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Anatomy of Game Development
CowboyRobot writes "ACM Queue has an article titled Game Development: Harder Than You Think that looks at the complexities of creating a modern game, in comparison with the relative simplicity of doing so ten years ago.
My understanding of the industry is that they have too many designers and not enough programmers. From the article: 'Now the primary technical challenge is simply getting the code to work to produce an end result that bears some semblance to the desired functionality... There's such a wide variety of algorithms to know about, so much experience required to implement them in a useful way, and so much work overall that just needs to be done, that we have a perpetual shortage of qualified people in the industry.'"
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
No it's not. Children make up games to play with their friends all the time. Why is it difficult to make a system? Codifying it formally is where everyone runs into problems. Oh and that everyone loves to reinvent that wheel.
As a programmer and game developer myself I have experienced first hand the level of complexity that game design and development has approached in recent times.
It used to be, and back in the day when I started programming my first games, that a single "Lone Wolf" programmer (Like I have always been) could develop his own game.
However, now with the crazily complex 3D games, there has to be a whole army of developers, artists, designers, programmers, etc. just to create a game.
Unfortunately that damages lone wolf developers such as myself, in that we cant keep up with the demands of such a large production budget!
Anyway, I have attempted to work as good as I can, see what you think of my game, it is a bit difficult to wear the hats of Programmer, Designer, Developer, Musician, and Artist!
http://abaddon.igerard.com
Post apocalyptic gaming goodness
No, really...
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
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Or is the author of this article really called Joe Blow?
Nice pen name
The hard part is not the engineering. The hard part is the game design, story line, and content creation.
So in a sense, the author is correct: game development is hard; but its about 10 times harder than he is making it out to be because he is focussing on the 'easy' bits.
Yeah, games were easy to make ten years aog, i coded a few but it was a "code" challenge, now it's different, most of the time someone built a nice engine and everyone make content for it, that's why many studios just focus on design, don't get me wrong, design it's important but programmers don't qualify often for game industry unless you want to built something new, something that is not a goal for many companies.
But hey! What do i know? I live in Mexico, there is a small or not-existant game industry at all!
--
No sig found.
It's also that there's a huge gulf between "having an idea for a game" and "being a game designer". Frankly, any idiot off the street can come up with a halfway decent idea for a game (it might not be terribly original, but it could probably turn into a reasonable game). The talent in game design lies in the thousand little decisions you have to make in turning the raw idea into an actual game. It's those little details that matter, and that separate a great game from an average game, and an average game from a bad game.
One thing I've noticed with a lot of open source game-directed projects is that they feed off each other as needed.
You can take jim's physics library and link it into fred's ROAM engine, slap tommy's interface toolkit on top if it then shoehorn bob's network protocol in and actually get a usable piece of software out of it. The SDL libraries are one obvious example of this but it's far from the only place I've seen it.
No it won't be the next jaw dropping engine that will command everyone's respect but that's not really the point, the point is as long as you have enough basic intelligence to learn an API and can manage to glue several of them together the open source world is plenty willing to fill in the gaps of your knowledge.
It isn't really an open source specific thing, this mode of thinking can be found under windows as well, but for obvious reasons it seems to flourish best in the linux world. It's not mature area of development yet, but the foundations are there. As the barrier of entry into developing commercial games increases, so to do the free software options.
I think it'll be neat to wait and see if open source can evolve to present a solution to the "kitchen sink" problems that current game development has to deal with.
Flash is a bad word for some folks here, but it really excels as a platform for simple, addictive, and fun games that can be easily spread to the world.
Working in a restricted environment like Flash eliminates a lot of the hassles described in the article. It's arguably easier to write, say, King's Quest now than it would have been 20 years ago,
Nice article, but I think it misses a key point. Game creation is only more complex these days if you're trying to build/copy a complex title.
Of course a Lone Wolf isn't going to be able to knock out myHaloTribes2! But s/he sure as heck can still tackle a simpler game, with even less effort than "days of yore" in my opinion. OpenGL, a slew of commercial games engines, cross-platform solutions, even SDKs for mobile phones.
The opportunities abound, even if the market is drowning in noise these days. The bottom line is don't try to compete with a big studio if you're not a big studio! Skip the $150K intro/cut-scene movies, etc. Don't aim for a MMORPG. Just build something fun, dammit!
Think of it as the development equivalent of asymetrical warfare.
what needs to happen, is we need a complete game enviroment to creat games, not just a game engine, but a complete piece of software that doesn't need any programming at all. think of using maya to do all your 3d models and animations and worlds for the game, and instead of exporting these out to an engine you keep it all under one roof, give the models properties like colision, key bindings to play this animation when this key is pressed in this direction etc. Of course programming should be en extensible part of it to add funtionality that might not be in it. so essentially a 3d applicaiton with a game engine at it's heart containing everything you would need to make a game. This could be done right now with directX9. The single man band could be back if this happened.
...have any of you seen the demo video of the upcoming Half-life 2 (or even *gasp* downloaded a leaked beta), I was watching in amazement wondering how games had come so far in such a little time.
Let me elaborate, splinter cell was an amazing game but the storyline was very linear and interacting with the environment pretty much restricted to shooting out lights.
Halflife 2 on the other hand allows you to use some magnetic levitating weapon that can tear metal objects like radiators from the wall and hurl them at the opposition. Boxes and furniture pushed against doors to stop attacking enemies.
I can't even begin to imagine the complexity that has not only gone into the code design but also the level design. That's the crux of it, without amazing and clever levels that leverage all of this new complexity a game falls flat on its face.
