Not Your Problem(howtomakeanrpg.com) |
Not Your Problem(howtomakeanrpg.com) |
Unfortunately, I may not have accepted it 6 years ago. I justified writing everything myself by saying I was learning. I justified buying C++ books by saying I wanted to be a "true" game developer. Then I justified switching to another language by saying I needed faster iterations and prototyping. I spent hours and days trying to make everything work on both windows and linux.
Me and a couple of friends just released our first game on google play last week [1]. It's stupid and only our friends and family played it. We didn't monetize it (it's 100% free, no adds) and we didn't promote it anywhere. It was made in two weeks, spending a few hours each day. I'm not very proud of it, but I'm extremely proud of myself for pushing through and finishing it.
Hopefully, our next game will be something people will actually like.
1. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manabreak
A few months ago I had the idea to combine a bunch of mini games that I could make quickly with a defined scope that wouldn't send me down that rabbit hole, and package them together as a collection. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, even if it hasn't been a commercial success yet. Plus now it's easy to add another minigame or two as an update, which I'm working on right now. For purchasers, the value keeps increasing.
As it turns out, a colleague of mine in charge of recruiting wants to use some puzzles for the next internship interviews.
Would you say those 6 years were wasted time?
I recognise so many of the bullet points the author recommends avoiding, and why they're so tempting, but ultimately it's all great advice. The last ones like this I remember considering were Steam integration, and database encryption to make cheating harder _shakes head_.
I'm determined to finish within 5 years, and never start another Duke Nukem again.
Answer can be inferred from my previous comment :)
Seriously though, thanks so much for the interest. The tech stack is C# and WPF specifically which Microsoft does not appear to be keen to port to any other platform.
If this version takes off when finished, I could be convinced to recreate as a web or Android app.
Question: do they still insist on UML at university? I remember they did for me, and with ten years in IT I have never since seen a single UML document by anyone, much less created one.
Not sure what he meant by the XML bullet point, or the .NET under level editors. Using XML or JSON for a config file is trivial in most modern frameworks, like .NET (e.g. Unity).
>Consume Less
>Reading 20 articles a day on game development feels like work. It is work! But it's useless unproductive work, it's not moving the needle.
>Better to spend less time on Gamasutra, TIGSource, r/gamedev/ (or where ever the cool kids hang out these days) and a little more time in your editor getting stuff done.
I'd be inclined to say that Ludum Dare and Twitch or itch or whatever are up there in the "where ever the cool kids hang out these days" list.
Btw, Handmade Hero is really a prime example of this stupidity.
Personal addendum: https://github.com/ensisoft/pinyin-invaders
I personally view it as an "exploration in NIH" under the ruse of "game development".
It does make up for an kinda amusing show tho. "Day 4524, debugging my shitty vector implementation" (;
I mostly avoid the cycle you mention by having a single strongly preferred language and focusing my library knowledge there.
Then process that JSON into whatever you need (I use python at that point).
I've been using it for a couple of years and it makes my life a lot easier.
1. Have fun coding
2. Learn new technologies
Actually shipping is way down the list, almost a side effect. If I wanted pressure and deadlines I would just get a job at a game dev studio.
Game development has changed a lot and now it seems that it is more about content curation and design, selecting the right plugins and models from the Asset Store and putting them together in a creative way.
The business model has changed as well, it's not so much about making a masterpiece with perfect gameplay anymore, but more about hitting the right niche at the right time with something novel. There are hundreds of games released every day on mobile, thousands of games on Steam Greenlight, and tens of thousands of free games on itch.io. Games have become YouTube, and the makeup tips and unboxing channels are bound to win out over Sundance documentaries, so finding the right niche is probably a good bet.
Have they stopped to "just work" in creating an overview of all global variables, functions, classes and their inheritance?
I found it very convenient to just drop a few documentation strings at the function/class definition for looking it up later in the autogenerated documentation. Of course you can overcomplicate these things and waste time. But in my opinion autogenerated documentation is better than no documentation at all.
I'm an embedded C++ programmer by day so I've almost certainly done many of the things on the OP's list. It wasn't until I set C++ aside after 15 years or so and gave Lua a chance that I finally started making real headway on my Secret Agent Sam remake.
[0] http://love2d.org/ [1] https://github.com/kikito/bump.lua [2] https://github.com/kikito/anim8 [3] https://github.com/kikito/gamera
(Note: I'm not kikito, just an appreciative user of his work)
Unlike other environments where everything is an integration with yet another library or tool chain, DarkBasic is refreshingly monolithic. Everything is simply in the language.
This makes it really easy for beginners to get started. Take a look!
I had a course [1] where the lecturer insisted on UML diagrams. And, even worse, they insisted on using a specific proprietary Java software and submitting the diagrams in that program's proprietary format.
Fortunately, my TA (who actually graded these diagrams) was much more lenient, but we had to do at least those UML diagrams that went up to the lecturer.
[1] The course was about applied development practices. Students were split into groups of 5 and had to develop a simple web application. It was really horrible; the lecturer had never heard of agile and forced us into a waterfall process in which 60% of the time was spent documenting requirements and drawing bogus diagrams.
It sounds like the lecturer did an effective job of convincing people how valuable agile can be.
The key is to use this sauce in limited amounts and only to guide the development of truly critical parts of your code. A utility library to convert dates? Eh. A core library that handles complex multiparty bid management for a market? Definitely.
There are diagrams for component overview and such, but they are so strange that you just end up with drawing your own diagram type.
But yeah, the software engineering department still teaches UML.
We'd probably draw something similar even if UML never existed but I think it helped a bit in creating the common vocabulary. So I'd say there is some benefit to teaching UML at university.
I don't know what to believe anymore as it looks like it's rarely used in the industry.
If your goal is to release your first game, I fail to see how Ludum Dare doesn't help: it's goal is effectively to release a game.
If the core point of the essay is to cut the YAGNI and just get something shipped, aren't gamejames like Ludum Dare a great way to do that?
I have however took part in many Ludum Dares and I have been able to complete 7 or 8 games/entries that, looking back on even the first entries, I'm quite proud of (and glad to show others).