Well I just finished/got as far as I will go with my XNA project. It consists of a flat procedurally generated plane and a ball that rolls 2 feet via some crappy physics when the player walks close to it.
How long has this taken me? A month.
Seriously, how do you guys deal with this crap? I have taken a month off from my normal activities and basically immersed myself in math and game graphics. It is RIDICULOUSLY HARD and I consider myself an intelligent person. :)
If I had spent this time working on a site design and coding, or a c++/c# application I would have had stunning results in a months time (I've done so in the past).
But with games, what do I have? A ball that rolls two feet. wtf???? And it was SOO much effort just for that...especially figuring out how to do the damn sphere.
/rant off, goodnight :)
I'm not a game programmer...screw games
Quote:Original post by OneThreeThreeSevenIt gets easier; if you were to do the same thing again you could do it much faster, and probably better as well.
Seriously, how do you guys deal with this crap?
Quote:Original post by OneThreeThreeSeven
It is RIDICULOUSLY HARD and I consider myself an intelligent person. :)
There are no hard things.
Only that which you have not yet learned.
My first game, a simple 2D top-view car game for Mac, took me something like seven months to finish. And that's with using a sprite rendering library (something called SpriteWorld, I think?). This was about fifteen years ago. Looking at the code recently, I was amazed that anything in the game worked. I could probably write the game in under a day now.
Stick with it, it will get easier. In fifteen years you can look back at your rolling sphere and smile.
Stick with it, it will get easier. In fifteen years you can look back at your rolling sphere and smile.
Quote:Original post by superpig
FWIW, what you've described would take about 15 minutes to build in Unity [smile]
Like so. (Took me a bit longer because I had to figure out how/where to upload it).
Very few game programmers, these days, spend time wrestling with physics or rendering routines. There are people who still deal with those things, sure, specialized physics and renderer programmers; but there's really no need to get into that if you don't want to. It sounds like you're more interested in actually getting results, so if I were you I'd skip all the low-level stuff and just make something fun and cool in an engine somewhere.
Professional games frequently get delayed months or even years. You are encountering the same phenomenon on a smaller scale.
Sir 1337, that is exactly what makes game programming so rewarding. If you're interested in the results but not so much the challenge, you may find darkbasic or an entirely prebuilt game engine much more suitable to accomplish your goals.
(edit: Game programming is the Marine Corps of the IT world. Get paid half as much for twice as much work, but the pride that comes from it is worth more than any monetary reward you could hope to get anywhere else.)
(edit: Game programming is the Marine Corps of the IT world. Get paid half as much for twice as much work, but the pride that comes from it is worth more than any monetary reward you could hope to get anywhere else.)
Just to reinforce some of the above remarks, if you don't enjoy the challenge involved in programming games you don't have to do all that nitty-gritty work in order to make games. Look into using simpler tools or existing libraries of code more effectively to get faster results.
If you genuinely don't enjoy it, don't do it.
If you're just frustrated at the moment but find that you like the challenge then just stick with it; it gets easier with practice and experience, and can be very rewarding when you achieve something cool.
If you genuinely don't enjoy it, don't do it.
If you're just frustrated at the moment but find that you like the challenge then just stick with it; it gets easier with practice and experience, and can be very rewarding when you achieve something cool.
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