Hacker Remix

What I Learned Failing to Finish a Game in 2024

103 points by grgaln 6 days ago | 72 comments

hypertexthero 3 days ago

While thinking of making a game I’ve found these helpful:

1. The Art of Game Design, A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell - https://schellgames.com/art-of-game-design

2. 20 Tips on Making Games by Jordan Mechner - https://www.jordanmechner.com/downloads/library/20tips.pdf

3. Liz England’s blog - https://lizengland.com/blog/

ghostzilla 3 days ago

Jesse Schell's book is a great read beyond game design.

Thanks for the other links.

To leave something in return, here's something I read the other day and kept thinking about it (I'm designing on a PvP motion based game)

"In competitive games, there is little more valuable than knowing the mind of the opponent, which the Japanese call “yomi.”

As a side note, I would even argue that the “strategic depth” of a game should be defined almost entirely on its ability to support and reward yomi."

The Yomi Layer concept is a reminder that moves need to have counters. If you know what the opponent will do, you should generally have some way of dealing with that.

https://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/7-spies-of-the-mind

snapcaster 3 days ago

I have tons of friends that took his classes at CMU, as much as everything he says sounds good I don't know a single person that has ever enjoyed a game he made. Because of that, I have to assume what he says is either fluff or wrong even if i can't perceive why exactly

ghostzilla 3 days ago

That's interesting, it hasn't occurred to me to check his games. That said, I remember reading that Machiaveli was once given a territory to govern and he was terrible at it, despite The Prince. It may be a thing about teachers vs doers.

THAT said, there is a lot of intersting things one can learn from John Carmack, so there's an exception to every rule.

snapcaster 3 days ago

>That said, I remember reading that Machiaveli was once given a territory to govern and he was terrible at it, despite The Prince.

this is a great articulation of what i'm trying to say thanks

daseiner1 3 days ago

Obviously you’d be a better judge than I am given your inside knowledge, but your comment reminds me of the many virtuoso musicians who don’t really make music people like. There’s a gap between technical ability and taste, artfulness.

snapcaster 3 days ago

It's not that he's making games too avant garde or something that might be going over my head. His company just makes corporate slop, not a single enjoyable game amongst them

no_wizard 3 days ago

I feel a great deal of the games Schell produces are for clients (like ports) or serve as a more in-depth proof of concept.

I think the client work pays the bills though, looking at their catalog.

snapcaster 3 days ago

Yep, but that's a totally separate thing from making good games

dowager_dan99 3 days ago

Usually but not always. There have been some great corporate projects, but it does feel like they are less common now than say 10+ years ago, and typically neat twists on existing successes vs. unique ideas

snapcaster 3 days ago

Discourage reading Jesse Schell if you want to make _good_ games instead of corporate slop. He's never made a game you like or anyone you know likes. Agreed everything he says sounds great but then why hasn't he made any good games?

diggan 3 days ago

> Agreed everything he says sounds great but then why hasn't he made any good games?

Quick browse of the portfolio on that website (https://schellgames.com/portfolio) seems to show multiple games that has won awards. All their original games seems to have "Mostly Positive" or above on Steam as well.

What metric are you judging this developer by? I can't say I've played/seen any of those games myself, but clearly they seem to be putting out some games that people play and enjoy.

snapcaster 3 days ago

The fact that i'm a huge gamer, and have a huge friend group of them but nobody plays his games. It's just crazy to me this guy gets a shout out by hordes of people that don't play them. I doubt anyone upthread recommending his book plays any of them regularly

no_wizard 3 days ago

The titles skew non 'gamer gamer' toward casual gaming though. Like some of these titles I could see being great on phones, for example.

I don't know their internal metrics by any means, but none of these games look 'hardcore', they all seem casual

snapcaster 2 days ago

So you've never played his games, but for some reason you are assuming they're good? why? why is everyone so desperate to lend this man authority without any personal experience on something you can evaluate yourself so easily

diggan 2 days ago

> The fact that i'm a huge gamer, and have a huge friend group of them but nobody plays his games

Yeah, same here. But my conclusion from that would be "I'm not the target market", not "Those games are clearly shit because neither I or my friends play them".

Again, looking at the games, they've won awards + are highly rated by people playing them. You just think those people are wrong for liking the games, or something?

snapcaster 2 days ago

Look there are countless game designers making shovelware crap. I don't fault them at all, what annoys me is people pointing to him as an authority when those same people don't even play the game. Even here you're just assuming someone somewhere does, why not pay attention to game designers that make games you enjoy yourself?

