Why Does Everybody Think They Can Do This?

I don't like Bit Blaster Xl, while i like a lot Devil Daggers gameplay , dynamics , effects and overall Quake like graphics, so each player have their games preferences, and your game can't appeal to every player.
You have better chances to success when you are able to make a game that is appealing on all aspects (graphics, background and story, gameplay, sounds, effects, menus , long run appeal etc ...), could it be a small 2D or 3D game.

 

I like your style, everyone else around here takes themselves way to seriously to have an opinion...I think your the only one being accountable to his feelings. Kinda reminds me of myself. Everyone around me just seem like lifeless zombies. Your posts are true human passion.

Just keep doing what you do.

 

Thats one of the things I've been looking at bro-force to me looks like the gameplay sucks. But its good a good package, the steam page kickass t that can people onboard whereas this game is the opposite.
Trailer kicks ass gameplay sucks.

Better gameplay worse trailer IMHO

 

Devil Daggers, now that's some brutal stuff right there. Put it into more of an adventure setting, get in some interesting AI monster-monster interactions, add puzzle elements in a minimalistical but flawless AAA-quality setting, add a story, and you have another worthy step in the D&D-RPG genre.

 

I think it boils down to the fact that games are made on computers.

I think that many people have a similar mindset regarding movies. They think that they can make great movies; if only they had the right equipment, right props, and right set. But if you add in the fact that it's on a computer, people suddenly think that all the resources they need are right there- They think that there are premade enemies, premade weapons, prethought game mechanics, and all they have to do is basically design the level.

Also, I believe that some people think that designing a game is the same in every engine. In my opinion, some game engines are easier to work with (mostly the ones with visual coding) than others (despite the fact it often forces games to be more linear). If someone has worked in, say, Scratch, and develops a tiny game in a few short minutes, I think they assume every game has a similar time slot. If my scratch-made pong game only took ten minutes to make, then Mount and Blade must have only taken a week or so!

Not sure how true this is (it certainly doesn't apply to everyone), but those are my thoughts.

 

I think maybe everybody (or most people) can do it? Kind of like if you solve a crossword in the newspaper you think "Wow, I'm a frigging genius! I'm going to send this in. No-one else would have solved this!" Then you find out you didn't win and a thousand other people had sent in the right solution.

Perhaps game dev is something that makes you think you are a genius whereas really, most humans with enough time could do the same thing.

Probably the thing that sets a programmer apart from a "norm" is that they have the tenacity and dedication to keep going and going until they solve the problem whereas a lot of people would just give up. Not that they couldn't do it eventually but they don't have the mindset and self belief.

One of the most important attributes of an indie dev is an ego the size of a house.

 

People write crappy novels, paint crappy pictures, play crappy music and call themselves"Writer" or "Artist" or "Musician" all the time. Why should game dev be different?

 

Those people are writers and artists and musicians and such. Those terms don't have anything to do with the quality of whatever is being produced. If you're producing music then you're a musician. If you're producing bad music then you're a bad musician (which is how everyone starts at everything), but you're still a musician.

 

The Apollo 11 program by NASA, most of the people working there were in their 20's. In most wars the average age of combatants are 19.

Do you notice a trend, young people with little experience of failure are the best people to get onto a project to do something that is nearly impossible, or die trying.

 

Average age of apollo engineers was 28, not 'most in their 20's'. Astronauts average age 34. (25 youngest, 77 oldest). (I am huge fan of NASA's Apollo era). Soldiers aren't a good comparison to achieving something in a creative field. (and not always volunteer). The average age of Nobel Prize winners is 59. (though often their achievements were earlier, but took time to take hold/get recognition.) Kirby's ground breaking work was in his mid 30's. (Lee was younger). Age isn't a factor by itself in a creative field. Many creative's achieve success later in life (built on experiences), some hit early on.
Interesting thing about people is that they are very different.

 

You are missing my point people think they can do game development because they are so young/naive they have not experienced real failure.

