12 hours ago, slayemin said:

The comparison to professional sports isn't very accurate to the discipline of game development.

 

I was more responding to the "playing games does not" statement of yours. And making a statement as becoming a PRO PLAYER, not a PRO GAME DEV to make money with playing games. As in e-sports.

But agreed, it was a "half troll statment" given the chances of making games with such a career... thus the sentence about the chances of that ever paying the bills.

14 hours ago, trjh2k2 said:

Have to disagree with that.  1-2 hours every day adds up quickly.  What you've said more or less amounts to "dedicate your life to this or give up" (even if that's not what you meant to say) which isn't really good or fair advice.

It is fair advice, if your paraphrasing is not taken too literally.

The people around me at my place of game development employment didn't get here by doing it 1 or 2 hours a day. Most of them got here by doing it full time, for 3 or 4 years, at university. The rest had to give up significant amounts of their free time while working other jobs, because that's what it takes to be able to compete against the ones who were doing it full time.

Obviously you can do something for an hour a day and get something useful from it. And if that routine is all someone wants to do, they can carry on. But in the context of people wanting to actually finish games and maybe secure a job doing this, the minimal approach just isn't enough. There is too much to learn and too many skills to practice to be able to coast along.

Hmm, see for me outside of work at the moment I only have a few hours a day (or less) that I can actually dedicate to game dev work, though on the weekends that goes up a lot of course.

But the reason for my lack of time is working full time as a software engineer, and finishing a part time Comp Sci & Maths Degree, so essentially.. so the extra time spent game dev wise while small for me right now.. I think is more than enough due to well.. the fact basically my entire day is living in code lol

5 hours ago, Kylotan said:

The people around me at my place of game development employment didn't get here by doing it 1 or 2 hours a day.

It comes down to what your goals are.  If you're doing this because you're a beginner or student expecting to turn it into employment in a reasonable amount of time, then yeah, you need to dedicate a good chunk of time to that.  But I was responding more specifically to:

22 hours ago, TheComet said:

It's really not enough to invest only 1-2 hours a day into coding and expect to improve beyond a basic Level.

The idea that learning and improving doesn't happen in smaller time spans isn't true.  2 hours a day spent on coding will absolutely help you improve.  Maybe not fast enough to get from beginner to professional in a short time, but it's still improvement.  Or the idea that projects can't be finished in small chunks also isn't true- I've finished projects (albeit slowly) by only putting a handful of hours in per week, let alone per day.

I'm actually doing this right now-  I have a small game project that I'm only putting in maybe 1-2 hours most days after work, and as much as progress is slow, it's definitely progressing.  And I'm absolutely learning things that I wouldn't otherwise know if I didn't spend this time on it.  Granted, I'm not a "beginner", but that's not really what the thread was started about- it was about balance.  The gist of the comment I was responding to was that you can't be good at making games (or coding in general) unless it's all you do.  And I disagree with that.

On 8/16/2017 at 0:32 PM, TheComet said:

Everything has pretty much been said, but I'd like to share an idle observation.

I'm fairly active in the GDNet online chat, enough to know pretty much everyone who talks there, and I've noticed that all of the people there who are good at making games are making games. Like, all the time. I've never seen them do anything else (be it gaming or other forms of goofing off).

Those that are struggling with improving their coding skills and have been stuck in the same spot for years and seem to be asking the same questions over and over in the chat are those that also play a lot of games in their free time (or are only there for the lolz). It's really not enough to invest only 1-2 hours a day into coding and expect to improve beyond a basic Level.

For me: I will immensely enjoy playing the occasional rare game. Half Life 2, Portal, StarCraft 1+2, WarCraft 3, Banjo Kazooie, to Name a few.

But I'm not the person who can play games for longer periods of time. Even with the examples I mentioned, I had to turn them off after about an hour and go back to coding. My default mode on the computer is to write code. Everything else I do I consider to be "goofing off".

You're saying everyone is like this? I make games and play my own games on Twitch. I speed run my own games which is quite odd but it motivates me because it gives my projects a purpose. Spending all of your time working can be boring. I just think programmers don't get enough sleep so their minds don't work right. Shouldn't even be an issue. Dividing time between coding and playing games should be easy.

Not sure if this has been said. Should you play games if you are a game developer? My answer to that question is YES, ABSOLUTELY YES.

However, you don't just play games. As you are playing the game, think of what are the things that can be improved with the game. Study the mechanic. Study the special effects, the sounds, the music, the animation. Don't play like gamers who just want to max their settings and FPS.

I had stared at the

" rel="external">main menu of the first Gears of Wars for several minutes, just to study the background. When does the fire loop. What did they do with the skull logo. I had moved my mouse carefully on the first StarCraft just to find where the collision boxes are. One old fighting game allowed me to pause and move frame by frame, and I did it, just to study the effect when you got hit. Fighting games especially spend quite a lot of time fine tuning it to make fighting feel "right". Those punches feel like you hit something rather than just a weak flowing animation. Skipping/pausing animation frames, flashing screens, jitter the characters, little splash effects, the acceleration of the characters as they got hit with little dust animation on the ground.

These observations translate well into your career. One time I was able to use it for a hack-and-slash platformer game I made, and made swinging swords feel a lot better. I paused the animation for 20ms as it hit the enemy. If followed by another button press during that pause, cancel the rest of the animation, enter the next attack animation but skipped the first few frames making combo attacks faster. Try it on the recent Street Fighter games, you will see the difference. All these details are intentional and important, and make the difference between a hobbyist game vs professionally-made game.