I am NaN
Many games take half an hour or longer to compile when starting from scratch, or when a major C++ header file is changed.
Come on, Design Patterns is only $50. Surely they can afford a copy or two? Shouldn't the public interfaces to external classes for a module be fixed pretty early on, if not at design time?
and the most popular game on the PC is still solitaire!
:-P
Here in florida we have a college, Full Sail, it specializez in entertainment industry stuff. Such as: game design and devolpment. It's good to know we have a place that specializes in making the people that are required if world of gaming is to be continued.
Obviously. New games these days are frickin' huge and increasingly sophisticated, and they have to be to compete with the OLD games. It comes as no surprise that they are harder to create.
Lua is the embedded interpreted language of choice for game designers. Lua's great for writing the game AI (you don't have to wait for a half hour C++ build). Lua's under 200K, threadsafe, has good OO abstractions, integrates with C very easily, and most important of all - it has a commercial friendly license.
This classic work is surely a Blow job...
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
I remember when I was 13 writing ASM code code aspiring to write something like Monkey Island -- that was a very attainable goal. I had a friend who was a very good artist, he would whip up a some cells in autodesk animator, I had written a little converter, and we could walk our little guy around the screen against a background. Now truth be told I had NO idea how a game engine worked at 13 years old, but we did end up writing a few neat demos and bbs loaders (I was a weird kid).
Now the level of art work and technical knowledge required to make something that looks half professional is off the scale. I have a great game idea that I don't think I'll ever be able to realize. Thats the loss I mourn... kids wont ever have the fun I had trying to make a game, and we might never be exposed to some new ideas these kids might have.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Anyone else read the headline as "Anatomy of Game Developers" ?
I always knew they were put together differently!!
Especially those Running with Sissors guys!!
There's still a market for the simpler games. Cell phone games are big. The Game Boy Advance is big and anyone can code for it. Distribution is another matter but there's nothing stopping developers from creating a product to get their feet wet. Worst case you make it a pay per download or give it away free as an ad for your PC games.
2D used to be the best choice simply because you could do infinitly better looking graphics. 3D is now getting up to par but there's really no reason not to still use 2D. The latest Wario game just took a tile based game and made it a cube based game in 3D. Not a programming challenge at all. Instead of DrawTile you just use DrawCube, increase the dimensions of your map and voila! 3D platformer. I whipped up the basic components in all of a few days (running, jumping, standing on and above things, collision).
The market is so saturated with 3D first person shooter crap that there's a huge market for games that are simply fun to play. You are not going to get rich from a 3D game so why bother making a crappy 3D game in a lame attempt to milk the 3D scene? Make the best of what you can do, even in 2D and it may not make you rich but at least it won't be half-assed crap.
Stop worrying about the million dollar budgets and just worry about making a fun product.
The best application of 2D is in puzzle games which are ginormous. The hardest part is comming up with the new puzzle concept. Programming them is rediculously easy and they're cheap. Which makes it more likely people will buy them as time killers at work to replace solitaire and minesweeper.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I worked in the games biz for 3 years in QA and production, and finally with a hiring team for engineers in our company. Let me tell you, coders in the games industry are payed jack, and work like mad. Most times, the average work week is anywhere from 80-95 hours for the coding team. I personally got out of the industry because of this. I don't think there are a lack of talented people to do it, just there are not enough people willing to put 80 hours a week in to a game for circa 40-50k, w/no OT.
First of all, any change whatsoever in header files trigger rebuilds, not just public interfaces. Secondly, core headers in theory would perhaps be fixed early on, but in practice that's just plain impossible. I can spend a lot of time here trying to explain how that comes about, but it's not worth the effort unless this message got a decent score. Suffice it to say that it's simply impossible to see into the future and know exactly how any header file really needs to be when it's finished.
I'm tired of this, I really am. When will guys like this admit that everyone else works for a living too? No, games are not always very simple. Thanks buddy, we know.
All this "Life is so hard! My industry is so cruel!" is just attention grabbing to get readers to an otherwise rather dry review article on the elements of commercial game production.
In other news, games are unimportant. All but a very few games are played by practically no one, and those that do play it throw it away after a couple-dozen hours. Where did this conception that making games was so exciting and dramatic come from? Just because so many other areas of software development are even more mind-numbing doesn't make gamedev automatically interesting!
Design me a new spoon. Design me a spoon that will be sold across the world, used by millions on a daily basis for years of their life. Design me a brilliant spoon, and I will be impressed.
is this article written by the half-life2 people to attempt to justify another 6 month wait? i wanna play it now damnit!
There is a school in Dallas called the Guildhall. They focus on Game Design, Software Development and Art Creation.
Sorry, Carmack is full of BS. Story makes or breaks a game in more than a few cases. Take Halo. Without the excellent story and plot devices, Halo would have been nothing but another faceless FPS. A pretty one, but hardly the best seller it was for the XBox. Story drove that game. Story seperates Baldurs Gate 2, a masterpiece, from the gorgeous but hollow Neverwinter Nights. NWN has BG2 dead to rights on every point except one, and it's that point alone that elevates BG2 to legendary status.
Of course Carmack says story is not really that important... Look at the games he designs-- FPS almost exclusively without story. It's a pretty narrow vision to be making such sweeping judgements from and it hardly makes his word gospel.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Here is an interactive game in one line of basic code (ok 4 statements, but you could write it in one basic numbered statement). Just showing what could be done with minimal code.
You control an object at the top of the screen it will move left if you don't push shift, right if you do. Blocks "###" are printed at the bottom of the screen and scroll up. If you crash into a block it is game over. Quite complex for 1 line. I would walk into stores displaying computers without games that attracted the kids, type this in and have fun.
