If you ever could have known how much work it is making games, would you still have pursued it?

I had no idea. I think even now, it's still only settling in my brain how much work I'll have to do in order to create meaningful experiences. Artwork, music, story writing, scripting, engineering, design... I used to wonder why all of the old games weren't how I imagined they could be. I always said, "If I made this game... I would have blah, blah blah". Yeah, okay. Sometimes I think if I could have been shown how much hard work it was, I would have devoted myself to a different hobby.

Like... playing Magic or reading comics.

 

Probably most suited to the Gossip forum.

But of course! I enjoy what I do every day, and wouldn't trade it for anything.

 

ooh... yeah I think I still need to learn what posts go in which forum.

 

I'm 16 and I don't really consider game development as a "hobby" anymore. When I first started out I did not realise the fact that the road to developing games is treacherous and we have to tread ever so cautiously. But soon, I embraced the difficulty and went ahead with the learning process. I don't really know how to describe it but there is a certain joy and ... satisfaction that one derives from creating a game all by his own brains. So, in a nutshell, I don't care about "how much work is involved" or "how difficult it is". I plan on taking baby steps forward no matter how long it takes.

 

You forgot an option for those of us who knew what we were getting into and got into it anyway.

 

It's almost the same as non-game Apps.


If you are sweating making games, the scale of hardness for non-game Apps is a magnitude higher.


For gamers, you can have a few bugs here and there. No issues.

For business apps, you have to test, make sure your UI is pixel perfect, make sure everything is 100% OK, everything works.

 

And non-game apps can be so boring sometimes.

 

Is there a mistype in there? I spent my first 10 years in business-app development and the next 11 in game development. I've managed dozens of people, across ~40 projects, and written 100k+ lines of code in a bazillion languages. So, I am Completely confident when I say there is NO question that building business apps is child's play compared to the "Rocket surgery" that is game development.

The complexity, diversity of skill sets, and interdisciplinary nature of game teams increases the difficulty by 10x. For my non-game projects, it's typically X engineers, with a mix of 'senior' and 'junior' types, plus a manager. Whereas, even my small game-projects have dealt with audio, story, cut-scenes, splash-screens, physics, and both 2D and 3D assets, nevermind that's there's also server-coding, UI-coding, 3D-coding, and of course, the game-logic itself. Though, the simplest argument is that game teams even consider paying $1M for a 'Game Engine'. Bout says it all.

Gigi.

 

100% agree with GIGI here, I did coding for telephony platforms / netflow nodes and a whole array of business comms / monitoring suites. If you are doing a game of any substantial merit it utterly dwarfs business apps in terms of complexity.

Do you not think you have to do that for games as well? You can't have crashes, bad UI's and you're aiming for a good consumer spanking if you don't bother testing it. Plus the million other challanges with rendering / shaders / lighting / phsyics / 3D modelling / particles etc. etc.

Bar ANN, probably good games are one of the most complex things I've ever come across.

As for the OP, I fall into the camp of I knew how bad it was but did it anyway .

 

I would say out of the couple of games I have made vs the non games I made. I would say games require a lot more complex logic vs the non games. Non games are hard in their own respect, but don't require a bunch of different scripts with all different kinds of logic with 2D/3D assets and hours trying to optimize. Both require a great deal of knowledge and whatever you do more your going to think is easier than the other.

To answer the question though, I knew how much work was involved but I wouldn't change what I do because this is one of the few professions that I don't need to work for a big company in order to be successful and I don't need to have a big list of top paying clients paying me to make their stuff. I get to make whatever I can think of and put it out to the masses to judge and play.

 

Truthfully, I thought it'd be more work.

 

I'm still amazed how much work it is even for something that I thought would be very small and simple. I keep trying to go for smaller and smaller projects that seem like they would not take long, but it always ends up take 5x longer than I expected, with so many little details and things... It's all in the translation between brain language and computer language.. having to put everything into a form or instruction that the computer can understand and work with. The ideas are so easy to envision but making them happen inside a computer, is just a ton of work.

I agree also creating applications is generally simpler and easier, and can be much less fun. Especially given it's much easier to know who your audience is and what the app needs to do, based on the needs of the user and real problems that it is solving... instead of trying to entertain subjective people and having no idea who likes what or why.

