8 ms·

People saying that it's "easy to make games" surprise me. Are you actually trying to make something real, or is this just speculation? If you're on the sideline

People saying that it's "easy to make games" surprise me. Are you actually trying to make something real, or is this just speculation? If you're on the sidelines or a dilettante, why speak? You're just adding noise. Personally, I'm in the trenches and making games is _hard_! Sure we have faster computers and better tooling. We also have _much_ higher expectations... Still, it's incredible to make games. I'm so lucky to work on them each day. If you feel what I feel you don't make excuses about "luck." What the hell is luck? Of course "success" is out of your control... But you control what you make. You can choose to make something beautiful, to hone your craft, to stir a feeling. What could be better than that?!

luxuryballs 3y ago
I’ve been at it for a year now and still a long way to go, but not only is it satisfying when you see each feature come to life but my skills at my day job have never been sharper, it’s been worth it just for the experience and mental “strength training”. No business feature in my 15 year career has ever come close to the complexity of shaders, trig, and physics! In the end whether I ship it to market or not I will always have the satisfaction that I literally achieved my childhood dream and, if I recall correctly, fame or riches was never part of that equation.
- turtledragonfly 3y ago
  > No business feature in my 15 year career has ever come close to the complexity of shaders, trig, and physics! Yeah, it's wild how even simple-ish video games can put to shame reams and reams of "enterprise-y day job" code in terms of complexity and demands on you as a programmer. I love it (: Aside: I wish DMs were a thing on this site; you should let me know your game if/when you make it public!
- krumpet 3y ago
  The very first game I built was a Breakout clone. Getting the game to work wasn't difficult. Getting the game to work well definitely was.
schemescape 3y ago
I think they’re probably saying that the technical aspects of making a game are generally much easier/more accessible now. I don’t think anyone would claim the actual game design is much easier (and the marketing is probably more difficult now).
- EamonnMR 3y ago
  Outside of a few niche genres, the expectations have scaled faster than the tech has, compensated by scaling up team sizes.
  - philipov 3y ago
    The indie game market is far from a niche genre, and expectations remain within reach of the tech available to solo developers. It has never been easier to get into hobby game dev than it is today.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    In the context of the article, the author is talking about Indie games. Normally those feature simple but well-crafted graphics and mechanics. Many of the genres biggest hits have been made by individuals or very small teams. Some examples are 2D platformers with some kind of ingenious twist. Making a platformer in 2023 is not very difficult, but making a good one is. I’ve had an idea for a strategy game I’ve wanted to make for years, but a big reason I haven’t started it has been how much tuning of the mechanics I will need to do, and a distrust of my attention span being able to slog through that process. However the game I have planned, while doable by one person, is a much larger scale than some of the most famous and influential indie games
  - watwut 3y ago
    Small games exist too and count as games too. Personal games made by one person and posted on itch are games too.
tiffanyg 3y ago
There are a lot of stupid comments on HN (to be fair, I've contributed some of them, willfully or not). One real "distinction" of HN - as much as this seems to pervade far too much modern & social media 'discourse', in general - is in strident arrogance. The confident assertion of BS, often couched in fancy language, is par excellence*. * Those who miss my own self-mocking should feel free to consult "Catullus 16" in lieu of submitting their critical commentary on my comment
kbenson 3y ago
> People saying that it's "easy to make games" surprise me. Are you actually trying to make something real, or is this just speculation? If you're on the sidelines or a dilettante, why speak? You're just adding noise. Perhaps you're interpreting a general statement that means different things to different people through your own context and missing a bit of what they mean. It's easy to do something as a career and discount the non-career people doing it, but everyone has their own reasons do to things, and sometimes it's not external. If we replace "games" with "art", then we get people saying "easy to make art". I'm sure professional artists trying to support themselves think similarly to you, that it's hard, and I'm sure it is. But they may not be talking about art the same way you are talking about art. Making art for yourself can be fun, and relaxing, and even liberating. Making games for yourself can be too. In this context it can be very "easy", because you're only looking to please yourself. It's no less "real", it's just for a different purpose in some cases. They aren't adding noise, they're talking about a slightly different thing, but it's also an important thing, and also important for the other, professional context as well. Do you really think professional game makers and art makers are making their profession better by telling laypeople that no, what they're doing is not the same at all and what you do is hard so they shouldn't relate their own experiences? Won't your profession be better served by instead of discounting their views discussing the differences of when it's done personally or as a hobby and when done for general consumption? Aren't many of these people the professionals of tomorrow, or maybe not, and you're helping some people realize they'd rather keep it personal and a hobby?
- a1o 3y ago
  > it can be very "easy", because you're only looking to please yourself. You have no idea how much harder I can be on the developer when I have a direct line to talk shit in his head
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  I think this is the common mistake. Making games is easy. Making a living making games is incredibly hard. Substitute "art", "music", "fiction", etc for "games". As the article says, making stuff that satisfies your creative itch and also appeals to a mass market is like getting hit by lightning twice. But as you say, this needn't be a discouragement for people who really want to try it. Because it's mostly luck whether your creative itch aligns with what people want to buy, so there's no harm in trying your luck. For the rest of us, it's either the long meaningless slog of creating stuff we're not interested in creating but people are interested in buying, or of doing something completely different to make money while keeping the creative hobby.
xwdv 3y ago
It is easy to make games. It’s difficult to make good games. It’s difficult to make fun games. It’s difficult to make complex games. But it’s easy to simply make games. People make games in 48 hours. People make games with pencil and paper. People make games probably no one ever plays. If a game is difficult to make, it’s because you have made it difficult: You’ve given in to scope creep. You’ve chosen an ambitious idea well beyond your abilities. You have complicated multiplayer network code where it’s hard to keep clients in sync. You’re writing everything from scratch… But overall, if you can stick to something simple, manageable, and well within your ability to execute, you will realize it’s easy to make games.
