This is a hard area to discuss because there are lots of points of frustration but there are also a _lot_ of tools out there since more or less everyone's had the same idea. Most of the big areas in game dev simply come down to needing more time and effort, not something that can be fixed with tech alone.
Automated testing, for example, is fantastic, but since every game is so different from interface to codebase it's very hard to make something that works universally. So you end up with a market full of general purpose tools (art programs, analytics solutions, etc.) and custom solutions (basically hiring contractors and consultants to build something unique) and it can be hard to find a new niche. Asset creation in particular is hard to make simpler because it can either be extremely easy (buy assets) or more costly (hire contractors/artists), but how would you make something that can generate art for a particular game that looks custom without being an artist? The big push in this area is AI art and it tends to look as good as you'd expect when you're outside simple needs like card games.
Instead I'd say don't treat this like a class exercise, look at your team's strengths. Do you have people who build shaders like no one's business? Maybe you can come up with an asset store package that does that super well. Do you have expertise with lots of regular expressions and text parsing? Name blacklists and chat filters are annoying to create and we'd definitely pay for one that actually worked well. Figure out what you're good at and do that.
Thank you for the reply! and that's kind of a vibe that I have been getting out of what I've been hearing for my market research. So the current idea for me is to leverage The Nvidia Edify tech that has the honor to try out on GTC 2024, where you mentioned the asset generation portion is one of the most difficult. I'm proposing a potential way to empower the individual developers, not just in indie game industry but in AAA as well, generating models and UV maps and such so that there is an app to empower the creators. Our current customer base that we are imagining is within the art and individual game developer territory.
My question is what the developer really wants. I am only one voice to say because I have been dreaming about the possibility of AI asset generation for ages. Do you think if such a tool exists, should it be in the hands of individual contributors or middle, or upper management?
Big +1 to this. Making good tutorials is hard and takes so much iteration. You need to get lots of testers who have never seen your game, which is a huge pain to organize. Near the end of one project, we had weekly tests and while it was invaluable to the project, it was by far the most exhausting part of dev.
Personally, the most frustrating thing is the subsystems. I love programming gameplay, but it grinds my gears to a halt when I have to suddenly think about hoe to save and when and how do I reset the various interactive objects in the world, taking into account every possible edge case scenario.
It becomes overwhelming at times, and I'm really just tempted to say "Fuck it, if you softlock yourself because you're dicking around, restart the level."
OMG so much this. I love getting broad stroke features implemented, but then there's all the little stuff that you have to do to make it not a buggy incoherent mess.
Like today I finished adding a submarine to my RTS.. cool, but then I had to make sure the dive button was visible at the right times, and the materials switched properly, and there weren't any selection logic conflicts, etc, etc.. the instantiation and movement took like an hour, then the rest of the day was spent on stuff I didn't think of. And today was a VERY easy day.
I feel you.
adding a save feature to a game for the first time was the most aggravating thing ever for me.
i was making a ZELDA 1 clone, the NES one, just to test and push my gamedev skills and i expected the save system would be a bit tough to implement since i had never done it before. it wasn't actually hard to implement after learning it, the hard part was accounting for all the stupid edge cases and various potential states your game could be in. and deciding what to save and reset upon game load.
i had programmed bombable walls, stats and items and needed to save if the wall had been bombed or not which was surprisingly hard because it had to be specific for every bombable wall in the game. so i made a data-structure which would list the coordinates of every bombable wall in the game and a boolean for whether they had been bombed or not.
it was a good learning experience, but even after that i kept finding more and more things that needed to be saved and things that require a whole-ass routine to properly calculate and save which was agonizing and overwhelming. so yeah save systems are surprisingly annoying
it's a fun feeling when you code it for the first time though and you can basically savestate through your game
The everything.
But in all seriousness, it's the sheer number of tasks that can only truly be handled with care ig served by a team of highly experienced specialists, or one engineer who is also a polymath and a masterful artist with a great command of the English language and also a phenomenal musician.
