it comes to making video games are:

1) It's a multidisciplinary effort. Unless you're someone with multiple talents, you need to put together a team to work on it. You might try to pull it off all by yourself using free resources you can find on the Internet, but it's next to impossible to make a truly great game that way.

2) The biggest amount of work will be spent on "polishing" things. Dotting the i's and crossing the t's, testing your levels and tweaking them, all that stuff is a lot of work. And videogame players are a lot less forgiving than other application users.

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#39

Post by Jach » Thu, Jun 07, 2012, 8:44 PM UTC

rprasad wrote: post #37

Jach wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So presumably you're against fanfics and sprite comics too? As with everything that can be copied (digitally or otherwise) and used in derivative works, fair use et al. concerns apply. (Hence the other commenters noting that it's common and fine to do this for self-education.)

That's not how fair use works. Simply making a derivative work is not enough to take advantage of fair use. The derivative work must fall into certain categories of use. A lot of fanfic and sprite comics would not fit into fair use, though many would. It is a very fact-specific analysis.

Indeed, I don't think I accidentally made the assertion that being a derivative but original work was sufficient. Similarly profiting off your work does not automatically dismiss any fair use claims.

Re: You Can Make Video Games

#40

Post by tehwebguy » Fri, Jun 08, 2012, 1:10 AM UTC

chasing wrote: post #5

If anyone's interested, I'm working on a fully web-based game-making toolkit project, as well. Not public, but slowly opening up: http://gt7k.com/ The genesis of that project is a high school class I teach -- see http://www.auscillate.com/post/300 . But it's proving attractive to a broader audience as well. Anyway: End plug. Just thought I'd throw it out there!

Super interested! Just signed up.