 

Video game development in one form or another has been one of my favorite hobbies. And I've been working at it for more than a decade. If I had known how much work it entailed at the beginning, I would have been a little more intimidated. But I still would have gone for it. Curiosity is a powerful motivator for me, and there is no end to the learning with game development.

Problem solving is one of my most pronounced talents. I didn't fully grasp this until after I had started digging into game development. And problem solving seems uniquely suited to this particular discipline.

I may never be a professional developer. But I'm never going to stop making games. Game dev fo' life!

 

If I was stuck on a desert island I would want my 3D app, my music production app, Zbrush and Unity with one of the new MacPro cylinders, dual 4K monitors, with some solar panel setup and I would be amused till the day i croaked.

 

If I could go back in time I still would have pursued a career in the industry, but I would have went through a traditional B.S. in Computer Science instead of a 'game' program at a private institution. I could have been far better educated for a significantly lower price tag. More importantly, it would have made it easier to transition out of the gaming industry in the event that I eventually get burnt out. The cost associated with programming in the gaming industry as opposed to most of the alternatives is becoming more and more 'real' as I get older and start seriously wanting to settle down and have a kid.

 

It's all relative. Flappy bird isn't 3dsmax.

Also, in games, from a programmer POV, if something isn't quite working out, you can fudge it. You just can't fudge an app. It has to do a very specific task, or not do it.

But as I said, it's more relative to what it is. Doing World of Warcraft isn't necessarily more difficult an engineering task than doing 3DSMax 2015, it's plugins, import, export, rendering and everything else.

But ultimately, game development is only as difficult as your ambition, skillset and time available.

 

A tool like 3DSmax isn't far a field from making a game with tools (Game engine), it follows a similar path in a lot of regards. But I agree, it all depends on the scope and size of the project you wish to undertake.. From an RPG standpoint it's far more difficult, making a space invaders clone wouldn't take much thought neither would it be that difficult.

 

For me making games is a hobby. I don't think that will ever change - particularly not when I hear the horror stories of 200+ hour work weeks. Okay, I exaggerate, but you get the point. I have a life. I love games, but I'm not sure I want to devote every waking moment to making games.

I have a partner who deserves a big slice of my time. I want to play games. I want to have friends and hang out with them.

If I ever got into the business, I would probably go at it alone, and form a team based on human expectations. I'd make it more like a film crew with clear roles than what I read game crews are like.

 

A lot of Yes. I wasn't expecting much in the way of response. I'm impressed at the amount of enthusiasm in this thread.

For anybody worried that they don't have a degree, I can't imagine how certification would make the work easier. It always falls on your shoulders to learn the material, build the skills and earn the experience points.

I don't personally see the difference between
games and non-trivial "useful" software. Both must solve a problem. Both utilize the same concepts to deal with data. I don't see the debate on which is "harder". Its like comparing being in a indie rock n roll band to playing instrumental music for weddings. To each their own.

Pretty cool, the independent spirit of "I'm going for it, no matter the cost!" Haha.

 

It's suicidal depression that drives half of us.

 

Well, then.

 

I would definitely rather make games than other types of software.

And any other job just seems tedious and depressing.

 

Games suit very visual and creative people, not only in artwork but code. It's great creating a CC or some AI and watching your characters react, it's great making a new shader and applying it to a variety of meshes to see how it improves the visuals. Breathing life into an atmospheric little world is a fine thing to behold, there are so many positives that's why I believe game development is so attractive.

But like everything else it has it's dark side, in-efficient tools / long work hours / constant frustrations and to be succesful you need to be a jack of all trades at a base line. If you are doing competitive 3D games (Don't do 2D so not sure), you also need to balance yourself. I've seen many instances of coders / artists becoming unhealthy and emotionally unstable, sure this happens in every industry but games seem to be promenant. Crunches aren't good for you, it's not cool and it's not clever but in a lot of cases it has to be done.

With a healthy body / mind you can achieve more in a couple of hours than you could in a whole day, also you need a skin of pure steel. Even if you work in AAA (Or should I say especially AAA), peer pressure and especially feedback. The amount of comments on youtube etc. most dismiss your years of hardwork even before it comes out the door.

