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A comment on Making Games. Parent comment

Re:Making Games by electroly on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @05:04PM (#36512570)
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?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Making Games by grog454 on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:33PM (#36515225)
> 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Making Games by electroly on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:39PM (#36515271)
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

Source code: 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. There are other "fantasy console" products like PICO-8, and tools like GameMaker and RPG Maker target modern systems.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Making Games by FactualOrion on Thursday June 29, 2023 @02:08AM (#36516943)
I don't know you personally so I'll help attest to the third requirement listed above, I hit a diaper and was impressed it was playable on mobile. It loaded extremely quickly and was enjoyable. My score was 220, but on a second go I got 550.
[ Parent | on HN ]