I had versions for PET, VIC20, C64, APPLE II, TRS80 machines
Adjust for my bad memory and learning of many other languages since then.
0 poke 32788+a,65; a = a + peek(515)*2-1; print tab(36*rnd()),"###"; if (peek(32788+a) == 32) goto 0;
clear the screen, scroll to the bottom and run
Break down
A) poke - puts player "A" set by ascii 65 at the middle of the top line of the screen plus the offset a
B) adjust the offset a of the players position dependent on the state of the shift key
C) print - puts a block in a random position on the next line. If this is the bottom of the screen, we get a scroll and everything moves up and the players object is cleared off the top
D) check the new position of the player to see if it is clear
Majic numbers
32788 address of the middle of the top line of the screen
65 character for players object
36 + width of block is 1 less than the width of the screen, in this case 36+3 40
515 shift key status updated by system interrupt
Even if you make the game in such a manner as not to be "professional", you may still have a winner of a game. Stuff written in Flash is very easy to do yet brings out remarkable results.
Not every game has to be a 3d FPS or whatever. Uplink was written by a couple of guys in the UK and is one hell of a good game.
If you want to do more than a Flash game, that's quite doable as well. Writing a high end 3d engine is indeed hard stuff, but that's why we have mods! Not only can you learn a lot from the open sourced engines out there, you can use some of them to make a mod that is high quality stuff.
You mentioned artwork: well, fear not- the stuff you can do with the right tools is shocking. You can grab a copy of Blender, and after a few weeks of beating it up you will be turning out 3d models that are better than what you figured you could have made at the beginning. The GIMP is perfectly good for texturing models, and has just about all you'll need for the task (while the GIMP isn't professional photo editing software, it's great for making textures and web graphics.)
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Let look at a few examples:
Games have ballooned in complexity-
I think it is safe to say that nearly all software has grown in complexity. For traditional client-centric applications, we have seen interfaces grow more complicated and sophisticated. Unlike software designed in 1996 nearly all applications are now internet aware. Even your wordprocessor has the ability to communicate via the internet, to interact with email and offer colaboration functionality.
Very little software is designed to operate in the vacuum of a stand-alone workstation anymore. Apparently this is also true of games. Wow, brilliant insight.
Tools-
The author is probably correct about a lack of competing products for Windows C++ development. Still Visual C++ is quite a good IDE. A lot of the issues raised are more generic complaints about C++ development than anything specific to game development. While game programming has its own special requirements- 3D rendering for example- other types of software has different but equally complicated needs. For example, the complexities of interating with a wide variety of back-end databases, message-queueing software and legacy mainframe systems add layer up layer of complexity to most business applications. The specific requirement is game-development specific but the problem is one which all complex projects face.
Let face it, the need for source control systems which are able to manage arbitary content is hardly unique to game development. Nearly every project I have ever seen runs into source control issues.
Workflow issues
Now the issue of re-compilation times, debug build load times and other development issues are a problem for ALL big software development projects. Multi-platform issues are equally problematic. This is hardly restricted to game development
Third party components-
Always an interesting issue for application development and not exactly one confined to game development. Think about applications you have seen which manipulate data and display charts and graphs. How many of those apps actually have custom written charting libraries. Hardly any. Nearly ever application OEMs someone's ibrary with all the associated headaches that come with emebedding components over which you have no control. That is the trade-off you make. You save 10 man-years of effort in developing a graphing library and you lose control of the source code, bug-fixing, release cycles and the ability to add new, special or project specific functionality. (Unless of course you go OSS). Big deal. Highly Domain Specific Requirements-
This is the dumbest section in the article. All software has some domain specific requirement otherwise it wouldn't be an application, it would be some sort of generic framework. Games clearly have a set of requirements not found in typical application software- 3D graphics, AI and sound effects for example. However if we look at network security applications for example, I think that we can safely say that there are just as many complex, domain specific requirements involved in TCP/IP protocols, packet sniffing, network tracing , etc.
Profiling-
Profiling all code is hard. Identifying bottlenecks in code which involves a great deal of user interaction is very complicated. Hardly specific to game programming.
Reality check time. All the article says is in 2004 that users expect a far more sophisticated product than have been required in 1996. Engineering complex products is difficult. Welcome to the software industry.
That guy with the funny shapes that fall down the screen, boy did we send him packing!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I completely agree, there is also a hell of a lot of difference between having a great game 'idea' and having a great game 'idea' that is practical and fun.
There are countless examples of games that are great in theory, but poor in practice(I'm looking at you Black & White). Yet relatively few that have no business in being so great(And here I'm looking directly at a certain Tetris), and somehow pull of all those intangibles such as playability.
Even taking a great idea that 'will' be purely playable and making it so, is a great skill that only few can accomplish.
It amazes me how certain designers can almost routinely pull off the impossible.
Although I'm a programmer, I've spent time learning GIMP, blender, Sodopi (and a load of applications from other skill domains) - when no one is regulating your use of software, you're free to teach yourself what ever you want.
...free software is the way the world *should* work
It's not a qualification, but you can easily learn enough to bluff through an interview. (so long as you can tell that the job is really just a programming job with too many requirements written in the spec to make a manager feel like she's doing her job.)
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
For what it's worth, Yes, I am a professional Game Programmer.
From a programming standpoint, 20 hours of high quality game play is just as difficult as 60 hours. The bulk of the work for an additional 40 hours is done by artists and level designers creating the additional content.