 

Making games is hard work. It's a job like many others. It requires a lot of dedication, passion and discipline. If you have none of those 3 just go do something else entirely

 

I could see a good number of people having passion, I think you see that reflected in the number of aspiring developers and the amount of people who view YouTube videos about making your own games. It's just a bit ironic that passion and discipline are seemingly at odds with each other, as far as personality traits go. On the one hand there's fleeting, visceral emotion--and on the other, mind above all else. You see a lot more of the former than the latter. That effectively explains the fallout/burnout rate of people seeking to produce their own games.

That is at the heart of my thinking in asking this question in the first place. We all start off, I would presume, with soaring ambition and high hopes, and we end up behind a compiler someplace, hacking away at a keyboard all hours of the night, scouring reference material for tidbits of info.

How can something so fun be such a pain? That's life I guess.

 

Game stuff's my passion, i like to think it chose me, i dont really care about factors of difficulty, that can just be a matter of free time and patience. Can learn a ton on an enormous range of subjects, working typically on my own theres been stuff ive been familiar with since i was a child and some stuff i feel incredibly stupid about. Always worth any effort though, its a cheesy thing but stop thinking of stuff you create as 'games', it's like calling all films 'action films'. You don't have to 'play' an alternate reality, you can let it happen to you. It's the most powerful and will probably grow to be the most profound medium ever concieved - total control over an artificial place in which you can do absolutely anything you can think of to some degree

People who stick with it may not find themselves millionaires, but they're richer, imo, as people and artists to be respecting and (hopefully) building the foundation stones of a medium that encompasses all others, where even a ritual (drawing with a pencil) can be equated. It's exciting times and i'm getting sick of the word 'game' and sick of the entitled power many gamers seem to assume, that its their right to have their arab shooting games and super realistic atmosphere compromising units and anything that isnt obviously a game is a terrible thing, how dare they insult REAL gamers by making this thing you can control that isnt a game.

No force on earth could tear me away from this even though its almost all i do, seven days a week, youd have thought it would drive me mad, but if you stop calling it a game and take away tired ideas of goals and competition and very boring, limited proscribed control and you have a medium capable of anythng, and videogames are often a massive insult against the medium. Why is what is a 'good' story in a game just so laughably bad if you read it in a book? Proably total lack of respect for the medium, using it like it was a film, filling it full of gaudy trash ala recent shooty games when it's all just trying to hide up the complete emptiness of the experience

I love games, naturally, most of what i make is recognisably gameish but i dont give that much of a damn about games in the long run because i think the best you can get out of the medium has little to do with anything gamey at all, talking about it in discussion, researching things, observing how a behaviour in a game might transpose to a non-'game' circumstance in an artificial world, broadening ones horizons to see exactly how 'different' things can be. How do you forsake that for a regular desk job.

For the record, the most amazing gaming experience of my life was Dear Esther with an Oculus Rift, Dear Esther was widely derided for not being a game. What a completely ignorant attitude. Its not really a game, and benefits from removing the narration to make it a walking around on an island simulator, and the not-gameness of it makes me want more and more releases like it. It being entirely respectable and profitable to create such experiences is where this thing grows up and stops being a mass accepted outlet for sociopathic behaviour for children of all ages. I'm not missing that on principle and as soon as i feel i have my stuff together (Going solo means lots of reading and familiarity with tools and free time like you wouldnt believe) i'll be using probably Unity to make non-games, no less of a pain, much more noble an endeavour, and just making random gamey stuff to learn things is great, still takes all my time, but couldnt give it up for much, especially now its growing up and and infinitely more respectable to folk as artistic expression

Sorry for the rant

 

No, if I knew how much work it was, I doubt I would have done it, but thats the thing. No one knows how much work it can be, even now its only as much work as you make it. Like apparently lots of Mario Galaxy was done in assembly and I was like OMG, thats crazy.

 

Words can be so limiting, especially when you don't appreciate their full meanings. "Game" is just a word like "film" is just a word, when everybody knows that most movies today are "filmed" with digital cameras. How far down the rabbit hole of semantics must we go?

Yes. Wandering about a virtual world for no particular reason is still gaming. We don't need to define the terms so rigidly, like a bunch of scientists arguing about insect taxonomy. You are at play. That's what it's all about.

Artistic expression is wonderful. Put it into every asset in your game. Ultimately, though, people are going to gravitate towards "normal" experiences rather than "different" ones. The most successful people always manage to take something that people like already and put their own unique perspective, or spin, on it. I see a lot of people pursuing psychedelic mind job games and, while that's certainly something that we need, we also need to have some concrete foundations to return to once in a while.

