Well, then.
I would definitely rather make games than other types of software.
And any other job just seems tedious and depressing.
Games suit very visual and creative people, not only in artwork but code. It’s great creating a CC or some AI and watching your characters react, it’s great making a new shader and applying it to a variety of meshes to see how it improves the visuals. Breathing life into an atmospheric little world is a fine thing to behold, there are so many positives that’s why I believe game development is so attractive.
But like everything else it has it’s dark side, in-efficient tools / long work hours / constant frustrations and to be succesful you need to be a jack of all trades at a base line. If you are doing competitive 3D games (Don’t do 2D so not sure), you also need to balance yourself. I’ve seen many instances of coders / artists becoming unhealthy and emotionally unstable, sure this happens in every industry but games seem to be promenant. Crunches aren’t good for you, it’s not cool and it’s not clever but in a lot of cases it has to be done.
With a healthy body / mind you can achieve more in a couple of hours than you could in a whole day, also you need a skin of pure steel. Even if you work in AAA (Or should I say especially AAA), peer pressure and especially feedback. The amount of comments on youtube etc. most dismiss your years of hardwork even before it comes out the door.
Making games is hard work. It’s a job like many others. It requires a lot of dedication, passion and discipline. If you have none of those 3 just go do something else entirely 
I could see a good number of people having passion, I think you see that reflected in the number of aspiring developers and the amount of people who view YouTube videos about making your own games. It’s just a bit ironic that passion and discipline are seemingly at odds with each other, as far as personality traits go. On the one hand there’s fleeting, visceral emotion–and on the other, mind above all else. You see a lot more of the former than the latter. That effectively explains the fallout/burnout rate of people seeking to produce their own games.
That is at the heart of my thinking in asking this question in the first place. We all start off, I would presume, with soaring ambition and high hopes, and we end up behind a compiler someplace, hacking away at a keyboard all hours of the night, scouring reference material for tidbits of info.
How can something so fun be such a pain? That’s life I guess.
Game stuff’s my passion, i like to think it chose me, i dont really care about factors of difficulty, that can just be a matter of free time and patience. Can learn a ton on an enormous range of subjects, working typically on my own theres been stuff ive been familiar with since i was a child and some stuff i feel incredibly stupid about. Always worth any effort though, its a cheesy thing but stop thinking of stuff you create as ‘games’, it’s like calling all films ‘action films’. You don’t have to ‘play’ an alternate reality, you can let it happen to you. It’s the most powerful and will probably grow to be the most profound medium ever concieved - total control over an artificial place in which you can do absolutely anything you can think of to some degree
People who stick with it may not find themselves millionaires, but they’re richer, imo, as people and artists to be respecting and (hopefully) building the foundation stones of a medium that encompasses all others, where even a ritual (drawing with a pencil) can be equated. It’s exciting times and i’m getting sick of the word ‘game’ and sick of the entitled power many gamers seem to assume, that its their right to have their arab shooting games and super realistic atmosphere compromising units and anything that isnt obviously a game is a terrible thing, how dare they insult REAL gamers by making this thing you can control that isnt a game.
No force on earth could tear me away from this even though its almost all i do, seven days a week, youd have thought it would drive me mad, but if you stop calling it a game and take away tired ideas of goals and competition and very boring, limited proscribed control and you have a medium capable of anythng, and videogames are often a massive insult against the medium. Why is what is a ‘good’ story in a game just so laughably bad if you read it in a book? Proably total lack of respect for the medium, using it like it was a film, filling it full of gaudy trash ala recent shooty games when it’s all just trying to hide up the complete emptiness of the experience
I love games, naturally, most of what i make is recognisably gameish but i dont give that much of a damn about games in the long run because i think the best you can get out of the medium has little to do with anything gamey at all, talking about it in discussion, researching things, observing how a behaviour in a game might transpose to a non-‘game’ circumstance in an artificial world, broadening ones horizons to see exactly how ‘different’ things can be. How do you forsake that for a regular desk job.
