Game development

This time something inspired by this twit:


If you look really general on game development you can compare it to assembling puzzles. A lot of people know about game development from articles, making of videos and few other sources. They also know that there are different options that developer choose when they started:
  • 5000 pieces - Making small game on ready technology.
  • 8000 pieces - Making small game with technology.
  • 12500 pieces - Making game on ready technology.
  • 25000 pieces - Making game with technology. 
This don't sound so bad, so why developer don't make their job properly? People complain about some bugs, some features, about how simple it would be to just add this one feature. This is so frustrating for them because this is so simple (like assembling puzzles).

Then one fateful day some chosen one of them decide to make game on their own and discover that yes this simple like puzzle but this kind of puzzles:

Ravensburger: Krypt silver
Don't understand me wrong: Bugs are bugs, issues with game are still issues and missing features would be probably nice to have.

My point is game developments is time limited, challenging and complex task. On top of that complexity of games increase with each years so even if whole process looks easy on first glance it not necessary really is. This mistake is done by people who never developed games and also this who do it (they get over optimistic about progress of their work).

Greg


Comments

  1. Totally agree. It's a common problem. If you see something from the outside, you don't know all the details that are needed to change / improve it... So you can think "can't you just..." and think it's pretty simple. But you have to be careful when doing that, it's generally not so simple. (I see it the same way as people who overly criticize the government, it's too easy to oversimplify, everything is a balance)

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    Replies
    1. Replying to myself, but did you see this blog post? Related to this subject...
      https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/the-eighth-dirty-word-just-2d2386850cda#.j1sdhzhao

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    2. Yeah everything is easy when you don't know details.

      Article I didn't know but I cannot fully agree with it. I very often catching myself on discussing issues with small group of people (most of the time the same group all the time). It's even worse very often we picking people we feel most comfortable to talk with. This not always mean the best people to discuss given issue or people with different view on problem. So "Your co-workers are smart. If they’re spending a lot of time thinking about a problem then it’s a hard problem.". My life experience showing that being "smart" don't mean that you find quick answer to easy problems.

      I always like to tell story from my early student life when I was working on "mahjong" game where you have multi level tower build from mahjong bricks. You can only remove pairs of brick where non of them is obstructed by any other brick. I needed to write algorithm that build this tower from bricks in the way you can clear tower. I tried to create algorithm for weeks but results weren't that great. I decided to go to one of my teacher to ask him for help. In 5 minutes he changed my hard problem in really easy one: why to build tower when you can dismount it. After that in less than hour I had written code which do what I wanted and always work.

      With the rest of article I'm ok with but still wouldn't like to pay for each use of "just" or swear :P I would go bankrupt quickly.

      Delete

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