And a shorter game does not aid its 'beat-ability'. It just aids its re-playability. Most 60 hour games can be beaten in 20 hours or less, typically, you just skip the side quests.
And doing a 20 hour game, but making more of them reeks of what EA does with expansion packs. Its a very shallow marketing ploy.
I would rather play one long well made game, then 1 short well made game and 4 short crappy games tossed off with the aim of turning out a profit.
END COMMUNICATION
BS. Programmers are like actors in movies. Sure they're vitally important but without the huge support group making scores, costumes, scripts, sound effects, CGI, directing, producing, and just shooting the damn thing you wont end up with much of a movie.
Just like with any modern game you'll need a soundtrack, sound effects, level design, textures, models, animations, voice-overs and a good story.
Honestly one good texture artist is worth their weight in gold. Far more than any coder but the lead at any rate.
The game development community used to take algorithms from other fields. Now they've gone beyond academia in graphics, physics simulation, and AI. Games are a tough, competitive market, and the stuff has to work, or you get trashed in reviews. That makes for real progress.
It's the usual story. Companies demand experience on all posts, and then whine about lack of "qualified" applicants. While ignoring the fact that they themselves are creating a qualification that's impossible to get.
Reminds me of the ads I used to see when Unix was first catching on. Entry-level pay jobs requiring 5 or 10 years of Unix experience, obviously written by HR people with no clue.
I guess Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, Bourne, and Plauger weren't tempted into leaving Bell Labs by the pay scale. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Every year or so I buy a game that consists of 90% 3D fluff. I just spent an hour at Dave and Busters and really enjoyed the "old" 2D interfaces because they nether helped nor hindered good games. By good game I mean something designed with regards to gameplay and not another over-done FPS maze game or cookie-cutter strategy game.
The game industry looks like the equivalant of the comic book industry in the eary 90s, lots of eye-candy, gimmick covers, etc and little substance. Seems its a technological arms race to build games that run on the newest hardware and that gameplay is the last thing on the 'to do' list.
you could write it that way.
And it rendered on, until the end of its days.
I think you're making it a little bit too easy on yourself. I've been in software development for, well, let's say a while now, starting with end-user applications over web-based and non-web based network applications to game development. Development of a 'profesional' game easily rivals large e-commerce applications as far as complexity is concerned. .NET and whatnot, specifications of proprietary file formats, encryption and security, are just some of the subjects a single software engineer may have to work on in a single large scale game project.
The reason?
Far more diverse challenges from different areas of software development come to play. Network engineering, including bandwidth, server stability and scalability issues, performance of processing large amounts of data in an unimaginable amount of different ways, compression algorithms, design and architecture of APIs, use of often many different (often poorly documented) 3rd party APIs at a time, efficient use of dedicated video, audio and other hardware, strong knowledge of human audiovisual perception, asset management, database design, knowledge of several different programming languages, scripting, SQL, SOAP, development of tools and applications using MFC,
In addition to that, any software engineer working in one or more of graphics, animation, audio, tools, to name a few, will need to have good knowledge of how the modelling, animation, audio and texture artists go about creating assets, in order to be able to make asset integration into the systems they develop, work as smoothly as possible.
Add about a teaspoon of multi-platform development (let's say, PC, XBOX, PS2, GameCube, sometimes Mac, for example).
Combine that with tight deadlines (the game industry isn't infamous for crunchtime for no reason), publisher's big wigs constantly looking over your shoulder and asking 'is it ready yet?', and dealing with (and this is the result of some people not knowing what they're doing as you stated) poorly specified requirements, and with the fact that hardware and technology in game related fields is advancing faster than anywhere else.
Stir frequently, and you have a recipe for the software development time of your life.
To summarize, in my opinion, a software engineer working on large scale interactive entertainment projects has to be far more flexible, have a higher level of self-motivation to take on problems and acquire the necessary skills and knowledge to do so, and be more team oriented and communicative than developers in other fields of software engineering.
We are not a bunch of kids hacking in hundreds of thousands of lines of spaghetti code without any consideration of software design and architecture principles, to release a game to make a quick buck. Those times are long gone.
*Gasp!!* Destructable, interactive environments! Its a revelation! A miracle of modern programming!! All hail HL2!!
..end sarcasm..
..begin rant..
..end rant..
..sorta..
Listen here whippersnapper, destructable environments are nothing new. Why, I remember, way back in... musta been ninteen hunderd and nintety four - when I played a game called XCOM. It displayed soldiers and aliens in an isometric format, and just about everything could be blown up. In fact, that was probably the thing that most contributed to how much fun that game was...
I take you back in time, for this conversation when I was viewing the game for the first time:
"They've got the door to the barn covered."
"OK, well, lets just make our own door, with this handy grenade..."
"What?"
"Yeah, kaboom, instant door."
Look, I know destructible, interactive environments in 3D games are new. (And no, the horrid piece of software called "Tresspasser" cannot be called a game, and thus does not count.) And I applaud game developers to finally getting around to it. But it isn't something that hasn't been done before. Added complexity, yes. A new age of 3D gaming? Perhaps. But I'd say a bigger advance was present in the first Half Life game - an AI that put up a decent challenge and displayed some level of realistic enemy behavior in a FPS.
All that said, good luck to the HL2 guys. I really do hope they succeed. I look forward to the day when playing first person shooters involves some level of problem solving, rather than testing reflexes with the mouse and keyboard.
// harborpirate
// Slashbots off the starboard bow!
The game I am working on right now is a week before Beta. I work for a medium sized publisher of console games. Take that as warning of my bias.
I would add several reasons to why game development is hard. All the technical issues Mr. Blow mentions, can be fixed given enough time. But there is never enough time.
