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Unfortunately it's not. If you're working on a small 1 or 2 person game where your work blurs the lines of art and engineering, you're highly unlikely to be su

Unfortunately it's not. If you're working on a small 1 or 2 person game where your work blurs the lines of art and engineering, you're highly unlikely to be successful. For every Undertale there are literally hundreds of other indie games that barely earned a penny It only takes a small studio of like 10 people before you're practically never touching anything creative and are working on software tools and under the hood functionality just like any other dev job

hypertele-Xii 5y ago
You're thinking of money. The parent poster was talking about art. If you can afford it, gamedev allows you to blow not only your own mind, but also the minds of everyone else - especially new generations who have learned the medium from birth.
- ChrisRR 5y ago
  Any amount of hobby projects allow to blend software with whatever your interests are. Everyone probably has other hobbies that they could easily write software for
- roenxi 5y ago
  I dunno, much like how most people aren't artists, I think most people probably wouldn't get a lot out of game programming because they just don't have that combination of creative spark and narcissism to think they can create a great game. Most of the actual fun in programming is that feeling of ongoing small puzzle solving.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    I had quite a bit of fun many years ago making an Arkanoid clone that included gravity and a tilting paddle that would react to the impact of the ball. Only two people ever played it: my brother and me. And I’ve lost the source code, but I recall it being very easy to make in Love 2D. It was fun, at least. And I’m a huge fan of this kind of mass low-grade creativity.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      If you still have a binary, LÖVE 2D games are reasonably simple to decompile.
      - renewiltord 5y ago
        Fascinating fact. Thank you. I have nothing. But it should be easy enough to replicate.
  - derefr 5y ago
    This seems to also be defining game creation in terms of money: a "great game", as if something has to be widely appreciated to be great. Artists make art because they feel a need to express themselves. There are often less-stressful, more commercial uses for their same talents, but they do art instead, because there's something nagging on their minds to be expressed out into the world. (Often an artist-in-general will learn a new artistic medium just to express a feeling they don't feel can be expressed with their current toolset!) And nobody ever said the artistic process itself is fun. It's toil for the reward—the satisfaction—of having communicated your thought in a way that seems capable of truly touching other people. Just like the "petty art" of the prose writing we're doing to each-other here — but with much more labor and intent put into each stroke, such that there is more value to be wrung out of each moment of experiencing the result.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      > It's toil for the reward—the satisfaction—of having communicated your thought in a way that seems capable of truly touching other people. The programming community is almost exactly the group of people who believe they can truly touch others by developing practical software. And programmers are usually really bad at truly touching others with artistic games. Most people are quite bad at expressing themselves, let alone most programmers. I think contributing to open source is probably a greater source of satisfaction for most than programming games. I've had a hopeless stab at both, and making a small meaningful contribution was much more satisfying than expressing myself badly through a game.
      - derefr 5y ago
        > And programmers are usually really bad at truly touching others with artistic games. I think you missed the key words "seems capable of" in my statement. Satisfaction in creating art doesn't come from actually touching other people's emotions, i.e. witnessing them being touched. (People who need that feeling, should best avoid becoming artists, and instead become entertainers or performers, where your craft is done "in communication with" a direct audience.) Satisfaction in art comes from when you've polished your work to the point where your mental model of other people is touched. It's actually completely solipsistic; it doesn't depend on whether any real person ever sees the art at all. Just whether you think your target audience (which can even be a fictional character, or a dead person, etc.) would like it if they ever did see it. (Art can also be entirely for yourself — though works of art of the complexity of games usually aren't.) As such, you can be truly bad at expressing yourself, and still receive satisfaction from creating art — as long as you're also bad at predicting how other people will react to your art†. Luckily for fledgling artists, skill in the craft of art, and skill in judging art quality, are usually developed together. So, when starting out, you can be satisfied by bad art, because you don't yet know it's bad. (Though this does mean that people who start out as art critics, have a very hard time of becoming artists, because they know from the start when they have no inborn talent for art, and that discourages them from doing the practice required to develop the skill for art.) ----- † It could also be that you're bad at the craft of art, and have a well-calibrated mental model of people, but you're just driven to create art for people with weird/outré/"bad" taste, who are especially moved by exactly your brand of unskilled art. But that's beside the point I'm making here.
  - simplify 5y ago
    > Most of the actual fun in programming is that feeling of ongoing small puzzle solving. Not for everyone https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/ https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/
jayd16 5y ago
>It only takes a small studio of like 10 people before you're practically never touching anything creative I've worked at AAA studios on AAA games with 500+ devs and you still get to play with art and fun ideas. How do you think they trick kids into spending 12 hour days at the office? There are some that retreat into bank software levels of detachment but it seems to be the exception, not the norm.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

You're thinking of money. The parent poster was talking about art. If you can afford it, gamedev allows you to blow not only your own mind, but also the minds of everyone else - especially new generations who have learned the medium from birth.