- sien 3y ago
  Yep. Like writing a novel. You can do NanoWrimo and bash it out. But it is incredibly hard to write a good, entertaining and successful novel. Music and drawing or painting is similar.
- chefandy 3y ago
  A statement by itself that needs that sort of qualification is false. It is easy to make dumb games. That does not mean it's easy to make games, generally.
electroly 3y ago
I tried to find the comments you're talking about and found only two that seemed to be talking about ease of development. Both of them were clearly making the point that the barrier to entry being lower than in the past has lead to a glut of basic low-quality, low-effort games. That is, people are producing games that boot up and do something but don't meet today's expectations for quality games. They're talking about the ease of making shovelware; you're talking about the difficulty of making AAA games. I'm not sure the sentiment you're responding to (that good games are easy to make) actually exists in a comment here. They're clearly right about their point. You can make a shitty game in one sitting using today's tools; I've done so a bunch of times. My games all suck but they are games with art, music, sound, and gameplay that people can play and enjoy briefly. You are also clearly right that making good games is hard, and indeed getting harder. The quality bar for a AAA game is insanely high in 2023. I don't see these as being incompatible points, and I'm not sure the anger I sense in your post is warranted--was it necessary to suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a dilletante and that their posts are noise?
- grog454 3y ago
  > You can make a shitty game in one sitting using today's tools; I've done so a bunch of times. My games all suck but they are games with art, music, sound, and gameplay that people can play and enjoy briefly. I'm skeptical but would be happy to be proven wrong. What are some games you've made that satisfy: 1. Made and published in one sitting 2. Have legally sourced assets and code 3. Have people who don't know you personally that have indicated enjoyment of it If this is a regular occurrence for you, I'm curious about the level of experience that got you to this point.
  - electroly 3y ago
    This one doesn't have music but with another hour I could have added it. It's built using PICO-8 which is a Lua-based game development environment. It includes code/graphics/music editing tools and handles deploying to a static HTML. http://electroly.com/games/parry1.html http://electroly.com/games/parry1.html Source code: https://github.com/electroly/games/blob/main/carts/parry1.p8 https://github.com/electroly/games/blob/main/carts/parry1.p8 You can see it's not a very good or sophisticated game but it was done quickly and we had some fun on Twitch playing it. PICO-8 makes it easy to write tiny games. It's not so much about my skill but about the availability of streamlined indie game-making tools. The hard parts of getting a game initially up and running have been done for you. There are "fantasy console" products like PICO-8 and TIC-80, and tools like GameMaker and RPG Maker target modern systems. In the old days it would have been Flash.
mcv 3y ago
I think making games is easy to some people, at the right time in their life. When I was a kid, my older brother could reproduce any game he saw. He saw Tetris and he built it. I described a Mario game (well before Super Mario) and he built it. He wrote a text adventure. Later he learned proper programming and stopped making games. I don't think he can do it any more, but at that time, it seemed to be easy for him. Of course games changed a lot since the early 1980s. But on the other hand, to make a game without all these modern frameworks and game engines, also adds an additional barrier that he easily overcame.
- OmarShehata 3y ago
  I think the hard part is the initial phase, before you know how to make things move, how to draw to the screen, how to handle multiple states of multiple objects without the code getting incredibly messy and unmaintainable etc. If I had to guess I'd say your brother spent a lot of time building many little things before getting to a point where he can quickly build a basic prototype of any game he saw.
m463 3y ago
I think games are hard, but people pay for them. Too bad that the toolsets and skills available for games aren't pushed further into the computer ecosystem. I think a linux desktop with UI elements from even a moderately basic game could be a better integration between humans and their work. For example, most games have settings with options and keybindings right at the very start of your interaction with the system. At any point, you can get in and tweak them if they aren't efficient enough for you. You can also adjust sound and display settings. Additionally, most games have a sort of "soft start" to help you learn the user interface, and navigate through the game world. Games have to attract the player and get them up to speed. It would be very cool to promote these sorts of things up in a desktop UI.
chefandy 3y ago
It doesn't surprise me in the slightest. As a long time designer/developer (but mostly developer,) I couldn't even ballpark how many haughty oblivious decrees I've heard from other developers that entirely disregard non-dev skillsets, especially in the creative fields. When working in a design role, developers consistently assume greater knowledge of my specific work, and my field in general, than most other designers do. It's infuriating. Dunning-Kruger at its finest. The worst part about that phenomenon in online fora is the scores of equally oblivious people itching to click that reply link and confidently back up the first ignorant comment with their equally uninformed suppositions presented as fact. I wonder how they'd react if Joe from sales interrupted them at every meeting confidently declaring that they were doing their jobs wrong, "backing it up" with assumptions and misgivings that any developer could instantly identify? I wonder how they'd react if after calling him out, he justified it by saying he should know because he's worked with developers for years? That is why designers don't contribute to open source projects.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Making "games" is easy. Making a GOOD game (which we will define as "something an audience on release date will be incentivized to buy) is extremely hard. Because making a good game isn't enough these days. Not just in expectations, but in choices and pricing and so much more. >If you feel what I feel you don't make excuses about "luck." one of my favorite quotes: “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" - Roman philosopher Seneca And I think it bridges both people's feelings on the term. Yes, to some extent you do need to just be in the right place at the right time. Or create that right place/time yourself (which I argue is harder than even making a game). But your own quality of work and talent will be a factor in if you are "lucky". A genius who never leaves their home or never communicates will never get lucky, but someone hard working with a plan to get themselves out there will create multiple portions of luck. Which of course contrasts to the rich but lazy heir who will have opporttunities out the nose but almost no genuine interest in them. >You can choose to make something beautiful, to hone your craft, to stir a feeling. What could be better than that?! based on this website, making 300k at Apple or something.

luxuryballs 3y ago

I’ve been at it for a year now and still a long way to go, but not only is it satisfying when you see each feature come to life but my skills at my day job have never been sharper, it’s been worth it just for the experience and mental “strength training”. No business feature in my 15 year career has ever come close to the complexity of shaders, trig, and physics! In the end whether I ship it to market or not I will always have the satisfaction that I literally achieved my childhood dream and, if I recall correctly, fame or riches was never part of that equation.

turtledragonfly 3y ago
> No business feature in my 15 year career has ever come close to the complexity of shaders, trig, and physics! Yeah, it's wild how even simple-ish video games can put to shame reams and reams of "enterprise-y day job" code in terms of complexity and demands on you as a programmer. I love it (: Aside: I wish DMs were a thing on this site; you should let me know your game if/when you make it public!
krumpet 3y ago
The very first game I built was a Breakout clone. Getting the game to work wasn't difficult. Getting the game to work well definitely was.

schemescape 3y ago

I think they’re probably saying that the technical aspects of making a game are generally much easier/more accessible now. I don’t think anyone would claim the actual game design is much easier (and the marketing is probably more difficult now).

EamonnMR 3y ago
Outside of a few niche genres, the expectations have scaled faster than the tech has, compensated by scaling up team sizes.
- philipov 3y ago
  The indie game market is far from a niche genre, and expectations remain within reach of the tech available to solo developers. It has never been easier to get into hobby game dev than it is today.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  In the context of the article, the author is talking about Indie games. Normally those feature simple but well-crafted graphics and mechanics. Many of the genres biggest hits have been made by individuals or very small teams. Some examples are 2D platformers with some kind of ingenious twist. Making a platformer in 2023 is not very difficult, but making a good one is. I’ve had an idea for a strategy game I’ve wanted to make for years, but a big reason I haven’t started it has been how much tuning of the mechanics I will need to do, and a distrust of my attention span being able to slog through that process. However the game I have planned, while doable by one person, is a much larger scale than some of the most famous and influential indie games
- watwut 3y ago
  Small games exist too and count as games too. Personal games made by one person and posted on itch are games too.

tiffanyg 3y ago

There are a lot of stupid comments on HN (to be fair, I've contributed some of them, willfully or not). One real "distinction" of HN - as much as this seems to pervade far too much modern & social media 'discourse', in general - is in strident arrogance. The confident assertion of BS, often couched in fancy language, is par excellence*. * Those who miss my own self-mocking should feel free to consult "Catullus 16" in lieu of submitting their critical commentary on my comment

kbenson 3y ago

> People saying that it's "easy to make games" surprise me. Are you actually trying to make something real, or is this just speculation? If you're on the sidelines or a dilettante, why speak? You're just adding noise. Perhaps you're interpreting a general statement that means different things to different people through your own context and missing a bit of what they mean. It's easy to do something as a career and discount the non-career people doing it, but everyone has their own reasons do to things, and sometimes it's not external. If we replace "games" with "art", then we get people saying "easy to make art". I'm sure professional artists trying to support themselves think similarly to you, that it's hard, and I'm sure it is. But they may not be talking about art the same way you are talking about art. Making art for yourself can be fun, and relaxing, and even liberating. Making games for yourself can be too. In this context it can be very "easy", because you're only looking to please yourself. It's no less "real", it's just for a different purpose in some cases. They aren't adding noise, they're talking about a slightly different thing, but it's also an important thing, and also important for the other, professional context as well. Do you really think professional game makers and art makers are making their profession better by telling laypeople that no, what they're doing is not the same at all and what you do is hard so they shouldn't relate their own experiences? Won't your profession be better served by instead of discounting their views discussing the differences of when it's done personally or as a hobby and when done for general consumption? Aren't many of these people the professionals of tomorrow, or maybe not, and you're helping some people realize they'd rather keep it personal and a hobby?

a1o 3y ago
> it can be very "easy", because you're only looking to please yourself. You have no idea how much harder I can be on the developer when I have a direct line to talk shit in his head
marcus_holmes 3y ago
I think this is the common mistake. Making games is easy. Making a living making games is incredibly hard. Substitute "art", "music", "fiction", etc for "games". As the article says, making stuff that satisfies your creative itch and also appeals to a mass market is like getting hit by lightning twice. But as you say, this needn't be a discouragement for people who really want to try it. Because it's mostly luck whether your creative itch aligns with what people want to buy, so there's no harm in trying your luck. For the rest of us, it's either the long meaningless slog of creating stuff we're not interested in creating but people are interested in buying, or of doing something completely different to make money while keeping the creative hobby.

xwdv 3y ago

It is easy to make games. It’s difficult to make good games. It’s difficult to make fun games. It’s difficult to make complex games. But it’s easy to simply make games. People make games in 48 hours. People make games with pencil and paper. People make games probably no one ever plays. If a game is difficult to make, it’s because you have made it difficult: You’ve given in to scope creep. You’ve chosen an ambitious idea well beyond your abilities. You have complicated multiplayer network code where it’s hard to keep clients in sync. You’re writing everything from scratch… But overall, if you can stick to something simple, manageable, and well within your ability to execute, you will realize it’s easy to make games.

sien 3y ago
Yep. Like writing a novel. You can do NanoWrimo and bash it out. But it is incredibly hard to write a good, entertaining and successful novel. Music and drawing or painting is similar.
chefandy 3y ago
A statement by itself that needs that sort of qualification is false. It is easy to make dumb games. That does not mean it's easy to make games, generally.

electroly 3y ago

I tried to find the comments you're talking about and found only two that seemed to be talking about ease of development. Both of them were clearly making the point that the barrier to entry being lower than in the past has lead to a glut of basic low-quality, low-effort games. That is, people are producing games that boot up and do something but don't meet today's expectations for quality games. They're talking about the ease of making shovelware; you're talking about the difficulty of making AAA games. I'm not sure the sentiment you're responding to (that good games are easy to make) actually exists in a comment here. They're clearly right about their point. You can make a shitty game in one sitting using today's tools; I've done so a bunch of times. My games all suck but they are games with art, music, sound, and gameplay that people can play and enjoy briefly. You are also clearly right that making good games is hard, and indeed getting harder. The quality bar for a AAA game is insanely high in 2023. I don't see these as being incompatible points, and I'm not sure the anger I sense in your post is warranted--was it necessary to suggest that anyone who disagrees with you is a dilletante and that their posts are noise?