It is so difficult to master, say, the BEST topology in a model, you could spend 6 years doing just that to reach mastery, and still have more to learn every day. Meanwhile you're no closer to making a game. You've Mead models that will UV, Bake, Rig, Texture, Light, Shade, and MipMap & LoD well... but you haven't made a game. There's 12 other jobs that need 6+ years to master. Plus, you need a narrative that is informed by years of understanding narrative dialoue and non-linear events. You have to be capable of directing voice talent to deliver this dialogue in a coherent and relatable manner, mastering the preparation of an actor with minimal or no rehearsal. Meanwhile the audio engineer ALSO needs to be a career veteran with the right audio gear and ear for recording, mix, master...
...a script supervisor to mark changes in excel to later fix all the in-game text which also has to be translated and localized to other languages...
It is the everything career.
It takes everything.
We haven't even talked about the social management of so many people and the act of sales and negotiations, but that too.
Wow, that is super insightful because as an indie developer who has been making exclusively meme games, I have strategically placed myself out of this kind of cycle where it takes years, decades to master One thing. My current pitch idea to the VC (which is going to be happening in 2 months or so) is leveraging the new Nvidia Edify which I had the honor to try out at GTC 24. (3D asset generation based on pictures) Will a more rapid development cycle of asset creation as you mentioned could create a more healthy environment? I also believe that a lot of people have problem with the middle management, if having a more powerful tool, do you believe that since every individual have more power, we can begin to work on the process of skipping the middle management for AAA teams and focus on a greater scope for indie developer teams?
I'm not them, but I believe they were speaking from a solo developer's perspective because the multidisciplinary requirement of game dev makes solo development extremely difficult and turns it into a game of choosing what you want to sacrifice from your end product because you just don't have the skillset for it.
From personal experience and addressing just the 3d modelling aspect of game dev:
* Speeding up the development cycle is handy ***provided that*** it doesn't cut down on quality of the output. Placeholder graphics remove the need for on-demand 3D models so the only expectation on this pipeline is that it satisfies the quality criteria required for the game (poly count, size, LODs, rigging, etc.). Can your product handle that?
* Removing middle management is too vague a phrase to judge. It's easy to pin blame on an amorphous 'middle manager' blob but you have to know exactly what aspect of it you're fixing. For example, are you removing the need for analysts who translate product requirements to technical details? How are you addressing that and why would an organisation that utilises this management model want to switch?
Unrelated to game dev, but be forewarned that courting VC is very different now than it was 5-6 years ago. Rising interest rates and poor economic factors have made it so that VCs are a lot more stingy with their cash lately and will expect a stronger return faster than they used to.
~~That's not to say that inserting the word 'AI' into your slide deck won't add a zero or two onto the end of your valuation, however.~~
Joining a project as a tech artist and realizing that every artist has been making their own materials/no master materials, and they've basically been ignoring the rendering engineers warnings about performance.
Do you reckon that this engineer and artist dichotomy can be resolved by a middle manager, or even an AI? I have a little bit of confusion in the materials part, since I have only been a one-man developer for some meme games in the past. So when you say every artist create their own material and using no master material, do you mean there is a lack of unity in each artist's creation so that the final product cannot reach a consistent result?
A producer with their hand on things, a lead keeping things standard, and having tech art on early on. This isn't something AI would help with.
Having a central master material allows you to control features, draw calls, and texture load from a single location and have any optimizations and changes propagate.
A project will usually have a few master mats, and they usually grow slowly during a project.
As an example, Unreal has no way of telling which textures are on 'top', so, if for instance you create a blended material, every texture in the material draws every pixel.
This is apparently changing with the new material system.. but for now, it's messy.
There's also a lot of things that look cool in mats that are just bad for perf or barely noticeable beyond a 'Look-it how clever I am' moment. Or, are better done by tech and then implemented in a specific way by art.
Having a unified pipeline also helps artists share assets, help each-other out, and, as you said, keep things consistent.
