Future of game dev?

I see alot of inspiring new devs here, most of which fall to the wayside and fade away, be it due to over expectations, or lack of paying dues. Unity is one of the easiest game engines to get used to, compared to other available public engines like UE/Cry Engine/Godot, and has a far bigger asset base than any other engine.

As a teacher of Unity 3D (fps/rpg), i encounter an alarming number of new students that "want things done for them", without paying dues, and actually learning. This is what i hear: "is there an app or asset that can do that for me?". "is there an easier/faster way to do that?". Umm...no!.

Am i the only one out here that encounters this?. People that just refuse to do the homework, pay the dues, and actually learn?. Am i alone in the thought that new devs are lazy, and need to be "hand held?", pampered, and givin the short answer right now?. I certainly hope not, because if so, we are in a world of hurt. As new devs will more rely on assets/apps to do things for them, instead of learning the actual process. Or maybe its just me, and this is the future of game dev?...

 

The future of gamedev is probbably a huge market crash within next 10 to 20 years.

The thing you experience with people who "do not want to pay dues" has been a trend for at least a decade or two, basically current technologies became accessible to people who would have zero chance with programming and lack any qualities necessary for development or programming.

So, basically, there will be a flood of trash personnel and wannabees with no future on the job market as well. I'm unsure what the implications of that would be, however.

This also could be a symptom of something worse, like failing to properly educate a couple of generations of people, which could have far worse consequences.

 

I don't think it's that surprising. Video games are just about the biggest entertainment industry nowadays. When you have an audience that makes up a significant portion of the world's population, that's a lot of kids who want to 'make video' games for a living. Not all of them are going to cut it, however.

Like other cut-throat industries only the top few percentage are likely to actually get anywhere. Kid's throwing together trash made out of free asset bundles are just going to just get lost down in the ass crack of store fronts.

 

Game development has become much more accessible too in the last decade thanks to game engines becoming more affordable, stores allowing anyone to sell their games on them, large amounts of learning resources, etc.

 

That's not very funny, actually, because in the worst case scenario, it is possible that mankind created a generation with extremely short attention span. See "clip thinking". I also see several extremely useful knowledge accumulation devices dying off.

However, it is unclear whether this is true or not as I tend to be pessimistic with those matters.

 

When they finally get their dream job, their management is going to ask them the same questions.

 

Isn't it said that the lazy make good programmers? xP
https://xkcd.com/974/
https://xkcd.com/1319/

 

There's right and wrong kind of lazy.

Refusing to learn the basics is the wrong kind.

 

First off, should fix the teaching subject name. It is not Unity 3D. Is just Unity.
People still writing YouTube titles and search for Unity3d, which long obsolete name. So let's educate it right.

As already mentioned earilier, game dev and education become more accessible than 10 years ago. Everyone young person will recognise mobile games, as made with Unity.
So young person utomatically will think, "I want my dream game and now I can make it" .

There is nothing wrong with asking "can this or that be made easier or faster? ". It is natural question, if comes to learning. Exploring options and ideas. Understanding what is possible and what's not. And how things can be made easier.

So yes, in certain cases things are easier.
You should teach people, that making fps like games is in reach of a hand, in for example Unreal. But need to be highlighted, that making anything more complex using Unreal, may be significantly more difficult than in let's say Unity. But the answer is YES, certain things can be done with little effort these days. Depending how far we want to go.

Game deving definatelly is much easier than decade, or more ago. More mature engines. More tools. More educational materials. And in the end, education with Unity like game engine for example, as per OP subject.

I wouldn't worry about such questions, if thing can be done easier. Easier education and more popular subject it gets, more people is able to reach the subject.

Like with anything, some people come with passion and will pursue the direction of the education. Other will explore what is possible and probably change the direction, if they realise this is not for them. At least let them to try. But fish and focus energy on thoes, who want to learn.

 

When first learning Unity (more than a decade ago), I experienced a lot of devs saying that I wanted things done for me, that I needed my hand held, etc. But I have worked with a lot of people who had been making games since the 8-bit days.

The process changes according to the tools. Someone with deeper levels will have advantages, but those who use the tools to make more gameplay are likely to win out in the end.