Vermeulen 3 days ago

I Expect You To Die, Among Us VR, Until You Fall. All good stuff

snapcaster 2 days ago

You're the first person I've ever interacted with that has personally enjoyed one of his games! Your comment is forcing me to slightly update my beliefs thanks. how many hours have you played them?

Trasmatta 3 days ago

One of the reasons I got into software development was that I wanted to make some games (even just small ones that I release for free).

I've now been coding for like 14 years, and I still haven't done it (besides a number of prototypes). And I'm so burnt out on writing code that I never have the mental energy to push through and get one done.

diggan 3 days ago

> I've now been coding for like 14 years, and I still haven't done it (besides a number of prototypes). And I'm so burnt out on writing code that I never have the mental energy to push through and get one done.

I was basically the same. Played video games before programming was even on my mind, and first exposure to programming/structured data was trying to mod GTA Vice City vehicles, and then eventually got drawn into programming while trying to game dev by night basically.

On and off I've tried Gamemaker, Unity, Phaser, Godot, Unreal Engine and everything in-between, for the last two decades or something. It always end up the same, game logic so complicated I can't make head or tails of it anymore, and it was really hard to decouple things enough so I could be as confident editing game logic as I am reading/editing other types of codebases.

So I never really got anywhere, until I found Bevy. I'm not particularly fond of Rust, way too verbose and strict for my taste, but ECS turned out to be a god-send for organizing game code (in my case). Suddenly writing decoupled game logic became a breeze, and since discovering Bevy (but really ECS gets most of the credit here), I've even shipped some games during game jams that I'm moderately proud off and placed well in the ranking compared to my expectations.

If you're of similar traits that you need code to be of a certain quality to be able to effectively work with it, ECS might be up your alley too, and worth a try if you haven't already. It made a huge improvement in terms of how flexible the architecture end up being, and made it a lot easier to incrementally work on games.

snarf21 3 days ago

I have a suggestion for you. Try making a board game instead. No complex technology to learn, way different than already being burnt out from coding all day, you can iterate on the fly by writing on your prototype, some can be tested solo (but having some friends come over once a week isn't insurmountable and is very social), lots on online testing available using "no rules" engines that let you just move "objects" around (a little tech to learn but done in a few hours), etc.

If if your game never gets published, etc. you could have a game that you and your friends got countless hours of enjoyment from. I personally get a lot of enjoyment from it. Good luck!

rcfox 3 days ago

Heh, I started working on a board game with a couple friends and then got caught up reading card descriptions from a shared Google Spreadsheet and generating images to work with Tabletop Simulator.

It's a different kind of work from my usual though, and it was fun to see my friends in awe that they could write arbitrarily many new cards and almost instantaneously see them in the game.

dxuh 3 days ago

I think putting off polish for later as the OP and multiple comments here recommend is a fallacy. There are many popular, successful games that would just not be fun if they didn't have good animations, no effects and everything was boxes. Every game that relies on "feeling good to play". It might be fine for an RPG or an RTS, but it's probably not for something like Overwatch or Doom (the new ones). Just imagine Vampire Survivors without sound or effects. Some games live off the art style alone. This is a very controversional opinion, but I think if e.g. Ori and the Blind Forest had bad art, no one would have played the game. Some games you can evaluate really well with bad art and no juice or polish, other games need some and there are even games that need a lot of it, before you know if they can be fun. It's not that simple imho. I remember working on games that were not really fun until I added some effect and suddenly it was really addicting. People like flashing lights and noises and pretty pictures. If good, unique or interesting art was irrelevant, no one would invest in it, but people do.

cartoffal 3 days ago

> Just imagine Vampire Survivors without sound or effects.

I can't help but feel that this completely undermines your point - Vampire Survivors is bashed together using rudimentary knockoffs of sprites from games from the 1990s, in an engine which barely supports the idea of particles let alone proper visual effects.* It is the gameplay that carries Vampire Survivors, not the aesthetic.

Game feel is of course essential to producing a good game all-round, but a competent game designer can and will tell the difference between a good game design and a bad one, way before polish and juice are layered on top.

*I don't say this as a criticism - Vampire Survivors is fantastic - but the idea that it's propped up by its look is just daft.

meheleventyone 3 days ago

The point of the OP (which I agree with) with is that the gameplay and the aesthetic are not orthogonal to one another. Even with Vampire Survivors which is not strictly beautiful the aesthetics are a big part of the gameplay. Largely the visuals and audio need to do several things:

- Make the game legible. A good example would be to reduce the whole game to boxes, you still need to differentiate things, so you might want to color them. Aesthetics in support of gameplay to make the game understandable.