There are formulas, rules, measurements... after all, we're not designing games for the human "mind" so much as we are designing them for the human brain. One is arguably metaphysical, while the other... well, not so much.

I think what I'm getting at, and what this thread is continuously making me realize, is that this whole gaming thing is a strange phenomenon indeed. It is at once science and art. Think about that. Visceral and completely intellectual. The melding of human feeling with technology; so much so that we often think of our lives in terms of gaming elements... and my point, again, is that I never knew that something that felt so natural to me would have to be artificially produced by such altogether unnatural means inside of a computer's processor. I'm describing my dreams to a computer and, in turn, it makes my dreams real.

So there's plenty of room for everyone, I think.

 

I don't really think about it, I just focus on fun, and I don't care what Jonathan Blow thinks about fun. Games should be fun, and that's what I'm doing.

It's fun for some people to wander around on an island with rift, and it's fun shooting things. It's simple.

 

What, that sounds like a horrible idea. Not thinking about it is insane. What you just flop around with ideas until you get one that people enjoy?!?!

 

No, we flop around with ideas until we get one we enjoy.

 

heck yes! I don't know about anyone else but I have days where I would sooner claw my eyes out than look at this project I had been working on for months... But then those little occasions come along where you work your way down the list of things you need to do and bugs you need to overcome and each one of those little triumphs drives you on. That's what it is like for me at least A series of small battles that eventually result in a victorious game emerging... Or a project that 'You'll get back too...' (And never do)... Needless to say I have more defeats than victories under my belt

 

Yeah I think I would have.
Going in I knew I would have to learn a bunch of new skills at the very least.
I guess the thing that most took me off guard is how much all the little mundane tasks add up--the little details most players would only notice if you didn't do them. You can get a quick and dirty prototype done in a relatively short time, but taking that from a rough draft to a bug-free, intuitive, and polished game is A LOT more work than I expected--even for fairly simple mobile games.

Kind of apropos to this, I don't think a lot of people realize just how much work is put into game development (both gamers and non-gamers). I still feel kind of awkward in conversations on the off chance it comes up that I develop games for a hobby--as if most people subconsciously equate "making games" with "playing games." Like people would be more impressed if I said I just participated in a marathon than if I said I just spent my free time for the past three months making a game. And yes, I know this complaint is nitpick-y and possibly just all in my head...

 

Someday it'll be as easy as playing games. Some games are about construction and world building. LBP is a good example. But, the problem facing us today with Unity is that to get the required performance to suit your ambition, you have to do a lot of hard work.

Unity to it's credit does a lot to help out here, but things like Static batching offloading any perceived performance gain to a large culling cost doesn't make any sense. Lack of shader editor that enables you to choose approximate high performance options also means I spend a lot of time making decent shaders. Avoiding garbage collection means I spend a lot of time working around garbage. And so on.

So Unity's big problem with how much work I've got to do breaks even with how fast I want it to run.

 

This is something I think about often. But it's misleading.

I argue that as the accessibility of technology increases, the creativity and ingenuity of its users decreases proportionally. This stems from a lack of necessity to develop such skills in the first place to achieve acceptable results. Not lack of proper education, not anything like that... just a simple, natural phenomenon of human laziness.

So yes, you'll be able to just play a game to make a game... but most people will use it to make crap, and it will always be looked down upon by the "professionals". And in this "someday" people who can do the "real work" like using a graphical environment like Unity will be more like today's C/C++ programmers who can write their own engines from scratch. In other words, they'll be employed. And so on.

And phones will be installed directly in our brains.

 

I don't think that's the case at all. There's always been S*** games since gaming began. It's not like laziness was invented in the future alongside easy game development.

I get what you're saying though. Since Unity came out, the amount of S***e appearing on steam and mobile is out of control. But eventually those that make effort will get rewarded. Better games will get noticed.

Currently it seems like you can bang out any old turd and get rich. That's not going to fly long term though. People ultimately need a steak sometimes.

 

All my favorite ideas were already made.

Markus Persson said in this interview: "I strongly believe that true greatness comes from being influenced by other people's work and improving it, making your own version of it, by mixing and matching your best influences and a few original ideas of your own,"

I have read similar things from creative people, and I tend to subscribe to that way of thinking. I already know what I like, I just need to develop a palette of unique experiences and ideas to contribute to my own version. I feel that's a good approach, whereas "flopping" (hahaha) about seems to be an inefficient process. Again, to each their own... but you certainly can't advance any art or discipline without respecting the current state of the art.