ChrisRR 5y ago
Any amount of hobby projects allow to blend software with whatever your interests are. Everyone probably has other hobbies that they could easily write software for
roenxi 5y ago
I dunno, much like how most people aren't artists, I think most people probably wouldn't get a lot out of game programming because they just don't have that combination of creative spark and narcissism to think they can create a great game. Most of the actual fun in programming is that feeling of ongoing small puzzle solving.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  I had quite a bit of fun many years ago making an Arkanoid clone that included gravity and a tilting paddle that would react to the impact of the ball. Only two people ever played it: my brother and me. And I’ve lost the source code, but I recall it being very easy to make in Love 2D. It was fun, at least. And I’m a huge fan of this kind of mass low-grade creativity.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    If you still have a binary, LÖVE 2D games are reasonably simple to decompile.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      Fascinating fact. Thank you. I have nothing. But it should be easy enough to replicate.
- derefr 5y ago
  This seems to also be defining game creation in terms of money: a "great game", as if something has to be widely appreciated to be great. Artists make art because they feel a need to express themselves. There are often less-stressful, more commercial uses for their same talents, but they do art instead, because there's something nagging on their minds to be expressed out into the world. (Often an artist-in-general will learn a new artistic medium just to express a feeling they don't feel can be expressed with their current toolset!) And nobody ever said the artistic process itself is fun. It's toil for the reward—the satisfaction—of having communicated your thought in a way that seems capable of truly touching other people. Just like the "petty art" of the prose writing we're doing to each-other here — but with much more labor and intent put into each stroke, such that there is more value to be wrung out of each moment of experiencing the result.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > It's toil for the reward—the satisfaction—of having communicated your thought in a way that seems capable of truly touching other people. The programming community is almost exactly the group of people who believe they can truly touch others by developing practical software. And programmers are usually really bad at truly touching others with artistic games. Most people are quite bad at expressing themselves, let alone most programmers. I think contributing to open source is probably a greater source of satisfaction for most than programming games. I've had a hopeless stab at both, and making a small meaningful contribution was much more satisfying than expressing myself badly through a game.
    - derefr 5y ago
      > And programmers are usually really bad at truly touching others with artistic games. I think you missed the key words "seems capable of" in my statement. Satisfaction in creating art doesn't come from actually touching other people's emotions, i.e. witnessing them being touched. (People who need that feeling, should best avoid becoming artists, and instead become entertainers or performers, where your craft is done "in communication with" a direct audience.) Satisfaction in art comes from when you've polished your work to the point where your mental model of other people is touched. It's actually completely solipsistic; it doesn't depend on whether any real person ever sees the art at all. Just whether you think your target audience (which can even be a fictional character, or a dead person, etc.) would like it if they ever did see it. (Art can also be entirely for yourself — though works of art of the complexity of games usually aren't.) As such, you can be truly bad at expressing yourself, and still receive satisfaction from creating art — as long as you're also bad at predicting how other people will react to your art†. Luckily for fledgling artists, skill in the craft of art, and skill in judging art quality, are usually developed together. So, when starting out, you can be satisfied by bad art, because you don't yet know it's bad. (Though this does mean that people who start out as art critics, have a very hard time of becoming artists, because they know from the start when they have no inborn talent for art, and that discourages them from doing the practice required to develop the skill for art.) ----- † It could also be that you're bad at the craft of art, and have a well-calibrated mental model of people, but you're just driven to create art for people with weird/outré/"bad" taste, who are especially moved by exactly your brand of unskilled art. But that's beside the point I'm making here.
- simplify 5y ago
  > Most of the actual fun in programming is that feeling of ongoing small puzzle solving. Not for everyone https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/ https://josephg.com/blog/3-tribes/

jayd16 5y ago

>It only takes a small studio of like 10 people before you're practically never touching anything creative I've worked at AAA studios on AAA games with 500+ devs and you still get to play with art and fun ideas. How do you think they trick kids into spending 12 hour days at the office? There are some that retreat into bank software levels of detachment but it seems to be the exception, not the norm.