- Add 'game feel'. This is where audio is especially important as you tend to notice the lack of good audio rather than its presence. But also 'juice', animations and what not all layer in.

- Support the fantasy. The name Vampire Survivors carries expectations that boxes do not match.

If you've ever done a lot of playtesting with your target audience one thing you'll find is that missing these elements gives you much worse feedback. Most notably legibility because it's so integral to being able to play a game but the others as well.

Game designers to an extent can get past this but it's still an attempt at extrapolation which is necessarily less concrete. Also if you're new to making games then you're going to make it harder to judge your own work.

The good thing about Vampire Survivors as an example is it shows that you don't need to do much but enough.

camtarn 3 days ago

Overwatch was prototyped by making levels out of plain boxes, using character models ripped from a previous game, then iterating until the game mechanics were fun. Of course, it then received many layers of polish before it was launched, but nonetheless the devs prioritised getting the basics right first.

The dev team had just come off developing Titan, a cancelled MMO where they had trouble making the core game loop engaging after seven years of development, so they had a lot of motivation to start small and make something good first, then polish later.

jon-wood 3 days ago

I don't think anyone is suggesting to ship a version to actual customers without some polish, but foregoing polish is good advice. I've attempted to make games on several occasions and my current is the first to stick because I intentionally decided not to worry about aesthetics too much at first, that allowed me to quite rapidly get to something that's fun to play, which in turn has motivated me to keep going. It also drastically reduces the pain of sunk costs when the entirety of your projectile system is a coloured box shooting spheres rather than a lovingly crafted gun model which isn't actually fun to use.

Having watched/read a few things about the white boxing stage the general advice is to put in as much polish as you need to do that and no more. If you're trying to prove out jump mechanics literally just some boxes for platforms and a sphere as the character is enough. If you're making a stealth game then you'll need some lighting in your level because it's a core game mechanic.

meiraleal 3 days ago

The idea behind postponing polishing is that if you can’t build a strong foundation using the skills you’re most comfortable with (coding), there’s little point in starting with the harder parts. It’s better to make as much progress as possible with the tools you already know, since the areas you’re less familiar with will require more research and move slower.

Most indie projects die before getting there.

EncomLab 3 days ago

The brutality of the marketplace is unlike any other - Steam has over 100k games in it's store, with 18k added just last year. Yes, as in anything there will be the breakout few which go on to generate fame and riches, but in general if you are a single or small group indie with little to no marketing budget you are unlikely to ever turn a profit. As the saying goes "just because you wandered through the desert does not mean there is a promised land."

robrtsql 3 days ago

It's definitely sobering. I don't necessarily want to make money (gamedev is what I would do if I _didn't_ need to eat) but it would be really cool to get some recognition, or even just have a community of 100 people who _really_ liked and care about my game. Given the sheer amount of indie games out there (and the number of games that I see advertised yet give no thought to), it seems less and less likely to achieve that as time goes on. The best time to release your indie game is probably 15 or 20 years ago, when the barrier to entry was a little higher (thank goodness for all of the free tools we have today, but geez has it allowed a lot of competition to appear!).

dpig_ 2 days ago

A community of 100 players is totally achievable if you are willing to put some time and effort in on social media presence, like a YouTube channel. I worked on a small game and managed to host a Discord server with 40-50 members relatively quickly.

corimaith 2 days ago

Well the problem I feel is that there is a disconnect between game devs chasing success or even just love making games and the desires of the core gaming crowd.

The majority of games being released today are in a few crowded genres, that frankly the majority care very little for. Go outside that, the space for competition quickly dwindles that just a proper, non exceptional execution would be sufficient for success.

Take Project Wingman for example, considering there is literally only ONE other competitor in Ace Combat 7 for a modern arcade jet fighter game, it was very much axiomatic from the trailers alone that it would be successful, and it was.

The same thing with ELIN, or Forever Winter, Noita by the sheer virtue of ambition of their ideas, even a flawed execution may be sufficient to drive a loyal crowd.

Success is the conjuction between ambition and execution, and if we presume one is dedicated to execute, then there are plenty of ambitious ideas waiting to be realized. If someone tried to make a successor to Mirrors Edge, or mech game in the vein of ACFA, or an Anime-style FPS, and with decent execution, I would be very sure of their success. It has nothing to do with luck here.