Why is game development so time consuming ?

I was wondering about this for quite some time.
What do you guys think, why does it feel like you make no progress even though you worked for like 5 hours?

 

Most of the time its because when you don't have a plan, that's how it feels.

I would recommend you to have a project schedule with each tasks listed under it.

I am using Trello and I have listed most of the stuffs that I need to do and then I focus on one task at a time. Even doing that, sometime i still feel like i am lost, then I go back to trello with all tasks listed and start working on it again...

So have a plan, then you won't feel like you made no progress.

 

I realize the 5 hours was likely just an arbitrary number... but what were you working on during those 5 hours? What did you accomplish?

Keep in mind that learning takes a good amount of time. Generally the more experienced you are and the more foundation/framework you have already developed for previous games the faster you can develop. In the beginning when you have no experience and no foundation to build on and must do everything from scratch that will take the most effort and time to see results.

 

Because Scope and Experience.

 

It's really no mystery. Once you start breaking down a game into its elements, you realize there are thousands of details to take care of, and most things take more steps to do it than one would initially estimate. And especially to do it carefully, so it's not sloppy and unmanageable in the long run. And more often than not, things won't go smoothly... they just wont man, problems will arise from places you could never imagine. It all adds up to a bizillion working hours.

 

Well said. I am actually impressed by some of the games that come out of the weekend game jams by the lone wolf devs. I realize they might be sleeping as little as 4 hours per day but still that means they went from zero to whatever they ended up with in 40 hours or less. There are people who spend more time than that just thinking about what to make. But yeah considering 20 hours may have been wrestling with weird glitches and so forth some of the games are impressive.

 

Because time flies when you're having fun

 

You build a whole new world, that is kind of a complicated thing to do. Plus all the work that nobody sees, that is important for the end product.

 

Its because computers don't speak english. They speak binary. They have their own language. Higher level `languages` ie programming languages have sort of transformed into higher-level tools like the Unity Editor. It's still a language. There's still ways of expressing and talking to it. You have to still be a translator - translating what you want to happen into computer-speak or Unity-speak. That takes some time and effort, particularly if you're taking advantage of how the language (Unity editor) is mainly designed to best operate. If you're going out of the box or doing something more custom it automatically takes you lower down in the levels of language sophistication/interface and you have to make up for that with more translation work, which means more detail, more complexity, more time. I guess if you float on the surface of Unity and just use basic built-in stuff all the time and off-the-shelf stuff and asset store stuff and not much scripting you are probably overall more productive.

Often also the much more sophisticated, polished, higher-mind kind of ideas which may be the most beautiful ideas, have even more distance between them and the computer language, so they take even more translation time. Not to say you can't do it and when you do finish implementing these can be the most inspired amazing results. So you can think lofty thoughts and be inspired artistically etc but the `higher you go` the further away you get from the computer and now you have to bridge that gap. That takes more time. Really awesome beautiful ideas take a lot of extra layers of support to interface with the computer, laying a lot of groundwork etc. I guess the fastest solutions would be low-level ideas that aren't very lofty which automatically are very close to the way Unity most naturally wants to operate so that as little effort is needed to bridge that gap.

Like I had this idea for a platform puzzle kind of game which was way outside the box and the idea was very beautiful and simple and abstract. But simplicity actually requires a heck of a lot of complexity to express it in computer language, so it actually took me like 2 months just to implement a basic version of this idea which seemed like forever, with so many technical hurdles and issues to overcome. And then the end result actually worked and was beautiful. I have it shelved right now for other reasons but it's a good example of how the highest ideals can take the most work to make them actually function inside a computer.

 

Bit of an open ended question, it's like asking why is it so hard to build a car from scratch? What type of car? What engine? What technology? What fuel? What fluffy dice?

 

I already do this , but a lot of times I get tired of working on the same thing for a long time and I end up working on something that's more fun to do.

I think that's actually the main reason why i'm so slow. I didn't even realize this that much until now.

Very nice explaining. Thank you!
I'm writing a documentation about game development for school and gonna use a lot of this text. I really like it

 

Most worthwhile things take time to accomplish. It is either months or years of experience before you're able to create something in short time, or lots of time spent tinkering on the project.

Which is a good thing, because computers are DUMB. Communication with computer in english would be an infuriating experience for normal people.

 

I was wondering this myself. Anyone?

 

IIRC car or a small plane can be built in about 2 years by single person. Proper car and plane that flies.

A Mad-max style buggy can be probably build much faster than that probably in few months (or in just one month), if you already have basic mechanic tools, access to welder and enough cash to afford all the parts.

 

Very true. And no matter which scope the project is there may be virtually no learning (if it is something you have done many times) or a ton of learning (first time) that adds possibly double or even triple the amount of actual production time.

 

I think that missed the point a tiny bit, like as in what sort of game? Bit of a difference between flappy turds and Gerald the can't keep his pants on Witcher..

 

Odd. I seldom get five hours straight to work on a game. And yet I rarely, if ever, leave a development session having made no progress.

I know game dev is a long and complex process. But five hours with nothing to show for it? Means you are doing it wrong.

 

I am going to give you some simple advice from the business world. This is about getting projects done in an office, but it seems just as applicable to every piece of programming I've ever done. Ready?

If you spent five hours working and don't see that anything got accomplished, you either weren't working or you need to break your project process down into smaller steps.

It really doesn't matter whether you're handling client billing or writing a program for client billing: If you break your work down into small, manageable steps, you can see what is being accomplished and where the work is or isn't getting done. Did you complete a method/function? Check that off the list. Did you fill the customer's information into the spreadsheet? Check that off the list. It means you got something done.

You simply cannot look at a whole project or large section of a project and say, "Well, I worked on it for five hours and it's not done, so I got nothing accomplished." Things need to be more granular than that, even if it's only to be able to say, "I entered 300 of the 800 pages of data today."


Caveat: There will always be some periods of time that just feel wasted because you fail at what you were trying to accomplish. If you spend five hours looking for a bug or trying different ways of doing something in Unity, yet fail to find the bug or get the thing working, it's easy to feel like that was wasted time. However, I'd argue that it doesn't have to be that way. Five hours looking for a bug should have eliminated a lot of possibilities (and documented them for later hunting for that bug). Five hours trying and failing to make something work probably taught you a lot along the way.

 

Because:

 

Pink ones.

 

At times like these its worth channelling Edison.

 

Game development requires so much skill and knowledge in so many different disciplines that I'm always shocked and amazed whenever a single developer manages to put out a game on their own. As a student of art, I am intimately familiar with how long it takes to produce graphical assets for games. It takes a long time, and longer still if you want those assets to be very high quality. (extremely polished) And that's not even getting into animation, which is an enormous time-sink.

As long as it takes to get things done these days, it is still far better than it used to be. I remember having to spend six or seven hours just to get a single quad displaying in OpenGL with a texture stretched across it using C++. With engines like Unity, I can replicate the same functionality in minutes, maybe less. As time-consuming as this hobby is, it is at least getting quite a bit better than it used to be.

 

Better? Yes
Easier? Not really.

You still have to learn how to use the tools provided before you use the tools to do what you wanted to do in the first place, and that still takes time.

And I am amazed at myself for making my own RTS multiplayer network game and turning it into a developer tool instead of a game I had in mind.... >_> Talk about making games when you're doing tools development under the disguise of game development.

 

Because it's hard. Like building a house.
Gigi