Paul Fletcher (Owner)
card-hockey@shaw.ca

As the number of people involved in a project rises, as do the collaborative difficulties associated with that project. Team dynamics break down at a certain point (depending on team member personality and number of members) so that is why you see this industry becoming more tightly controlled -> someone needs to be a chief, and the rest indians.

It’s a shame, but if you look at the history of human endevour, this is a pretty obvious step for anything that becomes significantly large i.e requiring the efforts of a large number of people.

Once people realise that game software development is just as complex (if not more) as most software development jobs we might get a little more respect.

“Like all disciplines it can go as deep and as complex as you like. ”
Truth. But really, anyone who thinks game writing is in any way on the less-complex side just isn’t aware. As dool mentions, not only is it a significant technical discipline, but it requires combining that with fun factor, poor pay/work conditions, all combined with the necessity to be cutting edge, which necessariliy involves many new problems each time. It does lack some of the stress that another..say, brain surgeon endures, or lacks the insane patience/risk of a physicist who spends 30 years only to fail at the one task they set out to acheive…but it’s no doubt a serious, challenging technical field.

But that pay problem is that main reason that I’m not professionally in the industry (I’m an Indie/hobby developer). The thing is I make way more money doing business apps than I probably ever would working at some game dev house. I might, and just maybe, be able to make what I make now after 10 years or so in the industry but by then I’d probably be looking to get out it anyway way before then if I’m like the average developer.

I like the challenge of game programming. That’s really the sole reason why I still do it. If I just did it for the pleasure of building my own game I’d probably be out almost as I got started. You’re right it is super tough, and what’s cool about it is if you think you’ve sorta got a good handle one aspect of it there are a ton of other things that you can get into and ticker with that you have no idea about. That’s another thing that I love about it, but is exactly why it’s so hard and complex.

About the people with their mad skillz again, I’ve found it’s very hard to convey the difficultly of game programming to people that haven’t really took it on before. They just assume they can do it with what they know at the time. I think it may be because people look to great games to emulate and those games make it look even easier than bad games because they hide all that complexity incredibly well. I had to do a ton of study for a long long time to even get started, and I’d been doing programming in general since I was like 12 or something. I was like 30 at the time.

Also, I’m guessing here, people sort of tend to think of games as like toys, which they definitely are for the players, but seem to equate that to their construction as well. Like, “it’s just a game you know, how hard can it be?” People don’t have this same perception of becoming a physicist or other similar thing but game programming can be just as complex I believe. Like all disciplines it can go as deep and as complex as you like.

I’d agree that the simple games are quite easy to do, and this can lure people into even more of a false sense of security that ‘coding games is fun’.

Yes, along with game programming being hard, the entire creation process is extremely difficult. Why else would most games run over time, budget and end up being only half as fun as was anticipated. I’d like to discuss why most publishers and producers don’t know what they’re talking about and are also not up to the challenge either, but this may get me in trouble with too many people that control my pay cheque’s .

Just joking, but still maybe we all should say instead of game programming is the hardest form of soft dev than game CREATING is the hardest form.