To keep funding $10M+ game projects, a corporation needs to release a steady stream of games during major buying periods. This means, unless you're the likes of id or Valve, development cycles are 18 months, rarely negotiable. If you are late you will start loosing consumer awarness and marketing budgets. You also need to schedule time to do several demo disks and generate assets for the media. A senior programmer said that our primary target is management, and only later the gamer.
Second, unlike many software markets, you constantly feel your competition at your heels. The graphics, realism, complexity is an arms race. This makes games better and it also makes developers stay at work extra longer past midnight to implement that extra rocket launcher effect to stand out from the competition.
Then the market judges you on purely subjective measures. You can't lock yourself into a market like MS Office or Windows would. It doesn't even matter if you are technically the most advanced. As a game developer you are fighting for gamers attention. This is why you see games that are mostly sequels and based on established IP.
Then again these challanges are the reason I'm a game developer. Mr.Blow does point out a good deal of inneficient practices in the industry.
This should be seen as a call to arms for middle ware vendors and ISVs. Whenever there is a problem there is a buisness plan!
This article is very well-written, but it only serves as evidence that the game industry still ignores standard engineering practices. 30 minutes is nothing in terms of build time, especially with a C++ project. And there are some very simple ways to reduce build time that they could be practicing right from the start instead of refactoring halfway through. I'm surprised they didn't establish such practices after their first experience with such horrific development delays.
I will agree that the cost of game developmetn is skyrocketing. The cost of developing an engine alone is more than many game houses can handle and things are not improving. It can't be too long before more third party suppliers spring up who do nothing but build game engines and design tools. In a way it's kind of silly that game houses still have to build most of their stuff from scratch.
-- Would it be acceptable to just put my name on my sig?
That's only 7 years. In the 7 years I've been in the business, I've become a certifiable 'old man'. That may sound nutty, but our industry moves so fast, it's perfectly sane. An in that 7 years, things have shifted massively.
When I first started, I worked on a project with a budget of about 2.5-3 million $. At the time, that was considered a pretty large amount. Our team was about 20 people, mostly rookies of 1 year (or less) experience, with 5-6 'old salt' types. This was a PC title at the very earliest edge of 3d acceleration. The voodoo 1 was barely out there. Use of floating point 3d math was finally starting to be possible. Our target for 'great sales'? 200,000. If we sold 100,000 it would be considered 'good'. 200,000 would be fantabulous. 300,000 and up would be massive wild success.
50 million. The average game that gets greenlit these days has a budget of 12 million or more. When you pitch a AAA title to a publisher the magic number is '1 million units'. This is of course an insane number that no one realistically expects to hit (especially the poor developers themselves). But the expectation of the top-end people is 'if we don't realistically think this can sell 1 million units, why are we considering it'?
You know what -hasn't- changed in this time? Selling prices. Games still retail for $40-50.
Yet budgets have quadrupled or worse. Technology has leaped forward by a LEAST 10x in capabilities. We went from the Voodoo 1 (cool! hardware rasterizing!) to the Voodoo 2 (awesome! really -fast- hardware rasterizing with multitexturing!) to the TNT (WOO! Even -faster- hardware rasterizing with multitexturing!) to the Geforce (Yay, no we've got T&L) to the Geforce 2 (Hmm, T&L plus a complex layer of vertex shaders) to the postmodern Geforce 4+ cards (ummm, dang, 4+ versions of pixel shaders now with a dump truck full of crazy, complex techniques which all the artists and designers and producers all have a hardon over). Ah, we've also got 20x the memory available and 30x the processor power. Can't ship anything without an ultramodern physics engine, or an endless streaming arbitrary polygon-soup world now can we?
And to top it all off, the trend in actual sales is : instead of a largish array of semi-successful to successful games, we now have a huge bundle of big-but-unsuccessful games and a small handful of monster selling uber titles. With very very very little in between.
Publishers now aren't willing to commit to something unless they think it'll sell a gajillion units. But of course, selling a gajillion units means having lots and lots and lots of risky and expensive features. So doing these big payoff games is a big gamble.
This 'Inflationary Period' (to borrow a term from cosmology) has resulted in a radically different landscape. Programmers balk (for good reason) at the design requirements necessary to make a competitive game. I have the privelege of working with some very smart people even 'older' than I am. One of them once said to me : 'Practically everything we do is worthy of a PH.d thesis'. And he is right. You can't -not- push the already ludicrous technology barrier with a new title, otherwise you'll be putting forward a design with limited sales appeal.
It's an ugly ugly situation. Where I work, we are to this very day struggling with coming up with a design for our next project (one of several) that will satisfy these myriad goals. Everyone is so incredibly smart and dedicated, but it seems to me that we're very fast approaching some sort of upper-bound on complexity.
I don't know where it is going to end, but at the moment, you can be damn sure that the days of the garage-developer are over. Technology has accelerated too fast.
All games absolutely must have a story... for the right definition of "story".
Most people interpret "story" to mean "plot", but the two are not the same. A story, broadly speaking, is "setup, conflict, development, resolution", but writing a plot line, with set characters and dialog is only one way to get a "story".
Tetris has a "story". The set up is the rules. The conflict is that the game is throwing blocks at you, but you don't want blocks on the field. The development is the game play, and in Tetris's case, the eventual resolution is typically that you fail, but you get some kind of score. (There are varients that play to a finite point which you can "win", but when most people think Tetris they think of the varient where you play until you fill the screen.)
