(back in 90's an Indie was a creepy guy in a garage with a passion for gamedev who rarely got acknowledged and shared their experience with other Indies using 56k modems; getting a rotating triangle rendering on screen used to feel like a major achievement)

this description still fits to my person (especially with this rotating triangle) The thing i was saying is that today obtaining this rotating triangle is probably harder than back then. I know I could use "easy" language, for example javascript and web gl - but this "easy" language is still probably much more complex than doing assembly on zx spectrum/amstrad/atari etc -- bac then it was all easier and people

were more focused on game itself Today i feel this complexity drains

me :c

I think its becoming easier and easier to make games. Obviously not "AAA" games, I'm not arguing that. But back in the olden days, if you wanted to create a game, it was ALL ON YOU. They didn't have any friendly tutorials. They didn't have frameworks you could download and make your life easier. They didn't have a game dev community with forums where you could ask questions. They didn't have digital distribution sites. They didn't have free graphics or sound libraries. They didn't have kickstarter or green light so you could get a little bit of buy in to your idea. They didn't even have websites!

You had a programming manual and that was about it. If you got stuck, you pretty much had two choices. Keep banging your head against a wall until you figured it out, or give up. You had to be VERY creative with managing your limited resources and invent techniques yourself. You didn't read a few articles on procedurally generated worlds... You had to INVENT with that idea all on your own without being exposed to it. Want some music in your game? Get ready for some fun data entry as you hand coded each note's pitch, duration, and channel.

Not to mention some of the crappy hardware like Tape Drives. Ugh!

Now a days, someone who knows a little bit about programming can download a free framework and developer environment, and get a silly little ship floating around on a screen within a few days. And if you get stuck you can read countless articles or turn to a community of gamedev users who pounce on the opportunity to earn some Reputation points. You can even blog about your progress, and attract a small fan base of people with little effort who eagerly anticipate the release of your game.

So many things have been abstracted away that we don't need to worry about anymore because of the efforts of some really smart people. We can concentrate on the fun game dev stuff almost immediately which makes a HUGE difference in motivation.

- Eck

I see it quite opposite way, back then when my first computer program was a classic

10 PRINT "COMMODORE 64"

20 GOTO 10

RUN

what is easier today? downloading and running python (not getting

lost what changed between versions, and all the other complex stuff

is much much harder

my second program was a program listing in basic which makes a small baloon sprite slide through the screen, This thask involved rewriting this down from the book or magaziine (about 20 lines)

c64 basic was ofc terrrible and asm was harder but overall it was probably much easier than todays myriads of topics that paralyzes you

(i find present state of the things as a problem, everything is to complex,

cpu is to complex, gpu is to complex, os is too complex, language is to complex, techniqes algorithms docs is also complex, etc.. you could say that i do not need to learn it all in to much depth but it is hard even to find most important things in this complexity and stay with that basic subset not being killed by this complexity of topics - this is just like 8-bit machine manuals had 256 pages, today manual for pc architecture has fckn 256 000 pages, and i am personaly only at the page 15 333 :C and it still not enough to be introduced in this playground

I see it quite opposite way, back then when my first computer program was a classic
10 PRINT "COMMODORE 64"
20 GOTO 10

...

8-bit machine manuals had 256 pages ...

That is the nature of why it is both harder and easier.

Consider the very popular 6502 processor, used as the base chip in devices like the Commodore 64, Apple 2, Atari 800 (a home computer) Atari 2600 (the game console) and the Nintendo Entertainment System.

It had 56 instructions, but only about 45 that programmers actually used. Most programmers at the time had all of them memorized, which really isn't that surprising.

The systems worked by putting the right bits in the right place at the right time. In many cases there was a single special byte of memory which was sent to the TV screen. To change the pixels you replace the byte. A few cycles later you replaced it for the next pixel. Your background on the 2600 was 40 pixels wide by 192 pixels high, you could swap out the color byte with one of 127 values that was sent to the TV.

I don't know if you would call it easier or harder. It was absolutely a different world.

One programmer was given a 200-page reference manual had everything they needed to fully exploit the system that ran at about 1 MHz. The device had 56 instructions and often 128 bytes of memory (many of those bytes reserved for special like graphics and audio). Unless the developer got lucky they got 4 kilobytes, or possibly only 2 kilobytes of total space. That one person was given between 45 to 60 work days to make a game that would hopefully reach a half million sales or more.

Contrast that with today. Teams get access to twenty or more volumes of technical material that describe most of how things work, coupled with a 100+ MB set of help files on the API that controlled an amazing collection of multi-GHz processors. Memory is not measured in bytes, but gigabytes of main memory, gigabytes of video memory, and are often expected to use 20-30 gigabytes of storage space. Development teams range from small --- 20 FTE work year projects --- to large --- 1,000+ FTE work year projects, with sales goals ranging from 1 million units to 20 million units.

The world is radically different, so relative difficulty is not easily expressed.

There is more to learn now this sadly as a result makes it look like its harder now when really it is easier. You have to remember if the information and resources are available then acquiring the knowledge isn't a matter of difficulty but simply time. The only thing stopping a person from making an AAA game is time.

I don't think anything in the information age should ever be considered 'hard'. If you have the time and put the effort in you can do anything. They should be some global mass movement in ensuring the word 'hard', when talking about something difficulty, gets replaced with 'time consuming'.

There is more to learn now this sadly as a result makes it look like its harder now when really it is easier. You have to remember if the information and resources are available then acquiring the knowledge isn't a matter of difficulty but simply time. The only thing stopping a person from making an AAA game is time.

I don't think anything in the information age should ever be considered 'hard'. If you have the time and put the effort in you can do anything. They should be some global mass movement in ensuring the word 'hard', when talking about something difficulty, gets replaced with 'time consuming'.

sometimes very time consuming ;/

There is more to learn now this sadly as a result makes it look like its harder now when really it is easier. You have to remember if the information and resources are available then acquiring the knowledge isn't a matter of difficulty but simply time. The only thing stopping a person from making an AAA game is time.

I don't think anything in the information age should ever be considered 'hard'. If you have the time and put the effort in you can do anything. They should be some global mass movement in ensuring the word 'hard', when talking about something difficulty, gets replaced with 'time consuming'.

sometimes very time consuming ;/

Yes but playing games is also very time consuming too :)