Also most Astronauts will admit they were mostly spam in a can, the rocket worked or it didn't.

Most Nobel Prize winners probably win their awards years or decades after their initial award winning work is published. Science only advances when the old pre-eminent scientists in each field give way to younger scientists and their theories. Or Science and probably Nobel Prizes are a political/ivory tower version of dead man's shoes.

Regarding combat or game development, if you want someone who can engage in mortal combat with a foe, aggressively and without an understanding of the full on impacts of failure check out your average teenager/twenty something.

 

That's Stan Lee. What about Jim Lee?

 

I found an intro for this topic:

 

I did miss your point. Fair enough, that is valid.

If they do ever say that is because they are just acting cool. The Apollo era astronauts were highly educated, (engineers) and heavily contributed to the systems and development of the program as whole. Shuttle era astronauts were largely scientists first.

 

I thought they were mostly test fighter pilots, "The Right Stuff".

 

Where do people get the impression that game development is somehow harder than any other field that requires a high level of education and experience? Game developers don't have to be any smarter than doctors, lawyers, scientists, or mathematicians. These are ordinary people with a reasonable IQ and the drive to pursue a profession requiring many years of preparation. Sure, there are a few technical geniuses and creative geniuses in the field, but those are hardly the norm.

 

I think it is harder than most when you think about solo development of a game, not because of the technical learning but because there are elements within every single game that you could spend a career training on(art, programming, marketing, toolchain, etc.) As opposed to a job that just focuses on one of those disciplines. Working in a team makes much more sense when you look at it like that.

 

Where I come from, "developer" is another word for programmer Usually someone with a computer science degree.. A one-man shop where the programmer also does art and level design and everything else, now that is another story. I wouldn't attempt that, personally.

 

They were, but test pilots were usually engineers and have aeronautics background. Test pilots were very intelligent and knowledgeable dudes. They were flying stuff that there was no manual for prior knowledge of, their deep knowledge of of aeronautics is what made them capable of flying in unknown conditions The astronaut corps were the were the uber elite (and survivors) of those test pilots. They knew and trusted the science with their lives, literally. It was a truly amazing time in the history of applied science.

 

Yeah I think it is a subtle difference but if someone says just developer I think programmer, if they say game developer I assume they are handling more than just programming. That is just my interpretation though. I agree with you that a programmers job is not inherently more difficult than any other skilled profession.

 

I wouldn't say it is harder being a game developer than other fields. The issue is that making a game is a very complex and time consuming process. Think of it like being a master carpenter. A very skilled and knowledgeable profession, but still building a house is complex and time consuming. One person could do it. Even if they didn't specialize in every field, they know enough to figure out the other parts, but still a difficult task to complete alone.

 

People often have varied descriptions of programmer/engineer/developer. We typically use the term developer to mean anyone that contributes content directly to the game. Engineers, artists, UI, and game designers in some cases are all developers. Producers, marketing, backend engineers,IT, and other support roles (which are all critical) are typically not referred to as developers.

 

Interesting, I will have to strike those preconceptions from my brain now

 

It's just one of those things that changes over time and even area. When I started in the software industry (in a different part of the country) developers specifically meant programmer. Engineer typicality meant mechanical or electrical. Here programmer is rarely used because most roles do some level of programming or coding.

 

Here's another one. Go to any industry or discipline and ask them what they think "design" is.

 

Ha! You're right, that is probably much more ill-defined defined than developer. I remember many years back, I had a producer who thought designer meant "person who makes icons".

 

This was an "engineer" to me as a child:

 

Just to add some more thoughts, I think a really big part of this is the assumption that dev teams are small.

For AAA games (the games that a vast majority of people seem to want to make), that is completely untrue.

I can relate this back to myself. When I first started coding, I was really excited to learn all the tricks that went into creating a game. I came in with the assumption that to be a game developer, you had to know everything. Modeling. Graphics. Programming. Level design. The whole works.

