I wonder if today (I mean 2010+ era) programming (also making & shipping)
gammes are easier or just harder than in late 80 or early 90-ties (it is in 8-16-
bit era of atari/c64/amiga)....?
I must say that I think probably it is much harder, but would like to hear opinions on this..
Depends on the game.
With the tools available today, making a game is a lot easier than it was 20 - 30 years ago, when we're talking about similar types of games.
That in mind, we can now also create stuff that was impossible to do (or at least get running) 20 - 30 years ago, which will be more complex affairs.
People can now create small games without knowing much about programming at all, just using various game engines and visual scripting.
Huge AAA titles (like GTA series) take an incredible amount of people and time to create.
Depending on the game, shipping can be easy as anything (host it on a website somewhere and share a link), or very hard (this game is only printed on mint-condition SNES cartridges).
To make a game of 'commercial' quality is much harder now.
Back in the 8bit days, you'd need to understand the machine down to the lowest level to make a game work, but then the complexity of the computers was much simpler (so it was something you could learn within a year or so). The 16bit era was a little bit more involved on the programming side, but still achievable. The only real problem was a lack of reliable information on the systems you were developing for (we are talking about a pre-internet time, so finding out information involved library searches, asking friends, buying specialist magazines/books etc).
These days getting your head around CPU registers, SIMD, & multi-threading will take a lot of time. Sure the dev tools are better, but back then we'd just worry about painting a few 32x32 sprites and a few parallax backgrounds in Deluxe-paint. These days you'll spend months doing modelling, you'll model super high res models to generate normal maps, then you'll be painting up any number of textures for your specular/diffuse passes. Whilst there are simpler languages than C++ available, you'll still need to understand how 3D mathematics work, and you'll be working with multiple languages (e.g. HLSL/GLSL).
Certainly you could pick up a game engine off the shelf that allows you to get something working fairly quickly, but you'll still need to spend time learning and understanding what is a very complex piece of engineering.
Developing for 8bit/16bit was actually very easy. The hard part was reading seriously unpleasant technical documentation to help you understand how to write games (because there weren't that many tutorials, although there were plenty of code & hex examples you could pick apart).
I remember writing games for my Acorn Electron which included lines like
DATA 41,71,78,13,124,7,14,65
Those numbers represented literal machine code instructions which you could call to execute. Talk about flying blind - there were none of those namby pamby compilers/debuggers to help you! Writing text adventures was always fun too - you had to think about how you used every single bit so it would fit in memory. Ahhh, the good ol' days.
However, it's true that things have gotten orders of magnitude more complex, so yeah, it was easier back then.
I also think back then it was much easier .. so world goes in the strange way when you should have much easier you got much harder
The development tools do make things far easier now than they did back then (where you'd be writing your own HEX->Machine code editors in BASIC).
The difficulty of game development today though, is simply because the machines are so much more capable, which means you'll be using a lot of 3D/4D mathematics because the users have come to expect flashy 3D graphics with bump mapping, DOF, ambient occlusion, etc.
That complexity simply wasn't there in the 8/16bit days, because the hardware wasn't capable of handling it.
As the others have said, it depends on the game. For example, if you wanted to make a game to emulate an 8-, 16-bit game today (graphics and sound wise) it would be super easy thanks to all the tools and libraries out there today. If you get into games like COD, Battlefield, Final Fantasy XIII, Uncharted, etc. where everything is way more complex to do and then it is harder even with the tools and libraries. Though, with some of the engines they have, I guess you could take COD and Battlefield (well at least COD) off the list as examples.
It depends. If you mean actually programming a AAA game then there is no contest today its harder because gamers demand much more from their games the best graphics, believable AI, Achievments, Multiplayer. Don't forget in the 8 bit era people could spend £20 on a text based adventure game.
On the otherhand nowadays it is fairly trivial to write a hello world in C++ but, back on the Amiga most people wrote in Assembler and had to write their own bootloader just to run their program.
As the others have said, it depends on the game. For example, if you wanted to make a game to emulate an 8-, 16-bit game today (graphics and sound wise) it would be super easy thanks to all the tools and libraries out there today.
strangely i am not sure even if we talking about such simple games
- to learn a library like SDL you need today to learn so many things
so i am not sure if this is easier even in such small game case
Also doing music for game, i dont know how easy it is today (not doing it) but back then i think tools were simpler, so today they are maybe better but also more complex
In 8-16- bit era there was myriad of very fine stylish games today are not present (or i do not know of)