 

I think that people have been saying this since the dawn of time. There seems to be a tendency to think that people want excellence because we appreciate excellence. And certainly, excellence will always be rewarded more consistently. But... there's something to be said for those turds that people can't stop buying.

I love steak, but McDonald's cheeseburgers have a certain mystical appeal to me. And in my lifetime, I'll probably spend a lot more money on burgers than steak. Food for thought.

 

If we're using food analogies...

Well, Markus Persson ripped off Infiniminer so I'm not sure he could actually say anything else, even if he wanted to. He's so far come up with nothing truly his own. But originality isn't the important part. All the food in the world has probably been discovered, but new combinations continue to delight.

 

How about that Steve Jobs guy, he did pretty well for himself.

@hippocoder Perhaps you are not looking at the right aspects of games, people are not going to play a bad game. Why did Flappy bird become popular? IMO it was the addictive nature of the gameplay and the short game time that had a great balance of anger when you die but not enough to stop the player from coming back. Was it crappy? well if your judging it on its story and immersion then probably yes, but overall no way.

In contrast, take The Last Of Us, its a good game as is evident by its reviews and how lots of people rave about it, but take away its art, cutscene and story and you have a horrible game. Gameplay thats like cardboard. But, as a cohesive game those elements could mask the gameplay. So much so that no one even realises or cares.

Again, take Slender. A game that was extremely popular for a time, the game has absolutely horrible art, the gameplay was pretty much not their. However when mixed with the atmosphere design, sound design and a feeling of helplessness it was pretty good, and with the way not many other games had done that at the time.

 

I don't think about any of that. I've been there, done that and worried about what the world wants. That doesn't work. Now, I just make games for me, my way, with my brother and Simian Squared. We just jam, we have a laugh, we work hard... If we like something we put it in. It's constantly iterated on, throughout the development process. We lean on the strongest parts of being indie: the freedom to make a decision about the design, the freedom to change whatever you damn well feel like. And change we do. The UI part (which is an integral part of the game) has had months. It's still not there yet, we keep tinkering and improving. The gameplay has evolved through 3 different codebases to be where it is today.

In short, the next game we are doing, is entirely whatever we want it to be. We didn't ask anyone their opinion and we're not going to ask anyone their opinion. We're just making it exactly the fun that pleases us the most, it's a kind of deep indie honesty that AAA will never, ever be able to touch, and I'm making the most of it.

Once it's finished, it'll undergo peer review, and we'll take people's thoughts on board (testers etc) - about what parts are too hard, or easy, bugs and things they didn't understand. But the game? the game is what we want, nobody else.

And that's a good thing.

 

@TylerPerry I've never played any of those 3 games you mentioned, because I think most games suck anyway. Flappy bird ripped off Super Mario. Everybody loves Super Mario, young and old. Last of Us was a movie that you play/watch, I'm not sure what to do with something like that but most people are like "why the hell not". Slender/Amnesia/Resident Evil: Nemesis... horror, survival always a big hit with human beings from planet Earth as long as they're well put together.

Really, honestly... it's not all that complicated to see why things worked after the fact.

It's sad. It's like rock n' roll. Still the best music on earth, but we become... numb to it? To this day though, if you could produce a killer rock album and promote yourself well, you could be famous. So it's not that there's not a formula, or that it's a mystery... I mean in games, in media, in marketing... we can tell what works but I think a mixture of fear, uncertainty prevents people from pursuing their goals and then of course, it's a lot of hard work so not everybody has what it takes to finish their game.

I think if I took any random aspiring game designer and somehow could produce their #1 favorite game idea the way they envision it in their head, it would probably rule. But imagination isn't enough in the real world, I suppose. You gotta have backbone, too.

@hippocoder Say what you want about old Notch but he committed to his idea and he finished it. He quit his job to spend more time working on it. The man has a very high IQ, there's no doubt he's some sort of genius... some sort. We can say something like "he didn't know if his game was going to succeed or not, but he still went for it and we can all learn from that" but that's phony. Show your game to ten people. What they think, that's what everybody is going to think. His play testers were probably losing sleep and inviting their friends to play.