For the record, the most amazing gaming experience of my life was Dear Esther with an Oculus Rift, Dear Esther was widely derided for not being a game. What a completely ignorant attitude. Its not really a game, and benefits from removing the narration to make it a walking around on an island simulator, and the not-gameness of it makes me want more and more releases like it. It being entirely respectable and profitable to create such experiences is where this thing grows up and stops being a mass accepted outlet for sociopathic behaviour for children of all ages. I’m not missing that on principle and as soon as i feel i have my stuff together (Going solo means lots of reading and familiarity with tools and free time like you wouldnt believe) i’ll be using probably Unity to make non-games, no less of a pain, much more noble an endeavour, and just making random gamey stuff to learn things is great, still takes all my time, but couldnt give it up for much, especially now its growing up and and infinitely more respectable to folk as artistic expression
Sorry for the rant
No, if I knew how much work it was, I doubt I would have done it, but thats the thing. No one knows how much work it can be, even now its only as much work as you make it. Like apparently lots of Mario Galaxy was done in assembly and I was like OMG, thats crazy.
Words can be so limiting, especially when you don’t appreciate their full meanings. “Game” is just a word like “film” is just a word, when everybody knows that most movies today are “filmed” with digital cameras. How far down the rabbit hole of semantics must we go?
Yes. Wandering about a virtual world for no particular reason is still gaming. We don’t need to define the terms so rigidly, like a bunch of scientists arguing about insect taxonomy. You are at play. That’s what it’s all about.
Artistic expression is wonderful. Put it into every asset in your game. Ultimately, though, people are going to gravitate towards “normal” experiences rather than “different” ones. The most successful people always manage to take something that people like already and put their own unique perspective, or spin, on it. I see a lot of people pursuing psychedelic mind job games and, while that’s certainly something that we need, we also need to have some concrete foundations to return to once in a while.
There are formulas, rules, measurements… after all, we’re not designing games for the human “mind” so much as we are designing them for the human brain. One is arguably metaphysical, while the other… well, not so much.
I think what I’m getting at, and what this thread is continuously making me realize, is that this whole gaming thing is a strange phenomenon indeed. It is at once science and art. Think about that. Visceral and completely intellectual. The melding of human feeling with technology; so much so that we often think of our lives in terms of gaming elements… and my point, again, is that I never knew that something that felt so natural to me would have to be artificially produced by such altogether unnatural means inside of a computer’s processor. I’m describing my dreams to a computer and, in turn, it makes my dreams real.
So there’s plenty of room for everyone, I think.
I don’t really think about it, I just focus on fun, and I don’t care what Jonathan Blow thinks about fun. Games should be fun, and that’s what I’m doing.
It’s fun for some people to wander around on an island with rift, and it’s fun shooting things. It’s simple.
What, that sounds like a horrible idea. Not thinking about it is insane. What you just flop around with ideas until you get one that people enjoy?!?!
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No, we flop around with ideas until we get one we enjoy.
heck yes! I don’t know about anyone else but I have days where I would sooner claw my eyes out than look at this project I had been working on for months… But then those little occasions come along where you work your way down the list of things you need to do and bugs you need to overcome and each one of those little triumphs drives you on. That’s what it is like for me at least 
A series of small battles that eventually result in a victorious game emerging… Or a project that ‘You’ll get back too…’ (And never do)… Needless to say I have more defeats than victories under my belt 
Yeah I think I would have.
Going in I knew I would have to learn a bunch of new skills at the very least.
I guess the thing that most took me off guard is how much all the little mundane tasks add up–the little details most players would only notice if you didn’t do them. You can get a quick and dirty prototype done in a relatively short time, but taking that from a rough draft to a bug-free, intuitive, and polished game is A LOT more work than I expected–even for fairly simple mobile games.