 

This is the nature of literally everything.

Boy, when I was a kid we mopped and vacuumed our own floors. Now kids today ask, "is there a robot that can do that for me?"

When I was a kid we drove our own cars, now several companies are working on cars that do that for you.

The dishwasher, electric lights, the vacuum cleaner, the digital tire gauge, the tractor... Name almost any invention and it will have been invented as an easier and faster way to do something.

25 years ago I wrote my very first game which was a tic tac toe game on PC. Some of you will remember that in those days the concept of "game engine" didn't particularly exist. Forget about a "rendering pipeline", we had to use hardware interrupts in VGA mode 13h to literally code our own "PutPixel" functions. If you wanted a physics engine I hope you were very very good at programming and physics....

Now there's "an app or asset" to make all that easier and faster, it's called Unity.

This topic always reminds me of "in my day I had to walk to school uphill both ways in the snow".

"Paying dues" is code for "doing things the hard way because we didn't have any other choice." Why would you choose to do something the hard way?

Apps and assets that perform work for you, thus expediting workflows, are a good and desirable thing and that has been the driving factor for almost everything that has been invented since the wheel.

 

The nature of gamedev has certainly changed as well. In 8-bit era it was known that while anyone can play around with Basic, to make an actual sellable game with assembler you would need to do some serious studying. And the programming was very low level. You would address the memory directly and it has much more clunky mechanical feel to it which is preferable for some kids. Nowdays the tools are very high level and you sort of have to program without knowing specificly how it works behind the scenes. It's like there's a layer of black magic behind everything and you just have to believe in it and trust it to do its job. Which is not bad, but can be overwhelming and confusing at first.

 

You didn't need assembly (or machine code for those of us who didn't have one) to make a sellable game for some of the platforms of the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush,_Crumble_and_Chomp

 

No, but the speed advantage was considerable.

 

Well that is a brilliant future for sure. Game dev is not about the hard work or complicate things, game dev is about delivering a experience. Also is a good thing if you can easily try to make a game even if you realize that game dev is not your thing after all.

 

Depends on how far into the future you're talking about. I think the ultimate "tool set" would be a direct to brain interface that behaves similar to a 3d scanner for your imagination. You think about what you want the experience, set pieces, and characters to be and it resolves into models and code to complete your vision. Will I be alive to see this? Probably not. I'll either be dead from old age or people are going to wipe themselves out. But IF it was available, you bet your ass I would be using it to speed up development even if it's considered a shortcut. Because at the end of the day that is what it boils down to. Being able to create the thing in your head in a way that you can share it for other people to experience.

 

Wonder how far the demand for quality can raise in that case. The easier it becomes to produce something like this, the higher the competition.
The amount of possible consumption cannot increase that much anymore, thus people would need to become pickier (or marketing becomes even more important).
Unless at some point we have digitalized ourselves and just add an x20 multiplier to the simulation of our brains - plus automated sleep mode (or the removal of the need to sleep). The we'd finally have (virtual)time to play even more games =D

 

i'd challenge the notion that unity is the easiest 3d game engine to get into. I think that it is one of the more difficult ones.

Yes, kids these days lack discipline. That's always been true. The ocean will swallow everybody before they start acting right.

 

One should always look into the ratio between learning curve and what can be achieved when pushing it far. Would say Unity holds its ground well in that ratio.
Of course simpler systems are even easier to get into. All the way down to RPGmaker

 

i didnt say its without merit. I just dont think it is anywhere close to the easiest engine in its category (for beginners).

Of course depending on what you want to do with it plays a huge factor in the equation. My assumption is geared towards wanna-be indie devs who will be making simple platformers, walking sims, basic shooters, etc.

To say something a little more constructive here, I think there is a balance between "learn everything the hard way on my own by the sweat of my brow" and "is there a tutorial for that?"

Anybody trying to make a game today has to be playing ball at a high level and the time it would take to learn everything needed to do it all on their own would be measured in decades. Or you can cheat to the maximum amount possible - piggy back off of all the content available out there - and cut the time down by factors of ten. But at some point, no matter what, yes you do have to break a mental sweat and make effort.