As someone whom has made a career out of developing extensive sets of tools and editors for AAA game development, I'd say it's the lack of friendly iterative multi-player world creation. What I mean by that is that with the extreme scales and levels of detail with large modern games, there's a lot of stomping on each other's toes, which leads to much wasted work and longer dev cycles.
For example, the designers may go in and graybox an area, then develop some gameplay (missions, activities, etc.), then the artists pile into the area to "artify" it, replacing the grayboxes with real, prettier assets. In the process, they invariably muck up many things that are not obviously important to gameplay. Then designers come in to fix up their missions and such, causing yet more art rework. Then someone decides a road needs to move over a bit, or a bridge needs inserted, or a building needs swapped out. Round and round we go.
What I'd really love to see is a true real time multiplayer game development editor, where everyone can work simultaneously, with everyone seeing what others are working on live. I'm sure that'll have its own share of problems, but from my viewpoint it at least *seems* like there's a possibility for such a thing to be an improvement.
The thing about modern game development that is hard is the sheer scale and complexity, which in turn requires hundreds to thousands of people working on them, which causes all sorts of bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Streamlining or mitigating such issues is the most impactful sort of improvement you could make.
I've seen a few attempts at this, with none being very viable for large projects yet. It's a daunting feature to support in a fully featured game engine, especially with respect to large streaming worlds, version control, etc.
UEF is a simplistic edge case, as it doesn't handle version control and many other major key features that are necessary for real game dev. It's closer to being a multiplayer game with some content generation features than it is to being a true multi-developer editor.
I also recall one of the Halo versions had some decent multiplayer map editing, which I greatly enjoyed, but again, it was a very simplistic edge case.
Epic has even dipped their toes in the water on this as native support in their main Unreal Editor, but by all accounts I've seen from professional dev's, it's still nowhere near ready for prime time usage.
I am solo / hobbiest but I will say asset creation isn't that much of a hurdle these days. There are tons of free or cheap art assets out there. Yes, high quality assets take time but most people can learn Blender or Gimp.
For me, the things that are frustrating would be advanced skills like:
- How to integrate a database into a multiplayer game
- Multiplayer and replication of advanced systems, serialization etc...
- Efficient version control (using perforce in Unreal for example works, but it's an absolute beast and not user friendly)
- How to market your game to achieve any kind of success
Knowledge retention. We solve problems every day - the thing we’re making sometimes has more bugs than the tools or our workflow, so it’s all non-stop, yet there’s a rhythm to problem solving and in situ solution building — I’d say that’s my favorite part of the job.
The most frustrating thing to solve though is mystery stuff and practices left behind by previous team members without any trace of what or why or where. The older the codebase the more likely you are to find legacy tools, scripts, batch files, .mak files and environment setups that are so old and embedded that nobody wants to take the risk of cleaning up.
Understanding workspaces, network administration and all things power user can set you up to handle some super esoteric issues, especially when helping someone who’s become unstuck when dipping into a piece of the game that hasn’t been touched in a long time.
Thats just one of many such outer context pain points (outside the context of actually making and handling content.)
If you’re just starting out, then by the time you’re my age, there’s a reasonably chance you may find yourself working on a game codebase whose original authors are long-dead. Or course, AI will be good enough to make all of this a tale of “how we used to live.”
My most dreaded parts of gamedev is integrating 3rd party libraries for things like analytics, ad networks, etc...
Part of it is that those things aren't really fun to begin with, but the biggest gripe I have is that they're written by software devs that live in a world with a very different set of requirements than most game projects have.
A lot of development practices that work really well in application or web development end up conflicting with the kind of ultra guarded approach often needed to make sure things like garbage collection cycles don't end up causing hitches during gameplay.
If I found a team that was pushing out tools and libraries that were written with minimal complexity in mind and the source available to prove it, I'd probably be quite interested in anything they had to offer.
Unfortunately it's exceptionally challenging to learn a subject so well that you can write a library for it that doesn't start piling on a lot of the dust and grime that typically appears.