Kind of apropos to this, I don’t think a lot of people realize just how much work is put into game development (both gamers and non-gamers). I still feel kind of awkward in conversations on the off chance it comes up that I develop games for a hobby–as if most people subconsciously equate “making games” with “playing games.” Like people would be more impressed if I said I just participated in a marathon than if I said I just spent my free time for the past three months making a game. And yes, I know this complaint is nitpick-y and possibly just all in my head…
Someday it’ll be as easy as playing games. Some games are about construction and world building. LBP is a good example. But, the problem facing us today with Unity is that to get the required performance to suit your ambition, you have to do a lot of hard work.
Unity to it’s credit does a lot to help out here, but things like Static batching offloading any perceived performance gain to a large culling cost doesn’t make any sense. Lack of shader editor that enables you to choose approximate high performance options also means I spend a lot of time making decent shaders. Avoiding garbage collection means I spend a lot of time working around garbage. And so on.
So Unity’s big problem with how much work I’ve got to do breaks even with how fast I want it to run.
This is something I think about often. But it’s misleading.
I argue that as the accessibility of technology increases, the creativity and ingenuity of its users decreases proportionally. This stems from a lack of necessity to develop such skills in the first place to achieve acceptable results. Not lack of proper education, not anything like that… just a simple, natural phenomenon of human laziness.
So yes, you’ll be able to just play a game to make a game… but most people will use it to make crap, and it will always be looked down upon by the “professionals”. And in this “someday” people who can do the “real work” like using a graphical environment like Unity will be more like today’s C/C++ programmers who can write their own engines from scratch. In other words, they’ll be employed. And so on.
And phones will be installed directly in our brains.
I don’t think that’s the case at all. There’s always been shit games since gaming began. It’s not like laziness was invented in the future alongside easy game development.
I get what you’re saying though. Since Unity came out, the amount of shite appearing on steam and mobile is out of control. But eventually those that make effort will get rewarded. Better games will get noticed.
Currently it seems like you can bang out any old turd and get rich. That’s not going to fly long term though. People ultimately need a steak sometimes.
All my favorite ideas were already made. 
Markus Persson said in this interview: “I strongly believe that true greatness comes from being influenced by other people’s work and improving it, making your own version of it, by mixing and matching your best influences and a few original ideas of your own,”
I have read similar things from creative people, and I tend to subscribe to that way of thinking. I already know what I like, I just need to develop a palette of unique experiences and ideas to contribute to my own version. I feel that’s a good approach, whereas “flopping” (hahaha) about seems to be an inefficient process. Again, to each their own… but you certainly can’t advance any art or discipline without respecting the current state of the art.
I think that people have been saying this since the dawn of time. There seems to be a tendency to think that people want excellence because we appreciate excellence. And certainly, excellence will always be rewarded more consistently. But… there’s something to be said for those turds that people can’t stop buying.
I love steak, but McDonald’s cheeseburgers have a certain mystical appeal to me. And in my lifetime, I’ll probably spend a lot more money on burgers than steak. Food for thought. 
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If we’re using food analogies…
Well, Markus Persson ripped off Infiniminer so I’m not sure he could actually say anything else, even if he wanted to. He’s so far come up with nothing truly his own. But originality isn’t the important part. All the food in the world has probably been discovered, but new combinations continue to delight.
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How about that Steve Jobs guy, he did pretty well for himself.
@hippocoder Perhaps you are not looking at the right aspects of games, people are not going to play a bad game. Why did Flappy bird become popular? IMO it was the addictive nature of the gameplay and the short game time that had a great balance of anger when you die but not enough to stop the player from coming back. Was it crappy? well if your judging it on its story and immersion then probably yes, but overall no way.
In contrast, take The Last Of Us, its a good game as is evident by its reviews and how lots of people rave about it, but take away its art, cutscene and story and you have a horrible game. Gameplay thats like cardboard. But, as a cohesive game those elements could mask the gameplay. So much so that no one even realises or cares.
Again, take Slender. A game that was extremely popular for a time, the game has absolutely horrible art, the gameplay was pretty much not their. However when mixed with the atmosphere design, sound design and a feeling of helplessness it was pretty good, and with the way not many other games had done that at the time.