Games with no "story" exist, but are typically rare. You can recognize them because they will typically look like "tech demos", or you'll think of them as "incomplete", even if they have all the technological pieces in place. Imagine an RPG engine that works perfectly, but you're confined to one town and absolutely everybody is friendly and all you can do is talk to them, except this one fight with a rat on the edge of town. The engine is (for the sake of argument), perfectly done, but there's no story.
You can similarly imagine a side-scrolling shooter where the game just goes on and on, but no bosses, no increasing difficulty, just monotonous onslaughts of homogenous enemies. I remember playing these on the C64... briefly. For better or for worse, the now-standard "boss" system does at least provide a story. Even the "level" system provides story; the exact same game as the classic 2D space shooter Galaxian, but without level delinations, would be a lot less compelling.
Lots of things must have a story like this, but not necessarily a "plot line" and "characters". A presentation should always tell a story: "Our project was this (setup), our problems with it were this (setup), we handled it this way (development), and this was the result (resolution)." (I strongly disagree with people who say to put the result first; you lose the interest of the crowd and they'll have a superficial understanding of the result. If you result is at all complex and you really want your crowd to understand the result, you must take them through the whole story before they can appreciate this.)
Doom has a story, but the "plotline" it has is entirely incidental. Doom's story is on a per-level basis: "[Rules of the Doom game] (setup), there are monsters blocking my path (conflict), the combat (development), I got to the end of the level and prevailed (resolution)." There is an over-arching story in the boss battle but it's quite diffuse compared to the level-by-level story, as evidenced by the fact you can basically pick it up and play any level you want without playing the ones before it.
All games must have stories. Plot lines are one way, but not the only want and generally not even a good way, for this to occur. Generally the engine itself must provide the story, or the user will feel they are just watching a movie.
(Think about this and apply it to games you've played before dismissing this; this is really a surprisingly interesting field. It seems that the general story pattern of setup, conflict, development, resolution is buried deep in our psyches since it is so important in so many artistic or creative endeavors, from games to literature to presentations to music to a whole lot of other things. Heck, even software tutorials should have a story. People who understand this and apply it have a distinct advantage over those who don't.)
There are a few game firms using tools such as SDL and pygame, but not enough, not even open gl. But look at a tool like blender, though the latest version doesn't have a realtime engine yet, they still have older versions with the realtime engine and the standalone player works well with the lastest machines, so using blender 2.25 for free one can develop game logic with "logic bricks" or you can code python, but you never have to use c++, and you can create 3d games for all the major platforms without having to use c++. But for c++ users, there's libSDL, which gives you a cross platform games library with opengl extensions as well. Pygame gives you access to the same library, but with python. However you can use distutils under windows to generate a windows exe which you can use the python installer builder to create a regular windows installer, as well as mac os x and linux and *bsd. Java is another tool that doesn't get mentioned. Its becoming a very important tool for wireless phone and pda game development. SDL is the number one game aid that gets overlooked, also the market for "microgames", some of the most popular games of all time have still been seemingly simple, but hiding complexity, like tetris.
Besides this, many people have ideas that have already been thought of but weren't done because they just aren't feasible to do or don't add to the fun in any way.
I think the problem isn't a lack of programmers, but that the design isn't focussed enough that the programmers aren't wasting their time on stuff that makes no difference to the gameplay. Some of this is attributable to the publisher who wants some new feature to advertise (realtime wart-growing!), or some overly ambitious designer that wants things that add nothing to the gaming experience (did MGS 2 really have ice cubes you could watch melt? If so, then WHY?).
I really think that every designer should be made to play Super Mario 64 and Tetris. SM64 was huge, and Tetris was small, but both are very tightly focussed on the things that make the game FUN.
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
"that we have a perpetual shortage of qualified people in the industry."
This is funny. A few years ago, after working on successful but boring software projects for the past ten years, I decided that I wanted to work in the game industry. I have no debt, and was willing to take a pay cut. I live in San Diego, home of a number of game companies, EA, Sony, etc. I figured it wouldn't be too difficult to get myself at least an entry level position with 10-years experience, just to learn the ropes. Nobody seemed willing to hire someone that didn't have several previously delivered games under their belt, despite a number of other successful consumer products and happy customers. I had sent resumes to all the companies in the area, as well as working briefly with a "game headhunter" which didn't work out as well. After roughly six months of trying, I gave up, and went back to working on my boring jobs. I'm guessing that the writer of the above quote isn't all that tied into the needs of the industry.
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
(Smash amp, burn guitar, take home the groupies)
The problem isnt that there arent enough programmers, it's simply that you need the best ... with artists you can make do with less talented one, since they can simply spend more time on their assignments while you hire more of them to do the work of the single better artist. With programming this doesnt work.
That's a common perception from those outside of the entertainment industry. There are those 'stars' in the game industry, just as there are in the movie industry, who really do think that. One of the plain facts is that modern games take a lot of intellectual work, much more than optimizing SQL queries, putting components on forms, or making two computers talk to each other. It's no different than how some professors look down at some software developers. While it does take skill to do it, you aren't really pushing every neuron in your brain to put out form-based apps or SQL-based systems.
Regarding the amount of learning that has to take place:
Of the programmers on my team, 4 (including myself) have masters degrees and two have bachelors degrees. Every week I find myself reading several papers from journals and conference proceedings. In contrast, two of my brothers are also programmers. One does POS software for a nationwide company, another works for a small company with photo processing software. Both have seen the things I do at work, and I've seen theirs. Both have told me that they couldn't handle my job, but I know I could do either of theirs. One of them has had to read a few journals and articles, the other hasn't read any since he earned his bachelors degree almost a decade ago. One of them works with mostly BS degree or no degree, the other works with entirely BS degree and one MS degree people. As for me, I've thought about going back and getting another bachelors degree in math just to review some of the advanced topics.
