[Discussion] What is the hardest part of making a game?

Is it making content? Is it programming.

Personally, I find the hardest part of making a game is building … the menu’s. Any GUI the user has to interact with takes a long time to build, even when I have a scaffold to build it on.
For example:

  • Five hours of work on my game yesterday and today. Progress: Now supports multiple player profiles. All of 10 buttons on the GUI:


    I predict another 30-40 hours to do the options menu.

The other hard part, of course, is staying motivated. My remedy is to work on some fun stuff every now and then. Take a break from the coding, and play around with modeling or texturing:




(Note that that is not 5 hours of work, that’s 5 minutes of playing with models doodled, drawn, modeled and textured over perhaps 20 hours.)

So what do you find the hardest part of making a game is?

The barrier that takes longest for me is the characters. Any elements that needs a good structure to be animated easily takes longest time and is something that I need to study further.

rigging, animating

Experimentation of concepts, for gameplay mechanics,

for UI I have been using ‘replace mesh’ for my hud, when the game is in a menu state, I will apply transforms and replace meshes on the Hud to morph it into the menus,

The hardest part for a game developer is STICKING with a project.
99% of the projects in the work in progress thread will never be touched again, thats work that people have simply given up on, found game development to be too time consuming etc.

I never set out in life to be a web developer. I really enjoyed web development as a hobby and always went about building new projects and expanding my skills. I would build a website - start to finish just to gain the experience. Now I work full time as a website developer and its great - I find the work easy and still enjoyable.

My point is this, I was not BORN a website developer, the same way members of Pearl Jam were not born as a great band. All skills in life take alot of time. All game (sucsessful) game developers start out small, and they start out working on projects they find fun.

The reason many of our new users leave before they finish a project is because they all want to be a ‘Notch’ - They don’t realise the guy was programming when he was 13, they only see the small picture - Minecraft and want to replicate it.

I honestly think this is the most difficult thing for game devs (more so in this community than any other I am a part of) to realise. Everyone gives up if they cannot make the game they want first time around and its a big big shame.

The hardest part for me is to go to the end of a project. Especially when I encounter difficulties and find solutions to virtually alone. I have at least a dozen unfinished projects. That’s a shame in my view.
Now I’m focused on a project mini game of zombie theme (yes, it’s cliche, but I like to blow zombie brains.: D) The reality is that it is adding a tutorial on the many skills which even imagined.

First and hardest priority:
Collecting and sorting your ideas and procedure.
Beginning your better-than-crysis FPS (quoted from PlantPerson :D) by making a gun model and pasting a mouselook script blindly won’t get you anywhere. And usually ends up by the user migrating to another engine because setting up a god rays filter is easier in the other engine.

Second hardest:
Making it deserve a post saying “Good work”. Keeping the dev logs updated regularly and formatted interesting enough to get someone to actually read it.

@Mperonen and RockyMadio:
Yup, trying to create meshes with nice topology does take a long time. My somewhat dumb solution to that was to only create games without human/animal characters. It greatly reduced the requirements for topology. That said, I do still have to retopo some of my hard-surface models.

@Blueprint:
Creating the graphical part of a menu isn’t the hard part. I made that weeks ago. It’s going through and coding up the interactions that’s the hard bit.

And I totally agree with AllanOcelot and firefox.jco. Keeping motivation for a project, and making sure your project is realistically achievable is probably the defining problem in the indie game scene.

Everyone gives up if they cannot make the game they want first time around and its a big big shame.

Hmm. I didn’t quite fit this one. The game I first wanted to make, well, it’s very very similar to the one I’m currently working on. It’s in it’s third iteration though (Defender, DEEP Space, and current version). I think I have the required skills and experience though.

Especially when I encounter difficulties and find solutions to virtually alone.

Now I find that really interesting. Because I’ve discovered it as well, and suspect a lot of the more experienced BGE’ers on the forum have as well. As soon as you get to a certain ability, you become the ‘expert’ in that part of the BGE. And all of a sudden, if you have a problem with it, there’s no-one that can help you with it. Martinish is the shader-expert. I don’t think anyone could understand any of the problems he must encounter when he writes a shader. Agoose is the networking expert. Again, if he needed help on a topic, no-one here could figure out what his difficulty was. It probably happens in real life as well. No-one could help Einstein with relativity because he was the expert on it.
In the end, a persons project is a persons project. They can get help on parts of it, but most of the work and problem solving has to come from the person working on it. And I think that’s what new users don’t understand:

  • There will be problems in development that no-one can help you with.

For me, the hardest part is to ‘balance’ & satisfied those everything (not in order) to become a complete game:

  1. Gameplay, scoring, levelup, etc.
  2. Models
  3. AI
  4. Animation & rigging
  5. VFX
  6. Menus & UI
  7. Texturing
  8. etc.

I have thrown away thousands of “tests” of gameplay mechanics,

When forging a sharp sword, it’s the sum of all of the hard work that adds up to a working product.

I agree the most important part is not giving up, and starting a project you love.

developing around issues only you understand has almost become my specialty…

I can’t wait till I finish wrectified,
I will then set about making

Universal Weapon System

Universal Inventory System

Universal Hud creation kit

Universal Map creation manager

all of these will use Python, and logic to be efficient flexible and self contained, so newbs will not start at Zero…

The hardest part about making a game is actually making the game.

Hi I Hope you are having a good day.

For me the hardest part of making a game is doing the things necesarry to make a game that you don’t enjoy doing,game development requires a lot of very different skills some of which might not be your speciality. Take me for instance I love coding I can do it all day even though it gets frustrating when I can’t get things to work. but I feel Like I am killing myself when It comes to modelling and texturing I just don’t enjoy as a result it tends to become difficult.

The concept is hardest for me, or at least finding a concept that is possible for me to do. But I found that the best concepts come during our day to day lives, and to find something odd or interesting in our lives and make it into an original game.

Fredstash

ps. I look forward to releasing my latest game “Racing Ryan” on WIP soon.

Staying motivated. Not getting burned out. Not setting your bars too high and letting feature creep overwhelm you.

That’s right.

The hardest part about making a game is actually making the game.

I think what you mean is: The hardest part is to finish the game. And i totally agree :slight_smile:

The hardest part for me is integrating the different elements of the game.

I’ve got the models and armatures, fully textured, rigged and animated.
I’ve got a movement system.
I’ve got an navigation and AI system.
I’ve got an inventory system.
I’ve got a level creation system.
I’ve got tilesets, modeled, textured and organized for placement.
I’ve got a UI and menu system.
I’ve got a combat and particle system, (though it needs to be partially rewritten for the project in question).

But when I try to put them together, that’s when I get to the point where I can’t visualize the whole code in my head all at once. It’s possible with the various elements to know and understand them completely on their own, but when they start meshing together you have to understand how they fit, why they sometimes don’t fit, how to make them fit and when, finally, they just aren’t going to fit and you need to go back and rework one of them. Because of the time that has elapsed since I last worked on any one part of the project, there are things I’ve forgotten, things I now know how to do better, big mistakes I made but didn’t see at the time… it all adds up to make the project a bit too complex to get my head around.

I know I could make compromises, make parts of the project much simpler (for example making it real time instead of turn based), but then I wouldn’t be making the game I want to make. I just can’t muster up the motivation to make a game that I’m not interested in playing myself, and so I prevaricate. Hoping that if I polish up one of the individual systems enough, make it shiny and streamlined enough, it’ll fit together much better.

There have been times in the past, before I was married, before I was a father, when I could sit down for a week and push through such a blockage and make something that worked fully. But these days the most time I get in one sitting is about two hours, and that’s just not enough time to really devour the individual elements, digest them and regurgitate a working game.

Anyway, I’m off to put some more polish on a couple of systems, I’m pretty sure this time I’ve got them just right… :slight_smile:

…me: always forgetting sfx & music.

I think it depends on the skillset of the people, for me it’s animating and programming, I’m getting the hang of animation but programming will always be hard for me and animation requires a lot of patience.

Animating humans, zombies, monsters, animals etc so they look real, is the hardest thing for me. A feat that I fear I may never achieve. here’s hoping that MoCap becomes affordable for the hobbyist. :slight_smile:
I wonder how hard it will be to get my cat in a Mocap suit.