grog454 3y ago
> You can make a shitty game in one sitting using today's tools; I've done so a bunch of times. My games all suck but they are games with art, music, sound, and gameplay that people can play and enjoy briefly. I'm skeptical but would be happy to be proven wrong. What are some games you've made that satisfy: 1. Made and published in one sitting 2. Have legally sourced assets and code 3. Have people who don't know you personally that have indicated enjoyment of it If this is a regular occurrence for you, I'm curious about the level of experience that got you to this point.
- electroly 3y ago
  This one doesn't have music but with another hour I could have added it. It's built using PICO-8 which is a Lua-based game development environment. It includes code/graphics/music editing tools and handles deploying to a static HTML. http://electroly.com/games/parry1.html http://electroly.com/games/parry1.html Source code: https://github.com/electroly/games/blob/main/carts/parry1.p8 https://github.com/electroly/games/blob/main/carts/parry1.p8 You can see it's not a very good or sophisticated game but it was done quickly and we had some fun on Twitch playing it. PICO-8 makes it easy to write tiny games. It's not so much about my skill but about the availability of streamlined indie game-making tools. The hard parts of getting a game initially up and running have been done for you. There are "fantasy console" products like PICO-8 and TIC-80, and tools like GameMaker and RPG Maker target modern systems. In the old days it would have been Flash.

mcv 3y ago

I think making games is easy to some people, at the right time in their life. When I was a kid, my older brother could reproduce any game he saw. He saw Tetris and he built it. I described a Mario game (well before Super Mario) and he built it. He wrote a text adventure. Later he learned proper programming and stopped making games. I don't think he can do it any more, but at that time, it seemed to be easy for him. Of course games changed a lot since the early 1980s. But on the other hand, to make a game without all these modern frameworks and game engines, also adds an additional barrier that he easily overcame.

OmarShehata 3y ago
I think the hard part is the initial phase, before you know how to make things move, how to draw to the screen, how to handle multiple states of multiple objects without the code getting incredibly messy and unmaintainable etc. If I had to guess I'd say your brother spent a lot of time building many little things before getting to a point where he can quickly build a basic prototype of any game he saw.

m463 3y ago

I think games are hard, but people pay for them. Too bad that the toolsets and skills available for games aren't pushed further into the computer ecosystem. I think a linux desktop with UI elements from even a moderately basic game could be a better integration between humans and their work. For example, most games have settings with options and keybindings right at the very start of your interaction with the system. At any point, you can get in and tweak them if they aren't efficient enough for you. You can also adjust sound and display settings. Additionally, most games have a sort of "soft start" to help you learn the user interface, and navigate through the game world. Games have to attract the player and get them up to speed. It would be very cool to promote these sorts of things up in a desktop UI.

chefandy 3y ago

It doesn't surprise me in the slightest. As a long time designer/developer (but mostly developer,) I couldn't even ballpark how many haughty oblivious decrees I've heard from other developers that entirely disregard non-dev skillsets, especially in the creative fields. When working in a design role, developers consistently assume greater knowledge of my specific work, and my field in general, than most other designers do. It's infuriating. Dunning-Kruger at its finest. The worst part about that phenomenon in online fora is the scores of equally oblivious people itching to click that reply link and confidently back up the first ignorant comment with their equally uninformed suppositions presented as fact. I wonder how they'd react if Joe from sales interrupted them at every meeting confidently declaring that they were doing their jobs wrong, "backing it up" with assumptions and misgivings that any developer could instantly identify? I wonder how they'd react if after calling him out, he justified it by saying he should know because he's worked with developers for years? That is why designers don't contribute to open source projects.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

Making "games" is easy. Making a GOOD game (which we will define as "something an audience on release date will be incentivized to buy) is extremely hard. Because making a good game isn't enough these days. Not just in expectations, but in choices and pricing and so much more. >If you feel what I feel you don't make excuses about "luck." one of my favorite quotes: “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" - Roman philosopher Seneca And I think it bridges both people's feelings on the term. Yes, to some extent you do need to just be in the right place at the right time. Or create that right place/time yourself (which I argue is harder than even making a game). But your own quality of work and talent will be a factor in if you are "lucky". A genius who never leaves their home or never communicates will never get lucky, but someone hard working with a plan to get themselves out there will create multiple portions of luck. Which of course contrasts to the rich but lazy heir who will have opporttunities out the nose but almost no genuine interest in them. >You can choose to make something beautiful, to hone your craft, to stir a feeling. What could be better than that?! based on this website, making 300k at Apple or something.