Neither of my brothers, both competent programmers, can understand the math it takes in writing game graphics engines. Do you understand the math involved in manipulating manifold surfaces, or self-shadowing techniques? Perhaps you can explain to the crowd how to make a 3D model look like it is breathing? Or maybe implement a system to give models joints at hips, knees, ankles, and toes, and make them realistically move, jump, walk, crawl, or stand still, based only on a direction and speed? How about converting between 4x4 matrix form, and Euler angles, and quats? Can you even understand a number that has 1 real part and 3 imaginary numbers, [w, xi, yj, zk], and has no real-world analogue? How about pathfinding; Since you play games, can you explain or implement 3 of the pathfinding techniques you've seen? Maybe machine learning is your forte; Can you implement at least 2 machine learning methods, such as RBF networks or backprop neural networks? [Incidentally, while seldom used, both work well in games since there is practically no cost to use them.] How about cheat-resistant networking; Do you know how to tell the difference between a forged packet and a regular one? How about how to properly get around a NAT device? Since TCP is too slow, do you know how to deal with out-of-order UDP data? Or keep clients in sync when they are missing critical information? I've only met a few non-game programmers who could do all of these, but EVERY PERSON ON MY TEAM knows how to do ALL these. But even then, I can still do most of the things you probably do as a programmer. I frequently help my brothers out when we talk about difficult issues they are fighting in their own projects.
Again, in comparison with my brothers. In their environments, they plan
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
I work in the industry. You can read some of my earlier slashdot posts to see where exactly I work.
Games are very complex pieces of software these days for sure. Graphics, audio, networking, even UI is a big deal. Just getting something working is only the beginning. Then comes the real work in making your game engines perform such that you are hitting your framerates in every area of the game.
It used to be if your main loop was hitting your framerate, you were done. This is because you did all of your I/O up front (the loading screen). Your user input was always polled each frame, so unnecessary state changes that could possibly disrupt your performance were minimal. Largely it was your graphics theory knowledge that made or break your engine.
Nowadays it is becoming more non-deterministic due to other forms of disruptive state changes. Graphics have become more complex and networking creates state changes that often don't happen within one frame (e.g. picking up an item in Quake 3 requires the server to acknowledge this).
People complain about why studios ask for at least 5 years of experience and on top of that ask for prior experience with a particular console. Getting something working fast isn't the goal. It's getting it working correctly.
How relationships with publishers changes priorities is an entirely different discussion, however...
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Every year or so I buy a game that consists of 90% 3D fluff
The game industry looks like the equivalant of the comic book industry in the eary 90s, lots of eye-candy, gimmick covers, etc and little substance.
I think the way this works is this: there's three types of games- those with fluff, those with substance, and those with fluff and substance (and gradients inbetween of course). Substance, by itself, does not sell.
The thing about substance or gameplay is that it requires a certain amount of attention that cannot be extracted from an audience until they have bought the product and invested some amount of minutes or hours into it. The sure-fire way to get that investment is to attract the eye- visuals can transmit much more information about something much faster than sound or text, so discerning quality of visuals is easy for nearly anyone. There is no shorthand to communicate gameplay other than simply playing the game, though screenshots and videos and short text descriptions may at least indicate what is to be expected.
If I'm going to play a crappy game, I'd rather play a crappy game that looks good than the alternative- and the same goes for other visual media.
An addition to that last statement is that there are a lot of people for which style is substance. The obvious ones are artists, or people with ambitions in that direction or simply an appreciation for it- playing something with really cool level and character design and etc. is the main thing while the story and interface should drive it along- if they're really good, that's a great bonus. Bad story isn't really a showstopper, but bad interface is - so I don't mind seeing the 'cookie cutter' approach get used there because I'd rather not every game try to reinvent the wheel when I just want to move the camera/character/units around.
Designers in abundance, salesmen all around but what I need is a coder and a C to sail them on.
But this C is tiny and difficult to sail so I'll hand them all an upgrade to C++ and let them wail.
This shrieking is ill met, I stop and look profound as I have a solution it's C pound.
My coders all have left me with this ugly stinking mess I should have not given them more and more but merely better less.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
It isn't codifying it formally that's difficult, but modern games are some of the most difficult to get correct because they place a lot of unusual demands for the functionality.
A game has to be robust, user-friendly, look good, work smoothly, give the player lots of degrees of freedom (which makes testing both important and hard) etc.
The games industry is going to die because there *is* an upper bound on complexity, as you have said.
I've said it before and I was modded as troll. But, if one faces reality, he/she would see that games development becomes much harder every year. Only really exceptional developers will be able to make a product that stands out. The smaller ones will die or will be absorbed by bigger ones.
In fact, there are several problems already.
One of the problems is the tools themselves. Although I am not a games programmer, the article's considerations are real, and they are present for bussiness systems, also. The usage of a language that solves some of the previous language problems (Java instead of C++, for example) only solves some tiny fraction of the problems.
Another problem is the content. There are just no new ideas. I have practically stopped playing FPS games after Half Life, because everything seems so inferior to it. I was playing the Contract Jack demo the other day, and it seemed so boring!!! I just had to shoot and shoot and shoot enemies, and that's it.
Personally, I have given up playing modern games. I am back to playing old games that I have missed. I recently finished Legend Of Zelda: A Link to the Past (on emulation, of course), and I found it highly endertaining. It was easy to grasp, easy on the eye, with very clever puzzles, many things to do and explore, in short, a fantastic game. I started Chrono Trigger yesterday. And in the last year, I have played many other games that are of high entertainment value (for example the remake of Kings Quest 2 by Tierra).
