Author Topic: Creating a game?  (Read 1133 times)

Offline Sgt.KAR98

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Creating a game?
« on: 17-01-2016, 04:01:57 »
Hello all. Just gathered some courage to ask something very uncommon here,as many from the FH community worked/works with modding.

How hard/costly it is to make a game nowadays? More specifically,how hard is this task for someone that have barely no skills,just ideas of how the game should be?

Offline Zoologic

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Re: Creating a game?
« Reply #1 on: 17-01-2016, 16:01:59 »
There are a lot of my college friends that open game studios now, some are quite successful (e.g. Toge Productions, the maker of Infectonator series).

Ideas or concept is the first requirement. Then choosing the genre (WW2, steampunk, anime, horror, medieval, etc) and the type (flight sim, racing, RPG, FPS, RTS, MOBA, etc).

There is a programming aspect of it, coding your logic into it. Which means, you should choose your game engine.

Then there is creating the game assets, the artworks like sprites, 3D models, textures, sounds, which requires specific skills. You can always do it all by yourself. The quantity, quality, time, effort, all are tradeoffs.

Lastly, testing it. As painful as it may seems, you have to play the game quite repetitively, reproduce the weird events that might not occur in slightly different scenario.

Offline MaJ.P.Bouras

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Re: Creating a game?
« Reply #2 on: 17-01-2016, 20:01:59 »
Just make a kickstarter, release a small demo of 15 minutes of gameplay and cash in with pre-release availability. Piece of cake.

Offline kummitus

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Re: Creating a game?
« Reply #3 on: 17-01-2016, 21:01:08 »
That completely depends on how huge your expectations are. Simple games come quick. Bigger ones take time and effort.

If you want to share your ideas then that would help assessing how much work it would require.
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Offline LuckyOne

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Re: Creating a game?
« Reply #4 on: 17-01-2016, 22:01:43 »
It depends on the scope of the game and your ability to grasp quite complex concepts. Oh and also if you plan on doing everything yourself or also involving your friends.

If it's a simple game, like a 2D platformer, some engine with a drag and drop interface, pre-made graphical assets and some easy way of scripting behaviours with a dash of logical thinking ability and you can do it alone quite fast.


If it's something more complex, but still medium-ish... Well I'd say a dedicated and coordinated team of few coders, 2D & 3D asset makers and testers can get a presentable alpha in... 6-8 months perhaps? Up that to 12 if they are beginners at game-making, but with previous experience of the required work. That's assuming they can use a pre-made, well documented engine and don't need a custom solution.


Anyway it depends on a lot of things. Don't think anyone could make something like Forgotten Hope 3 alone even if he spent a dozen years on it. That's already stepping into AAA territory. There's just too many man-hours needed for that kind of a game.

FH2 is on an older engine with crappier workflow but it still takes many months of iterations and quite a few different people to make a single map ready for release.

As for the cost. Well, the required tools might get quite costly, but there's lots of developer-friendly licenses floating around nowadays. It doesn't take a lot of cash to make simple and yet still good looking games today, provided that you don't intend to actually sell it, as many sources of digital assets only allow non-commercial use.

If you're making something which uses online architecture, the costs might increase significantly because you then need to pay for the servers and the bandwidth.
« Last Edit: 17-01-2016, 22:01:14 by LuckyOne »
This sentence is intentionally left unfinished...

Offline Zoologic

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Re: Creating a game?
« Reply #5 on: 18-01-2016, 13:01:43 »
If you want to try out, I see that there are several game maker tools available in the internet, some are for free. You can also look at Steam software.

Offline Sgt.KAR98

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Re: Creating a game?
« Reply #6 on: 29-01-2016, 04:01:55 »
Probably I am thinking at something too large. A multiplayer FPS for example.

Offline Dukat

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Re: Creating a game?
« Reply #7 on: 11-02-2016, 21:02:58 »
In the first place funding is your problem. Creating an AAA title requires so much work, you need a team of developers getting paid.

Engines come completely free these days already.

https://aws.amazon.com/lumberyard

I usually imagine my own sounds with it, like `tjunk, tupdieyupdiedee` aaa enemy spotted, ratatatataboom