So I say use every advantage out there to get as far as you can by leveraging work of others, then of course you cannot be lazy - you still have many miles to go on your own. Game developers are smart people and they will be able to figure out when to apply effort and when to use what is already available.

 

From the beginning the problem was because of Microsoft Unity DI.

Many times I had to google with "unity3d" instead of "unity" keyword to filter out the results.

 

When everybody can deliver an experience, what you get is a market crash. Or an equivalent of current state of mobile market. I think books are in t he same state. There's t oo many books being released, and only a few of them become known, that's because anyone can write, but not anyone can write well and market their work well.

This sort of stuff will instantly turn into digital drug, where couple of people hook their brains together and group-hallucinate till they starve to death. That in turn may or may not give birth to some sort of human hive intelligence.

In a creative field there will be definitely people who are MUCH more efficient at using BCI than everybody else and can run circles aroudn everybody else. Those people will be the "rockstar employees". The reason fro that is that human mind is not precise. When you envision something in your brain, you get rough strokes, rough shapes, and vague blobs roughly corresponding to your idea, unless you're a painter or a sculptor. Those would need to be refined in external medium, and people who are really good at interfacing with BCI will be extremely good at refining. Then we'll get "experience streamers".

Basically, I do not think that a future where "everybody can create" will come to pass, as people are not equal to each other, and their abilities differ greatly, and even with BCI there will be those who are simply better at it. We sort of already see this with Stable Diffusion/Midjourney. Two months after the release, the default midjourney style became instantly recognizable, and as a result looking at its result is not interesting. To make something that differs from default result, you have to invest into learning the tool and many people do not do that.

 

It is not possible to confirm or plausibly deny a trend without actually collecting statistics.

That said, back around 2000s we've been joking about all the n00b developers on some forums. About twice per month someone wanted to make an innovative new MMORPG and all they needed was a team to implement it. There's always people who either have no experience, or are detached from reality, or both.

The game industry isn't going to crash for it. Game studios who know what the important requirements are for each role they are hiring will quickly find out wether an applicant is up for the task, even if that means letting go during the probation period (typically 6 months in germany). By that point you can judge the quality of work, the number of issues caused and failed reviews and such, and whether the person shows willingness to learn and avoids making the same mistake twice.

Actually it's the mediocre students who will suffer, not the industry. Every once in a while it is said "study this field, there's more jobs than applicants and it pays well" and five years later, there's more applicants than jobs because the number of students in that discipline has skyrocketed in recent years.

With apps and "democritizing of game dev" I'd say some simply expect this to be easier than it really is, because the marketing works so well conveying the message that game dev is indeed easy, but inexperienced developers have not enough experience to realize that "easy" is a relative term and that it used to be REAL HARD WORK in the past. Now it's only REAL WORK for the most part.

I'd say the Dunning-Kruger effect applies here too.

 

Just like there's rarely something actually for free out there in the harsh world, there's rarely an actually easy and yet well paid profession...
It's the nature of our psychology mixed with the fact that we communicate with each other.
We all seek permanently the "easy, comfortable way" to some degree (following even a hard passion matches that as well, because a passion gives us a mental comfort, even if it's not rational from the outside).
Therefore for example when a product is priced under value, we flock to buy it until the seller realizes the demand and increases the price.
Similar, when there are professions where it seems feasible to have it easygoing, there are soon more people who want it, than there are jobs (like CodeSmile said).

The game industry is actually a prime example of that. Work conditions and payment of a software dev in the Game industry are not that great. Especially compared to software jobs at banks and other number cruncher fields that are perceived as more "dry". The reason is that every teen and their dog wants to become a game dev.

Funnily enough, that also means if you are serious about it and have some resources, you likely will have it way easier gathering a passionate and reasonably skilled team for game development than a team to start some number cruncher company.

EDIT: Hope number cruncher is not sounding too derogatory I'm working myself like that and hence why I took game dev as a pure hobby.

 

I don't think there's any issue with someone wanting to find the easiest possible way to do something. The issue is really whether they give up if they cannot find it.