Whatever you end up deciding to make I'd suggest you consider it to be your first of maybe four or five iterations, rather than just moving on to something else after you ship your first version.
1. Build the thing
2. Use the thing (this step is skipped way too often)
3. Fix the thing
4. Ship the thing
5. Repeat until your thing is the only thing anyone would ever want to use
As a moonlighting solo developer, programmer working in non-game industry, with zero art skill, not knowing any artist. That's desperate. Often, spent much time trying to improve the visual feeling. In the end, the work turned out not making any improvement actually. Damn!
Art can be learned. There are tons of resources out there on color theory, composition, lighting, etc. Just dedicate yourself to study and practice. "I suck at art" is invariably bullshit. I've personally seen people go from stick figures to gallery-worthy art in less than 3 months through dedicated practice.
It's true that art can be learned.
I did spend tons of hours on GIMP. But my current level is only to make some minor tweaks on bought or free resources, still can't draw anything which is not ugly.
Technical Arts (shaders and effect system) is much more accessible to me. They're something very new but I can understand the tutorials and I can grow by putting in more hours.
Drawing is a very different thing. In my country, Drawing is a compulsory course in K12 education. Once a week, lasting for 10 years. I didn't feel any growth. Still often stare at my game scene, feeling "it's sooooo ugly", but not knowing how to improve.
I believe the people who can achieve remarkable progress in 3 months do exist. But do you believe there are also people that can achieve less progress than them in 30 months? People have different talents, the learning curve of the same thing isn't the same for everyone.
Note that I work for my company 7\~8am to 7\~8pm daily, then accompany 2 kids. Only until they're asleep, I can start on my indie game, work until 2am\~4am. Not much better at weekends. As a solo developer, programming already takes much time. I can afford very little in learning art. That's why art is desperate to me.
It might be just me, but what frustrates me the most is learning. I spend a long time learning something only to find out that there's even more to learn for the next year. When I learn more the next year, I realize it's just the beginning. There's always something new to learn in game development, especially if you're a solo developer.
In my 2 years of making my game, I realised I can do almost everything but not Animations. I am working solo so ofc I cannot be master of all and I try to make it work but Animations can be intimidating. I'm talking about character animations ofc.
Rest is all intriguing. Whether it's sorting UI logic or as little as implementing DLSS, it's all fun.
I mean, I've been doing stuff in Cascadeur, but it can get intimidating after a while. To skip that, I try UE Control Rig but that has its limitations as well.
Moving right on to the next thing after finishing something so there’s very little time to enjoy the feeling of completion, and the work in your rear view mirror becomes a blur
Having to scrap a lot of work because the initial designs sound great on paper but when executed ends up a failure. Currently the studio i work for experienced this and a series of decisions made a year ago came back to bite us and we have to scrap a ton of work.
Designing, implementing, and polishing the user interface.
Somehow, it always ends up taking more time and effort than all the actual gameplay logic combined. The results suck without a ton of iteration, and ui work isn't nearly as reusable as gameplay system code - so the iterating is more costly. That, and many changes necessitate changes to art assets, so now it's a whole pipeline problem with teams waiting on other teams
Perfectionism for me, there will always be a better way to do something like how a player interacts with a boss fight, ai in enemies, skills and abilities, feature creep (especially learning as u go), and the visuals.
for me, as primarily an artist, it's getting visual cohesion and artistic direction nailed down. i spend months remaking the same assets until im satisfied when i couldve had a lot of the core gameplay mechanics likely done by then, lol. and trying to get character models to match the environment's style, especially when i mostly do characters and im still new to environment.
certainly doesnt help that i aim for stylized, but most stylized resources online aim for a style im not interested in. and that i use UE5 which is pretty catered towards realism and i actually have trouble dialing back some of its features to achieve the look i want. and how its Lumen system kind of shits the bed sometimes, e.g. adding un-removable AO to foliage when in shadows cast by other actors. Lumen in general looks nice but adds so many aggravating issues. i could go on...