TLDR: Basically, play games like you are their QA and designer.

This is very slightly off topic, but after reading all the posts here I'm wondering something:

What does everyone here think about AAA game designers vs. smallish indie developers in terms of the overall quality of the games they put out? So obviously AAA games have big teams and huge budgets, but indie games have innovation and 'passion' (the-hard-core-gaming-nerds-that-love-games-so-much-they-wanted-to-make-one that the OP seemed to be idolizing). Do you think the two categories can/do on average come out equal in overall quality? Do you seem to enjoy one more than the other, or do you think your like or dislike for a game has nothing to do with these categories? Do you think the AAA model is working, or a little broken?

(I'd just like to say also I realize not all indie games are made with passion, it's just that most of the ones that make it to the surface of the public's attention probably are)

On 10/8/2017 at 0:59 AM, MaliceEternal said:

How do you find time for learning more game dev, making your prototypes and balancing actual gaming and adult responsibilities?

You play a match of Dota 2 as first thing in the morning.

After it, you will be so frustrated by your team feeding and speaking to you in russian the whole time even though you all joined in a WestEU server, that you will be done playing for the rest of the day.

And then you are free to put all your effort and mind into your game just to forget that last match...

 

On 3.9.2017 at 1:43 PM, PicklePet said:

This is very slightly off topic, but after reading all the posts here I'm wondering something:

What does everyone here think about AAA game designers vs. smallish indie developers in terms of the overall quality of the games they put out? So obviously AAA games have big teams and huge budgets, but indie games have innovation and 'passion' (the-hard-core-gaming-nerds-that-love-games-so-much-they-wanted-to-make-one that the OP seemed to be idolizing). Do you think the two categories can/do on average come out equal in overall quality? Do you seem to enjoy one more than the other, or do you think your like or dislike for a game has nothing to do with these categories? Do you think the AAA model is working, or a little broken?

(I'd just like to say also I realize not all indie games are made with passion, it's just that most of the ones that make it to the surface of the public's attention probably are)

 

IMO, the big thing with AAA is not that the studios are NOT filled with the same passionate nerds as the Indie studios (though of course chances are higher that these nerds are just doing their job there and are not looking to fullfill their dreams in an AAA studio)...

The thing (you could call it a "problem") is that the people making the shots in big AAA studios are either driven by economical factors (shareholders, higher profits, lower risks), are playing it way too safe (which, given you have a big company to feed with many jobs at risk, is a good thing, for the company and devs), or, worst of all, have actually no idea of games and a pretty bad impression of gamers.

Many of the execs in game studio are not "gamers", nor are they developing products for their customers. They are trying to generate revenue to feed their shareholders and to bump their own bonus to bigger numbers. Satisfying the customer comes dead last after all the tricks in the books to squeeze more money out of them. Yes, its a business. Even then, a business should serve its clients, not just its shareholders...

 

EDIT: Oh, and lets not forget the exploding budgets. A game costing 500m$ is an impossibly high risk, that HAS to generate billions of $ in return (thus the greedy money grabbing schemes are kind justifiable when you think about it), and that kind of risk will only be taken on very proven concepts (thus leading to endless sequels). Its not ALWAYS the fault of greedy execs when games are underwhelming and overpriced. AAA Game dev on the "cutting edge" is just getting too expensive for 60$ games. These games probably should cost 120$ to start with so they don't have to appeal to everyone and their dog (thus are only overpriced when you apply the rules of games always costing 60$ to them... getting a collectors edition for 120$ with some gadgets, and an extre nice box is good value when the normal price should be around 120$, and having to pay another 60$ in DLC to get the full game is just bumping the price up to the expected 120$), and have to cut all kind of edges to fit into a still too tight budget while delivering an overambitious scope.

Its kinda hard to say who is at fault here, its a chicken and egg problem really.

 

One of the reason why so many AAA devs at some point in their career try to go Indie to finally work on a game that isn't just some kind of online casino or try to squeeze the last penny out of players without giving them the awesome play expierience they deserve for that.

 

Its the same thing with the Movie industry, and lucky for us as gamers, there are both the silver linings of new IPs that have something to prove (HZD or the first Borderlands come to mind), or the few lucid moments when bosses realize that "good games sell" *gasp*. Or the times a dev gives a cult classic that was just not good enough for the masses another shot, and nails it (Nier Automata comes to mind).

In the end, the problem is not really the bad average quality of AAA games pushed to market today... problem is the stupidity of customers. Preorder Culture and people buying into online moneymaking schemes have made the AAA devs fat and bold to try always new ways to screw their customers, yet some gamers seem unable to learn. Its simple: Never pre-order (unless the dev is a small Indie and the game probably will not happen without kickstarter or paid Beta... ehr... "early access", and you REALLY want to see the game realized), never spend money on F2P games (unless the game gives you the value you expect for the money you invest. Good games should get your money, F2P or not), never buy DLC (unless you get good value for your money again). Never even buy games that chop content off into multiple DLCs (Unless the base game alone is worth your money without the stuff gated behind DLC Paywalls).

Give games at least 6 months to ripen in the market and get their release day bugs ironed out. If they do not get ironed out, spend your money on AAA devs that are more professional and actually finish their products they are trying to sell.

 

21 hours ago, PicklePet said:

What does everyone here think about AAA game designers vs. smallish indie developers in terms of the overall quality of the games they put out?

"Overall quality" is an impossibly vague metric.