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"The way games are made now is fundamentally flawed," he responds. "If I was a betting man, I’d imagine that in the future, this business of getting more than a

"The way games are made now is fundamentally flawed," he responds. "If I was a betting man, I’d imagine that in the future, this business of getting more than a hundred people together for three, four years will look really odd. It's so incredibly expensive. I predict that we'll see a core of deeply talented people working on games beforehand, then a big team comes together for a brief period of time." So, I say -- game design is moving toward something sort of like a movie, with years of preproduction by a small team, then a big production with set designers and key grips that only lasts a couple of months? "Yes, exactly." If you can solve this problem, you will transform the face of the game industry and usher in a new era of creativity in the face of the current method of massive teams and budgets. Is it a good idea for a startup? Beats me. It's a large, open question. I don't have an answer as to how to approach a solution. Yet.

as 18y ago
Agreed. I'd personally love to design a game world and story, but am not willing to devote 4 years of my life to just making something rudimentary.
- marvin 18y ago
  There's a host of interesting startup ideas in this field, most related to 3D graphics. We need higher levels of abstraction for creating textures, architecture/models, decoration etc. The tools we have today are awfully rudimentary, and there's research indicating that much better solutions are possible. See for instance http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Documents http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Docum... - a higher-level language for describing architecture. In the marketplace there are things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedTree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedTree, which is already in use in a great number of games. It is obvious that we could create a huge amount of tools to this purpose, and also that there is a huge market for software that makes game development easier. What's the sense in creating the 5000th 3D model of a human? Humans don't change that much. Not even fictional bipeds do. Have you ever heard a game developer or pundit complain about 'spiraling costs' for game development? It's because human developers have more and more work to do to make the games keep track with developments in hardware. It should be obvious to anybody that this development isn't sustainable; there's no way every room of a game designed by humans can have even as much detail as the room I'm sitting in right now. But most of this architecture is predictable, and could probably be generated by the right program. Consider a lower bound of game development costs for this 'generation' of consoles at 3 million dollars. If even five percent of that cost could be eliminated by better development tools, that would mean savings (and potential for profit!) of 150,000 dollars. But the potential savings from automating menial modeling tasks are a lot higher. Seriously. We need software to make stuff like this easier. There's a major can of worms in implications of sorting this out - a lower barrier to entry, more creative freedom, better-looking games and so on and so on...

as 18y ago

Agreed. I'd personally love to design a game world and story, but am not willing to devote 4 years of my life to just making something rudimentary.

marvin 18y ago
There's a host of interesting startup ideas in this field, most related to 3D graphics. We need higher levels of abstraction for creating textures, architecture/models, decoration etc. The tools we have today are awfully rudimentary, and there's research indicating that much better solutions are possible. See for instance http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Documents http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/Docum... - a higher-level language for describing architecture. In the marketplace there are things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedTree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedTree, which is already in use in a great number of games. It is obvious that we could create a huge amount of tools to this purpose, and also that there is a huge market for software that makes game development easier. What's the sense in creating the 5000th 3D model of a human? Humans don't change that much. Not even fictional bipeds do. Have you ever heard a game developer or pundit complain about 'spiraling costs' for game development? It's because human developers have more and more work to do to make the games keep track with developments in hardware. It should be obvious to anybody that this development isn't sustainable; there's no way every room of a game designed by humans can have even as much detail as the room I'm sitting in right now. But most of this architecture is predictable, and could probably be generated by the right program. Consider a lower bound of game development costs for this 'generation' of consoles at 3 million dollars. If even five percent of that cost could be eliminated by better development tools, that would mean savings (and potential for profit!) of 150,000 dollars. But the potential savings from automating menial modeling tasks are a lot higher. Seriously. We need software to make stuff like this easier. There's a major can of worms in implications of sorting this out - a lower barrier to entry, more creative freedom, better-looking games and so on and so on...