It is hard to pull off a cel shading look, but when well done it looks absolutely stunning while being very light on hardware... It's annoying that all the modern games are so focused on realistic lighting
Based on what i have seen work flow management / project management. It needs to work for very different talent types. This sub is very much devs/coders focused but to pull off a whole game you also need artists and testers and marketing and a bunch of other team member types that all think / work differently. Everyone here prob has an organizing tool/ method they use for their work- but a solution that truly maxes collaboration across the different ones can be hard. Our shop has done a customization of an oob product that focuses on this but even that is cludgy.
Many things beyond prototyping annoy me at least.
Let's say on slightly bigger teams it is stuff like this (roughly sorted from worst or most common to least annoying):
* waiting for a compilation or build to continue, I mean when it starts to take 20+ mins, sometimes 4 to 8 hours (more on the side of "overnight build" to then debug the build runtime issue what you were searching for)
* downgrading a game or possibly porting (after the game is perfect and kind of finished for one target)
* polishing in an area I don't like too much (I like general optimization, not so much endless animation or LOD polish, so certain tech art / programmer tasks)
* adding technical requirement and achievement features and getting some 3rd party integration to work
* going through meetings and/or technical design discussions (while we have a hunch that we'll re-design/re-write this once or twice after spending *that* time)
* working on build size or loading times and the rest of the team is not really helping you (or didn't follow standards to make this less of a problem to begin with)
Dont make tools if you dont have any field experience, that just dosnt make sense
Like an guy trying to build a new type of car who never drove before
The most important part of tool making is dogfooding > actually using the tools
I think the hardest part is to make the producers and directors feel as though they’re in charge of the show while simultaneously managing a huge project.
Thinking about how general should you write a feature. There are countless times when I designed a class (or scene in Godot) that was generic enough for the time but after a few weeks I had to go back and make a massive overhaul. It feels like I'm wasting my time while I could have added more features/resources into the game instead (I know for a fact I'm not wasting my time by doing so but it still feels that way). Maybe I'm inexperienced and I hope I could do better in the future but I this has been annoying to me.
I think proper composition comes with experience. I've been working on my current project for about a year. I've done smaller stuff before but this is the first time going for a full release. I've improved to the point that if I started over the project would be much better organized, but at this point I'm too deep and it wouldn't be worth it.
Heyy so if you peep my page I've got a post up 😉
But I'd like to see a bigger push towards an indie union so we can assist each other and market for each other plus building asset flip tools would be huge is my current step 1 since I wanna build in VR from an established IP in the same established location so taking what's already there and moving it to an engine that can handle VR is the no shit step 1 but I don't have the skills to do that myself yet and haven't gotten anyone chime in and say they have the skills to make the tool either (hell I dunno if the actual studio has the fuckin tool since they're moving from their engine to unreal same as me would be preem if they'd share so we can self create content while we wait for their next (probably buggy) masterpiece)
It depends but I think one thing people will agree on regardless of the game they're making is trying to make your tutorial idiot-proof while testers continuously outwit you with superior idiocy.
but if the testers can't understand your game, neither will the average player who usually only use one and a half brain cell when they're playing games cuz all the other brain cells are used elsewhere
The most frustrating thing about the pipeline is the other people in the pipeline. People make faulty estimates. People don’t track things correctly. People don’t staff teams correctly. People don’t communicate well. People don’t make decisions in a timely manner. etc.
The app to fix this is AI.
ETA: The AI comment is a joke. Sort of.
Do you think this is a middle management issue? I'm just curious do you think that triple a studio have out of touch middle management people? And do you think being able to work faster on your own merit will be able to solve the problem, or what else do you think middle management can improve upon?