That's why I never finished anything. I knew none of my past ideas, in the form I could realize them, were worth anything. I knew it. You know. You always know. Do something ordinary well and you can succeed. But that's the thing... doing it well. What does it even mean, sometimes? That's why I've spent so much time studying games, game feel, game theory (to a small extent) and why I'm continuing to learn. There's no guide posts in creativity. You just... do things. Nobody can tell you if what you're doing is going to work or not until they've seen something.

My goal is to not be a "one-hit wonder" (or a zero-hit "wonder" lol) but to really be able to consistently produce quality. It's possible. There's no point for me, then, to just throw stuff at the wall and see what fits... or flop around... I need to be able to have more control than that.

 

I don't even understand you dude. Many of these things are your opinions and other things are just plain wrong.

 

Yeah well, I've got to the point in life where I've said "F*** it, I know what's good. It's time to trust myself". If people dig what we're doing here, then they will really dig it. It's intense. But if they don't like it, well that's OK as well because I'd rather cause intense happiness or dislike. The worst thing would be indifference.

 

Well, my name is not "dude". Honestly, it can't be that difficult to refer to me by my user name... it's literally at the left of every post I've made so far.

I, along with many others, I'm sure, am already aware that I have shared my opinions. Thank you for confirming that for the entire world. There might have been some confusion.

As for the things I've said that are "just plain wrong" I'm sure you'll be enlightening me at a later time, since you clearly were unable to elaborate at the moment.

*edited before @KheltonHeadley responded, that was fast

 

Dude, clearly you misread what I said. I never said your opinions were wrong. You're saying things that don't make sense or are wrong. So Dude, read every word next time.

 

I think this is key. Do what you do. And really, really do it to the nth degree. Make people who don't like that sort of game angry, to the point they have to comment how much it "sux". Make fans of that type of game experience gaming nirvana every second they play... but you're so right. If people just look at it and say, "Aaanyways, I left my phone in the car..." then you're screwed. Haha.

 

Come on it's not rocket science, you know what the succesful competition does. You know what production values should be to follow suite, you know what makes a story line or gameplay interesting. Nearly everyone can pick apart a game and decide if it's good or not. I also very much agree with Hippo, if you worry about what the world wants it causes panic and your always stretching yourself to play to competitors strengths, not your own.

Tyler perry says it's "insane" to flop about and it really isn't, prototyping and "flopping" is probably the most essential part of game development. There are only so many cold calculated clones people can make and more often than not they fail miserably to capture the magic of the game they are cloning.

You have to enjoy what you do, or I wouldn't even bother doing this. Hippo asked me once why don't you do shovelware? Simple answer is, if you're only aiming for money you'd probably have a more lucrative career in IT and I do what makes me happy.

 

Loving this thread so far

It's especially interesting seeing peoples ambitions and how they intend to get there - its great that the tools are getting so good, an affordable (Quixel) that while still needing strong skills - with those skills you can create great things

I'm at a weakness by going solo, and my ambitions are high, but im getting the hang of deciding how to manage priorities, and as hipocoder says, how to make games that i myself will love. I'm doing a stepping stone approach where i'll set a goal, probably not get there satisfactorily, 'flop', reappropriate my priorities to come back to that at a later time

It's still ongoing, i never forget an idea i have real passion for, and i do the above process until i know where i can get a grip on the skills and learn a lot - And this is hard because im in a flat in england, not a well staffed studio, i have no real back and forth banter with colleagues and hence am always behind and frustrated at seeming ignorant and dim while simply not having the time to fully investigate something

The process is compelling, the path to where i want to go could be up to 10 years in the future, there'll be side projects to warm me up in some area, installation-type work that can remain pretty prototypical so long as it runs on my computer, but as detailed in my previous post its endlessly compelling, and cant let myself not get there, and i have some ambition

I know what this medium can give, as work like the oculus rift and such narrow the divide between our self and an avatar, i couldnt just watch that happen and just stand by. My trumph card is that in some ways, money is not a concern, nor is free time, and if i was under pressure as a subordinate on a game i couldnt give a crap about things would be different, but things are as they are and ill take the opportunity, and i hope even those with financial concerns will get what they want made to a personally gratifying best - just so they can say that that piece was theirs

The medium is in its infancy, 'AAA' games remind us how childish it still is, but the indies are still the trailblazers, opening opportunities to experiences things that could not even be conceived of before seeing it - its exciting!