

Lessons From The Lost - help lower the entry barrier for gamedev - angrycoder
http://www.merseyremakes.co.uk/gibber/2010/06/lessons-from-the-lost/

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wccrawford
Happy Happy BS. LOT of time spent saying to help other people, without any
real information on how exactly to do that. Here's an example:

"Instead of spending our time moaning and griping how hard it is to make games
or complaining about the frustrations, we spend some time encouraging people
to have a go at it themselves."

That 1 sentence is what the whole post says over and over. It's not actually
-helpful- to anyone. If a cheerleader could actually help people finish a
game, there's be a lot more indie games.

He also talks about how when people ask how to start, they get a million
different answers, and he thinks that's people trying to out-do each other.
NO. It's because there are a million ways to start! And they're almost all
valid.

Starting is the EASY part. Finishing is hard. If you can't even install a free
IDE and get typing, there's no way you're going to bring all that logic and
art together into a game.

People don't need encourage, they need information. Some need to learn to
program altogether. Others need to know where to focus their efforts. Some
just need to know how to do 1 specific task.

If there was a 1-size-fits-all answer for this problem, it would have already
been found.

If you want to write a game, start writing a game. Don't diddle about looking
for the perfect language or framework. Pick anything that looks halfway decent
and has a community and just start working on it. If you find out half way
through that it won't do what you need, you can switch. It's a bit heart-
wrenching, but you will have learned a TON of lessons along the way already.
It will have been worth the time.

~~~
henrikschroder
If we had a dollar for every starry-eyed wanna-be game developer we get at our
service, we'd be profitable by now! :-) We make cloud services for mainly
Flash multiplayer games, and most of the developers are programmers and only
need a little help to use our services, but there's always the occasional "Hi!
I have a great idea for a game!" or "I want to make a game, but I don't know
where to start lol".

I mean, we want to help them, almost everyone I know that works as a
professional developer today started as a kid, wanting to make something. But
where do you start with someone that doesn't know anything, and more
importantly, someone that seems incapable of just downloading a development
environment, ANY environment?

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CodeMage
Dear Rob,

You know, I wanted to give you the benefit of a doubt, I really did. But I
couldn't get past the condescension. Let's take a look at where you went
wrong, apart from sneering at a lot of people.

First of all, let's take a look at just how high the barrier for making games
_really_ is. Go and visit Kongregate, Armor Games and Newgrounds. Stop at Jay
Is Games, too, while you're at it.

Now, as you might have noticed, what you can find on those sites ranges from
utter "what the heck was the author smoking" crap to amazing "I would totally
buy this on PSN" jewels. Some of that stuff was obviously done by coders who
don't have substantial talent for art. Some other stuff was obviously done by
an artist who couldn't code to save his (or her) life. And some was done by
teams of people, each one proficient in one or more areas. But the aspect I'd
like you to focus on, at this point, is the sheer, enormous _quantity_ of
games.

With that out of the way, let's delve deeper into your post and acknowledge
that you weren't really complaining about making just any old game. What you
claim is that people who wanted to develop games felt that "stealing content
was the only way to make an ambitious game become reality".

No, not really. I know a lot of people who want to make ambitious games and
"stealing content" is not an idea that has occurred to _any_ of them.[1] If
you ask them, they'll come up with plans that might be naive or realistic-but-
hopeless, but they won't think of stealing. And if you offered them to
"shared" or "recycled" assets, they would probably think you were well
meaning, but seriously misguided.

See, the barrier for making "ambitious" games has nothing to do with the
availability of the assets. The real barrier is twofold:

1) Making a good game is hard.

2) Selling games is even harder.

You acknowledged the problem #1 in your post, but you don't seem to be taking
it seriously enough and it tells, because you said that "making games isn't
hard". Sure, compared to "heart surgery", it isn't hard. Compared to most
other forms of software development, it's _damn_ hard. And making good games
is a hell of a lot harder than that.

Incidentally, this is why a lot of people will react with what you call
"exclusion" against people who ask "I want to write a game but I don't know
where to start." It's an impossible question, unless the asker elaborates.
What is it you want to do? Do you want to do the coding, but don't know what
to use? That's just nuts and bolts and I'll happily point you in the right
direction, but it won't help unless you have a group of people who'll help you
make the game (or you're incredibly multi-talented) _and_ you've played a
boatload of games available in the same place where you intend your game to
end up _and_ , well, you know where you want your game to end up. Which brings
me to the heart of the matter.

The toughest part of the barrier is the problem #2. You don't _need_ someone
to share, recycle or otherwise give you assets. There are people out there who
are perfectly capable of creating those assets. Most of those people feel
disinclined to do it for anyone who can't answer the big question: "How are
you going to pay me?" Even for "non-ambitious" games, such as those you'll see
on Flash portals, selling your game is not a trivial matter.

To sum it up, the real barrier for game development is not that people who
have done it or are doing it on a regular basis are elitist snobs. It's not
the lack of freely available assets either. The real barrier is that it's an
entertainment industry. Sure, you can "get into" music by picking up a guitar
and learning how to play. You can "get into" game development by picking up,
say, FlashDevelop, Flex and FlashPunk. But there's no magic formula to make
you a star.

Regards,

Vojislav Stojkovic

\----

[1] Sure, mine is just an anecdotal claim, but then again what do we call a
claim based on the story of _one_ game featuring exclusively stolen content?

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benologist
The indie gaming scene is absolutely _full_ of guys who're just getting
started - the barrier for entry is negligible!

Every day on Kongregate and Newgrounds you can see guys who're producing shit
but at least giving it a go, and on FlashGameLicense.com you can see everyone
trying to take it to the next level and turn their hobby into some kind of
revenue stream.

There's a community at play there that does actively help, offer feedback,
collaborate, offer quality art,graphics and support etc, even if some of the
players are douches.

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teach
This is a great article; thanks for posting it.