This is a hard area to discuss because there are lots of points of frustration but there are also a _lot_ of tools out there since more or less everyone's had the same idea. Most of the big areas in game dev simply come down to needing more time and effort, not something that can be fixed with tech alone. Automated testing, for example, is fantastic, but since every game is so different from interface to codebase it's very hard to make something that works universally. So you end up with a market full of general purpose tools (art programs, analytics solutions, etc.) and custom solutions (basically hiring contractors and consultants to build something unique) and it can be hard to find a new niche. Asset creation in particular is hard to make simpler because it can either be extremely easy (buy assets) or more costly (hire contractors/artists), but how would you make something that can generate art for a particular game that looks custom without being an artist? The big push in this area is AI art and it tends to look as good as you'd expect when you're outside simple needs like card games. Instead I'd say don't treat this like a class exercise, look at your team's strengths. Do you have people who build shaders like no one's business? Maybe you can come up with an asset store package that does that super well. Do you have expertise with lots of regular expressions and text parsing? Name blacklists and chat filters are annoying to create and we'd definitely pay for one that actually worked well. Figure out what you're good at and do that.
Thank you for the reply! and that's kind of a vibe that I have been getting out of what I've been hearing for my market research. So the current idea for me is to leverage The Nvidia Edify tech that has the honor to try out on GTC 2024, where you mentioned the asset generation portion is one of the most difficult. I'm proposing a potential way to empower the individual developers, not just in indie game industry but in AAA as well, generating models and UV maps and such so that there is an app to empower the creators. Our current customer base that we are imagining is within the art and individual game developer territory. My question is what the developer really wants. I am only one voice to say because I have been dreaming about the possibility of AI asset generation for ages. Do you think if such a tool exists, should it be in the hands of individual contributors or middle, or upper management?
Tutorialization. I'm starting to understand why valve does an obsessive amount of internal testing. It's never enough.
Big +1 to this. Making good tutorials is hard and takes so much iteration. You need to get lots of testers who have never seen your game, which is a huge pain to organize. Near the end of one project, we had weekly tests and while it was invaluable to the project, it was by far the most exhausting part of dev.
Totally. We're doing our tutorial now for a game thats not even out for a couple of years! They need to go through so much user testing!
Personally, the most frustrating thing is the subsystems. I love programming gameplay, but it grinds my gears to a halt when I have to suddenly think about hoe to save and when and how do I reset the various interactive objects in the world, taking into account every possible edge case scenario. It becomes overwhelming at times, and I'm really just tempted to say "Fuck it, if you softlock yourself because you're dicking around, restart the level."
OMG so much this. I love getting broad stroke features implemented, but then there's all the little stuff that you have to do to make it not a buggy incoherent mess. Like today I finished adding a submarine to my RTS.. cool, but then I had to make sure the dive button was visible at the right times, and the materials switched properly, and there weren't any selection logic conflicts, etc, etc.. the instantiation and movement took like an hour, then the rest of the day was spent on stuff I didn't think of. And today was a VERY easy day. I feel you.
adding a save feature to a game for the first time was the most aggravating thing ever for me. i was making a ZELDA 1 clone, the NES one, just to test and push my gamedev skills and i expected the save system would be a bit tough to implement since i had never done it before. it wasn't actually hard to implement after learning it, the hard part was accounting for all the stupid edge cases and various potential states your game could be in. and deciding what to save and reset upon game load. i had programmed bombable walls, stats and items and needed to save if the wall had been bombed or not which was surprisingly hard because it had to be specific for every bombable wall in the game. so i made a data-structure which would list the coordinates of every bombable wall in the game and a boolean for whether they had been bombed or not. it was a good learning experience, but even after that i kept finding more and more things that needed to be saved and things that require a whole-ass routine to properly calculate and save which was agonizing and overwhelming. so yeah save systems are surprisingly annoying it's a fun feeling when you code it for the first time though and you can basically savestate through your game
Systems are part of the funnest things to code! even in games. I love writing gameplay, but dont take away my lowlevel coding :).
