I''ve been into programming for a while now and starting exploring the game development area. And i was just wanted to know how come most games created by programmers here and other places don''t have graphics that look like games such as maybe a Vice City or NFL Madden? Is it very hard to accomplish something at that level or just takes too much time to do without a large development team, or both? I was interested in knowing this, becasue i would possible like to be able to create games like those.

It''s probably because professional games have large teams, really good artists, colossal budgets, and professional programmers.

The majority of indie projects have small teams (or one person alone), if the programmers are lucky they might get a decent artist, they have little or no money to spend, and they are probably still learning skills that professional programmers have already mastered.

It seems pretty obvious to me.

Both

So is the videogame indsutry hard to get into? Alot of people make it seem like it is, but i don''t see how it could be too hard since the videogame industry is growing so fast.

Eh, I don''t know...

Yes.

I applied to become an XBox developer. They want details of 3 previous commercial releases (that I''ve been involved in). Needless to say, as an Indie that''s just not feasable.

Superpig
- saving pigs from untimely fates, and when he''s not doing that, runs The Binary Refinery.

To superpig,

We recently got accepted as Xbox developers and one thing I would like to note is that the devkit costs about $10.000 - so besides experience you also need some dough to throw after it.
In short, console development is not feasible unless you are part of a company.

To Syntaxxed,

Where I work we about 15-20 people and we do create a engine and graphics on par with the top games out there. So don''t forget the professionals are reading the forums here too (alhtough most people here are indies) - we just don''t post it on the web for everybody to see since we have to earn some money.

Getting into the game industry is not as easy as getting into many other IT industries but it isn''t impossibly hard either. Get a good degree in computers, learn all you can about games and you will succeed eventually if you work hard enough.



Jacob Marner, M.Sc.
Console Programmer, Deadline Games

quote: Original post by felonius
To superpig,

We recently got accepted as Xbox developers and one thing I would like to note is that the devkit costs about $10.000 - so besides experience you also need some dough to throw after it.
In short, console development is not feasible unless you are part of a company.

That would be the incubator program, right? Where they give you a machine as part of the package... I was applying for the XBox Prototyping Kit, which I''ve heard is just a word document detailing how to set up your build environment for XBox development (i.e. stuff you can/can not use, etc.)


Superpig
- saving pigs from untimely fates, and when he''s not doing that, runs The Binary Refinery.

indies....i''m guessing like ...independants?

i would like to make games like Gran Turismo or Madden one day....

The sad part about big games is that you would likely only work on the AI, or the menu interface, or different parts like this, its nothing like being independant

10k for the xbox dev kit? Isnt'' that cheap? i thought the ps2 dev kit used to be 22k