I quickly found that to be untrue. Learning to program takes enough time as it is, and people can only focus on so many tasks at once. When I first started out, I had no idea how many people it took to make a 'big' game. I had no idea that it took a solid twelve minutes to display all the names of people who put work into LOZ: Twilight Princess.

Many people generally assume that it only takes a few people to make an interactive open-world game with a satisfying plotline and interesting characters. And it's certainly possible. But extremely unrealistic, time-consuming, frustrating, tiring, and is probably the quickest way for a game to fail.

 

One of my colleagues once mentioned to a civil engineer that our team had consistently good results because we have someone who actually designs our software. (He wasn't implying that we were special, but that every software team should do that rather than kludging things together.) The engineer's response was something like "how does that help? Making your software look nice doesn't make it any more useful." My colleague then explained that our designer didn't focus on what things looked like, but on identifying problems and figuring out how the software could solve them or help humans solve them. The engineer's response was "Oh, that's not design, that's engineering."

Even in university the terminology was used similarly. I picked up a "design and engineering" course and the "design" parts focused on what things looked like ("design a new DVD player" was really just "present a DVD player differently"), with all of the functional stuff referred to as "engineering". In the software world, though, the terms often seem to be used interchangeably.

Personally, I see the jobs of both designers and engineers as being to solve problems. The main difference to me is that designers work in largely subjective areas ("what's a good workflow for X?"), where engineers work in pretty objective ones ("can this bridge support the required tonnage and motion?"). I suspect that "designer" gets a bad rap in some industries because it gets applied to people who aren't solving problems because the work looks similar to other people who do. For instance, I suspect that the term "graphic designer" gets used far too liberally. It's not just people who put together images. They're people who design images to communicate some message, and that's nowhere near as straightforward as it seems.

 

Hey now.. Don't be so harsh. All learning process.
At least these people are not open heart surgeons.

 

Right. I think non-engineers may also think technical design is still engineering, which I guess it still can be categorized as such, but it can be confusing.

Then you have your interior designers, mechanical designers, fashion designers, etc...

 

"Desktop publishing" ruined the term graphic designer. Web designer is also a meaningless term now.

 

designgineereloper

 

It's still not that quite clear cut even in engineering. I'm a Mechanical Engineer. I've worked for manufacturers on how to improve the production line flow, the product quality and have also designed parts/components for the products. I currently work as a consultant and still do design work as well as a myriad of other tasks.

The engineer designs the product, figures out how to make it work and analyses it for flaws and corrects any that are found. If it's a product that has to look good then it may go to a designer to make it look pretty. That may be done in conjunction with the engineer throughout the process or it could be done the opposite way and designer makes it pretty first...but that doesn't tend to go too well because then the product has flaws and doesn't work right anyway.

That said...an engineer can also be a designer. Just depends on how the workplace is setup. The designers I've worked with have all also been qualified engineers and can do the same job I do. Stuff just gets handed to them if it's a critical product that needs to look nice or be refined.

 

I'm more suprised that people don't seem to think it's pretty much been the same for the last sort of 2 / 3 decades.. My farther and his brothers used to make games on ZX spectrums back in the day, some of my uncles did and I've met a bunch of other people who did it at some point.

What is more unusual is people who keep it up long term, it's a bit like most people picking up the guitar. They usually get pretty good at it then life gets in the way / they get bored and move onto something else then the next generation takes over.

Hobby / indie development has been a big thing for a long time, the only real change is being allowed to publish on some of the biggest game outlets like steam..

 

Indeed. Back in my GG days the indie community there was pretty large. Tons of people making games, very few finishing, few any good, but still plugging away at it. Always noobs just downloaded torque and ask how to make a big game and looking for collaboration. Always complaining about the engine. The ratios were pretty much the same but gaming in general was smaller then. The only big difference was, as you pointed out, there wasn't a clear path to market. Mostly the goal was to make it good enough to interest a publisher.