There are lots of good games out there that one can play that are not very demanding and they are highly entertaining. And thanks to the Internet, they are available.
Finally, I really pity console owners. The PC offers much greater entertainment that it is not possible with a console. I was a console player, but now I am hooked to games that actually require thought...that is the best genre, really.
Do you know Counter-Strike? Its a mod. Do you know DoD? Its a mod. Actually some very interesting games comes as a devirative work of other game. That safe a lot of work, whatever can be shared, dont need to be recreated (the engine, textures, sounds, menus, etc...) and you have instantly a lot of users.
So you make a tiny mod for Half-Life, and you have a 1 millon potentian userbase. Cool or not?
Making mods shortcut the problem of very very long development process.
posdata:
Recently a quake guru (FrikaC) has make a Tetris clone in only 2 hours of work. You can download a stand-alone version here:
http://telejano.berlios.de/option/qtetris1.zip
-Woof woof woof!
We would much rather have that manpower spent to make the system compile programs quickly, or generate efficient code,
Bingo, I think the future of mmg's depends on this. People increasingly will want more variation in gameplay. Concepts like an Architecture Generation Engine (AGE) would benefit greatly from this. An AGE makes a multiplayer map/scenario different every time you play it, so you have to adapt all the time. The ability to randomly generate and compile the new map very quickly, is very important. This for me is the neatest thing in gaming going on right now. Great article!
My main experience, from programming on computer game projects ranging in size from 10 to 80 people, is that design is a weak discipline. Planning is often non-existant (in a way that simply does not happen when writing a graphics engine or sound library or building from concept art into in-game models) and suffers from the whims of anyone with a say (all levels of management and often extending into the entire team) that feels they can add input in a way that does not happen when approaching other fields.
Features are often not thought through and the interaction between the many aspects of a game not even considered.
Designers can be placed in two camps. Those who, given a half completed project, based on a vague specification, can tell you what's wrong with it, what they like about it and hint and what to do next and those that can sit with a blank sheet of paper and find a feature set that will interact in a way that will enhance the game rather than act to it's detriment.
I'm sure that type II designers exist. I don't think I've ever met any of them.
I've worked on too many projects with Just-In-Time design that's burnt out the art team (who are the first to suffer when design strays) and even the programming team.
Blue sky design is often seen as an opportunity to come up with a crazy set of "cool" features that out-do every game ever made in every aspect. This rapidly cools into less and less of a next-gen game as time is wasted on prototyping the impossible (often going beyond prototyping and getting half way into a finished game before it's realised that it _is_ impossible) where, in the first place, the design team should have sat down and just talked through ten minutes of gameplay to see if it would be possible/contain positively interacting features/actually be fun.
Of course, rigidity in design can also be a huge problem if taken to extremes. What is generally needed is a well thought out, flexible design that does not suffer the whims of all and sundry. This, unfortunately, is rarely the case.
Mike
(working on a Sunday due to the whims and impractical designs of industry luminaries)
I cannot deny that many programmers have multiple specialties. I have worked in shops that do SQL all day, and presentation software, and remote sensing, and scientific computing, as well as the game industry. I've worked with programmers that range from high-school dropouts to PhD earners. I believe I've seen most of the full range.
That's where I disagree with you. It is not just a matter of being more specialized. I believe there is a completely different, almost fundamentally different, degree of difficulty and requirements for game developers.
I'll go through the places I'm comparing it against. Feel free to disagree about any of them, but I feel that each is fairly typical of programming environments.
When I was working with SQL on POS, there were 7 of the about 35 programmers there who were the SQL and communications experts. They could literally do anything that anybody else was doing. The remaining 80% of the programmers were just doing grunt-work, basically commodity programmers. Yes, people had specialties, but they weren't really used. There were approximate deadlines, but they were very soft.
Next, I worked with presentation software, specifically it was interactive polling in focus groups and larger corporate meetings. The owners were all psychologists that ran these corporate meetings. The owners stated exactly what the presentation software required for their industry, had contracts with keypad vendors that basically gave us serial-port input, and all we had to do was tabulate the results, record them, and stick them into graphs. Nobody on the group was required to do anything spectacular that a college grad with 3-5 years of general programming experience could not do. Additionally, there were approximate deadlines, but they didn't really care as long as some specific feature was in place before some specific presentation -- these were known months in advance.
Moving up to remote sensing hardware, people were starting to specialize. There were the hardware folk, many of them were highly specialized. That's partly because the company owners were two university professors who had some good ideas, and started a business with their best grad students. Everybody at the company was expert in mathematics, and had at least a BS. About half of the company had MS degrees or higher, and the only people without a BS were the interns -- they were still in college. In addition to lots of math, about half the people were quite good in one or more other areas. I know this is not the typical company, but it may be typical of your experience; in which case it does seem that everybody has several expert areas. Again, there was no real hard deadline, customers were mostly governments and they only cared about it being done within a certain fiscal year.
In my job with scientific computing, multiple specializations was almost required. At a minimum, you needed to understand all the nuance of floating point numbers, and how they are different from real-world values, and when that it a problem. There, I spent most of my time dealing with compatibility and networking issues. But I also had a lot of time in spatial partitioning and distributed computing. Most co-workers were also working on three or more complex issues. From my experience, I know that most of the programmers from the SQL/POS shop couldn't jump into those roles, and only one other person from the presentations software could have made that transition. Most of the people who worked with me at the remote sensing job could probably have made it though, a
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement