Does Art or Coding Take More Time for an Indie Game

I've been interested in games programming since I started learning programming as a teenager more than 25 years ago (gasp!)

I started with Qbasic and Gorillas.bas, but never understood the code.

Of course, I didn't get anywhere at the time, beyond very bones games. I wrote a simple Shoot the UFO type game in Basic (later ported to C). All it had was a UFO moving left and correct across the screen, and you could shoot a bullet at it. The biggest problem in the game: The UFO would finish moving as the bullet was fired, as I didn't know the concept of groundwork processing. Which meant the game was stupidly easy to win.

And for the next xv-20 years, I didn't brand much progress across that. Certain, I learnt background processing, just the games didn't become any more complex. Game coding was difficult.

Enter Unity / Unreal / Godot

Last five-10 years, we've had a bunch of tools to make games programming piece of cake. Unreal and Unity are industry standards, Godot is racing to catch up with them. It suddenly became easier to make games, as these tools did a lot of the heavy lifting for yous. Level design, physics, collision detection, player animation – a lot of the things we did with lawmaking tin now be done by the tools.

Not only that, these gaming platforms come up with a lot of prebuilt examples yous can only copy and use. Fifty-fifty Godot comes with an awesome 3d shooter demo:

Unity is the top player here– you tin can purchase total skeletons for whatsoever game y'all desire to make– all the code done for you, only tweak for your own use case.

So making games is now like shooting fish in a barrel right?

The sad truth – most developers will never finish their game

I myself accept abandoned ii dozen games, in platforms ranging from PhaserJs to Unity to Godot.

Browsing online forums, it looks like I'chiliad not lonely. Most people never end games. I've seen beautiful demos, that developers spent multi-years working on and then just abandoned. I asked i guy when he sent me the files to his concluding game (on Google bulldoze, no less): "This is crawly! Why don't yous release it? At least put it on Github?"

His answer: He had abandoned the games months ago. Merely didn't intendance anymore.

I struggled with Unity for a long time before discovering Godot. Godot is crawly, information technology is very easy to get started with (at least for 2nd games).

Hither's what I institute in my ain journey: No matter how easy the tools brand complex things the simple truth is: Games programming is nonetheless a lot of piece of work

Even designing and completing a whole level is tons of work. Even worse, it looks similar never ending work.

Information technology took me just a month to go a simple mechanism in my game working– the player throws a grenade and the enemy tin can kicking it dorsum.

Granted, information technology took a month because:

a) I'grand nevertheless learning Godot

b) I accept limited fourth dimension to work on this in the evenings.

c) I plant a lot of gotchas in how Godot works– things you lot only learn past doing

Now, some of this stuff might become easier over fourth dimension.

But however– this is only one enemy. Ideally, you demand multiple enemies with their own quirks/attacks, coins, environmental hazards (like spikes), parallax (moving backgrounds) etc

And my biggest fear– designing a whole level but seems similar a nightmare; maybe because I've never done it before, peradventure cause my design skills suck.

When I looked at how much piece of work there is just to create one simple level, I tin can understand how people tin can spend months/years on a elementary game, simply to abandon it.

The skills are not transferable

So I spent a lot of time learning the quirks and gotchas of Godot (and before that, Unity). Here is the trouble though: these skills aren't transferable.

And worse, they have fiddling to no market value.

What practise I hateful past this?

I as well spent some time learning about AWS(and still learning and crying. Is information technology normal to cry when learning 'bout Aws?).

Information technology'due south a huge ugly monster with dozens of keywords (buzzwords?). You spend half dozen months passing an AWS examination, and all you have learnt is how AWS works.

Except– some of these skills transfer. IAM might be an AWS specific tool, but similar tools exist for Azure, GCP and every other platform, and the concepts volition transfer.

I had already managed Linux servers, and so working with EC2 servers wasn't that big a learning bend.

So even though AWS has a steep learning curve, those skills can be used elsewhere.

Not then with game engines

You learn the quirks of how Godot handles a physics object colliding with a player object, it doesn't help you at all in Unity. And vice versa.

Plus, the gaming manufacture is very exploitative and low paying, and so it's not like y'all are learning any "in demand" skills. Your boring programmer maintaining a 10 twelvemonth sometime Coffee app written with vanilla Js earns more than most game programmers.

And information technology isn't whatever amend for indie devs– most indie games (I don't take any statistics on manus, just my feeling based on talking to other devs) rarely make plenty coin to even justify the toll of their game assets, allow alone their own coding fourth dimension.

Gaming, similar Hollywood, is a hit-driven industry, where a few big players accept in xc-95% of the profits, while most others barely survive.

Games Programming is more than merely lawmaking monkeying

To exist a games developer you lot have to know near art, music, AI, level design, dialogue, story, just to mention a few.

Certain y'all can outsource or buy fine art (and there are dozens of complimentary resource). And it's non like most games have much of a "story".

Sample video game story: Evil gubbamint has taken over, rather than fighting elections, take this machine gun and kill everyone (which might exist how things work in America, from what nosotros hear).

But you as the developer still demand to know the nuts of these. Even if you lot end up ownership art/music, you lot demand to empathize how it works in your genre of gaming.

Peculiarly for an indie dev– you lot are more than than simply a lawmaking monkey. Yous will have to know a bit of everything. And even in traditional gaming, nearly developers seem to know more than than their narrow field of coding (just my impression from interviews etc).

A tldr of why games programming is so difficult

• Completing a full game tin take years
• It's hard work– and I mean this literally. Hours and hours of coding
• There is no treasure at the stop of this rainbow: You tin can spend years with nothing to show for information technology
• Information technology's like shooting fish in a barrel to lose heart and just quit. Or movement to a different game, different engine, endeavour some other library etc

And that is the harsh truth of game programming: Recent technologies have made the process much easier and smoother, merely it'southward still a lot of work, and it's very like shooting fish in a barrel to become disillusioned and surrender.

If anyone has a good solution, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts.

cornejoshou1971.blogspot.com

Source: https://new.pythonforengineers.com/blog/the-harsh-truth/

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