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This is neat and I always find myself coming back to these sort of topics year after year, learning stuff I’ll never actually use, about how to make a video gam

This is neat and I always find myself coming back to these sort of topics year after year, learning stuff I’ll never actually use, about how to make a video game. I bet there’s a lot of people here like me who got into programming as a teenager because they wanted to recreate their favorite 2D video games, ending up having a useful career skill instead and almost no video games to show for it for lack of time. The issue was only made worse when the industry went toward much more math heavy 3D games which has logic my mind just can’t wrap its head around. Maybe that explains why Kickstarter and Steam saw a ton of retro 2D games in the past few years... some people just went for it.

psyc 9y ago
Have you tried Unity or Unreal? I think they're relatively easy for a programmer to get into, and they are great fun to tinker with as well as enormously powerful.
- _sdegutis 9y ago
  Yep. Started teaching Unity to my kids. I have neither the imagination nor the patience and time I had when I was their ages and wanted to make video games. Figured it’d be a better use of time to give them the tools and time and opportunity to try their hand at it. They’ve made some cool small things in it so far.
  - psyc 9y ago
    That's wonderful! I can only imagine the joy I would have had, if I'd had access to anything like Unity or Blender when I was about 12 or so.
fnayr 9y ago
> Maybe that explains why Kickstarter and Steam saw a ton of retro 2D games in the past few years I actually think (as someone with gamedev experience) that the explanation has to do with the difficulty of creating art assets for 3d games rather than complex math (as other users have pointed out, current widely used engines take care of mostly). Indeed, even indie games that are made in 3d generally take a low poly style as they are easier to make (and obviously easier to achieve performant results).
- megaman22 9y ago
  > the difficulty of creating art assets for 3d games As somebody who is a hobbyist at best, this is my biggest sticking point. Anybody can learn to slam together some pixel art in Paint, and even doing more advanced work in Photoshop is not out of reach with a little time and practice. But learning a 3D modeling tool is orders of magnitude harder - I've made a couple runs at Blender and older versions of 3D Max, and there's just so much to making meshes that look decent, and then you have to skin them. And then there is the question of adding animations. My hat is off to people who have developed those skills. My only hope is that technology to make this process easier will advance. I've seen some demos of people using their phone cameras to scan real objects and generate 3D models, but even if that worked perfectly, it appears to me that there would be a lot of work to process that into passable 3D art assets.
  - AJ007 9y ago
    It isn’t just that it is more difficult, it takes much longer to produce a final art asset. If you are doing a 3D game you won’t be able to get away with one artist, you’ll need a team. A good pixel or 2D artist may have more skill in many dimensions than an average 3D artist, but given the fidelity of what is being created they will be able to produce more in a given set of time. Ideally, as an independent game developer you want to have one artist. You can do that if you choose 2D.
  - Kagerjay 9y ago
    To my understand, some 3D artists are currently building things using VR to create the rough mesh layout, and fine tuning it after in a program like blender There's also modelmakers that scan real objects as well too
  - fsloth 9y ago
    "My only hope is that technology to make this process easier will advance." If you just want to source art assets using 'standard' definitions used in CG and games you a. Subcontract them b. Purchase them from some store or source free ones c. Use generator programs like Poser and any combination of those. If you want to learn modeling and art in general,you learn modeling. The trick is it's partly art, so unlike, say, woodworking, the number of free parameters to master is quite large.
meric 9y ago
Woah, my life story.
islanderfun 9y ago
It's eerily amazing that you just described me. Trying to keep the spark alive at 33. Hopefully one day.
- _sdegutis 9y ago
  32 here and I don’t think it’s going to happen for me and probably not my kids either realistically. But at least I got decent career skills out of it. So that’s how I’m trying to look at it.

psyc 9y ago

Have you tried Unity or Unreal? I think they're relatively easy for a programmer to get into, and they are great fun to tinker with as well as enormously powerful.

_sdegutis 9y ago
Yep. Started teaching Unity to my kids. I have neither the imagination nor the patience and time I had when I was their ages and wanted to make video games. Figured it’d be a better use of time to give them the tools and time and opportunity to try their hand at it. They’ve made some cool small things in it so far.
- psyc 9y ago
  That's wonderful! I can only imagine the joy I would have had, if I'd had access to anything like Unity or Blender when I was about 12 or so.

fnayr 9y ago

> Maybe that explains why Kickstarter and Steam saw a ton of retro 2D games in the past few years I actually think (as someone with gamedev experience) that the explanation has to do with the difficulty of creating art assets for 3d games rather than complex math (as other users have pointed out, current widely used engines take care of mostly). Indeed, even indie games that are made in 3d generally take a low poly style as they are easier to make (and obviously easier to achieve performant results).

megaman22 9y ago
> the difficulty of creating art assets for 3d games As somebody who is a hobbyist at best, this is my biggest sticking point. Anybody can learn to slam together some pixel art in Paint, and even doing more advanced work in Photoshop is not out of reach with a little time and practice. But learning a 3D modeling tool is orders of magnitude harder - I've made a couple runs at Blender and older versions of 3D Max, and there's just so much to making meshes that look decent, and then you have to skin them. And then there is the question of adding animations. My hat is off to people who have developed those skills. My only hope is that technology to make this process easier will advance. I've seen some demos of people using their phone cameras to scan real objects and generate 3D models, but even if that worked perfectly, it appears to me that there would be a lot of work to process that into passable 3D art assets.
- AJ007 9y ago
  It isn’t just that it is more difficult, it takes much longer to produce a final art asset. If you are doing a 3D game you won’t be able to get away with one artist, you’ll need a team. A good pixel or 2D artist may have more skill in many dimensions than an average 3D artist, but given the fidelity of what is being created they will be able to produce more in a given set of time. Ideally, as an independent game developer you want to have one artist. You can do that if you choose 2D.
- Kagerjay 9y ago
  To my understand, some 3D artists are currently building things using VR to create the rough mesh layout, and fine tuning it after in a program like blender There's also modelmakers that scan real objects as well too
- fsloth 9y ago
  "My only hope is that technology to make this process easier will advance." If you just want to source art assets using 'standard' definitions used in CG and games you a. Subcontract them b. Purchase them from some store or source free ones c. Use generator programs like Poser and any combination of those. If you want to learn modeling and art in general,you learn modeling. The trick is it's partly art, so unlike, say, woodworking, the number of free parameters to master is quite large.

meric 9y ago

Woah, my life story.

islanderfun 9y ago

It's eerily amazing that you just described me. Trying to keep the spark alive at 33. Hopefully one day.

_sdegutis 9y ago
32 here and I don’t think it’s going to happen for me and probably not my kids either realistically. But at least I got decent career skills out of it. So that’s how I’m trying to look at it.