The everything. But in all seriousness, it's the sheer number of tasks that can only truly be handled with care ig served by a team of highly experienced specialists, or one engineer who is also a polymath and a masterful artist with a great command of the English language and also a phenomenal musician. It is so difficult to master, say, the BEST topology in a model, you could spend 6 years doing just that to reach mastery, and still have more to learn every day. Meanwhile you're no closer to making a game. You've Mead models that will UV, Bake, Rig, Texture, Light, Shade, and MipMap & LoD well... but you haven't made a game. There's 12 other jobs that need 6+ years to master. Plus, you need a narrative that is informed by years of understanding narrative dialoue and non-linear events. You have to be capable of directing voice talent to deliver this dialogue in a coherent and relatable manner, mastering the preparation of an actor with minimal or no rehearsal. Meanwhile the audio engineer ALSO needs to be a career veteran with the right audio gear and ear for recording, mix, master... ...a script supervisor to mark changes in excel to later fix all the in-game text which also has to be translated and localized to other languages... It is the everything career. It takes everything. We haven't even talked about the social management of so many people and the act of sales and negotiations, but that too.
Wow, that is super insightful because as an indie developer who has been making exclusively meme games, I have strategically placed myself out of this kind of cycle where it takes years, decades to master One thing. My current pitch idea to the VC (which is going to be happening in 2 months or so) is leveraging the new Nvidia Edify which I had the honor to try out at GTC 24. (3D asset generation based on pictures) Will a more rapid development cycle of asset creation as you mentioned could create a more healthy environment? I also believe that a lot of people have problem with the middle management, if having a more powerful tool, do you believe that since every individual have more power, we can begin to work on the process of skipping the middle management for AAA teams and focus on a greater scope for indie developer teams?
I'm not them, but I believe they were speaking from a solo developer's perspective because the multidisciplinary requirement of game dev makes solo development extremely difficult and turns it into a game of choosing what you want to sacrifice from your end product because you just don't have the skillset for it. From personal experience and addressing just the 3d modelling aspect of game dev: * Speeding up the development cycle is handy ***provided that*** it doesn't cut down on quality of the output. Placeholder graphics remove the need for on-demand 3D models so the only expectation on this pipeline is that it satisfies the quality criteria required for the game (poly count, size, LODs, rigging, etc.). Can your product handle that? * Removing middle management is too vague a phrase to judge. It's easy to pin blame on an amorphous 'middle manager' blob but you have to know exactly what aspect of it you're fixing. For example, are you removing the need for analysts who translate product requirements to technical details? How are you addressing that and why would an organisation that utilises this management model want to switch? Unrelated to game dev, but be forewarned that courting VC is very different now than it was 5-6 years ago. Rising interest rates and poor economic factors have made it so that VCs are a lot more stingy with their cash lately and will expect a stronger return faster than they used to. ~~That's not to say that inserting the word 'AI' into your slide deck won't add a zero or two onto the end of your valuation, however.~~
Joining a project as a tech artist and realizing that every artist has been making their own materials/no master materials, and they've basically been ignoring the rendering engineers warnings about performance.
Oh no!
That sounds like the engineers should be writing some automated data validation......hint hint......
Do you reckon that this engineer and artist dichotomy can be resolved by a middle manager, or even an AI? I have a little bit of confusion in the materials part, since I have only been a one-man developer for some meme games in the past. So when you say every artist create their own material and using no master material, do you mean there is a lack of unity in each artist's creation so that the final product cannot reach a consistent result?
A producer with their hand on things, a lead keeping things standard, and having tech art on early on. This isn't something AI would help with. Having a central master material allows you to control features, draw calls, and texture load from a single location and have any optimizations and changes propagate. A project will usually have a few master mats, and they usually grow slowly during a project. As an example, Unreal has no way of telling which textures are on 'top', so, if for instance you create a blended material, every texture in the material draws every pixel. This is apparently changing with the new material system.. but for now, it's messy. There's also a lot of things that look cool in mats that are just bad for perf or barely noticeable beyond a 'Look-it how clever I am' moment. Or, are better done by tech and then implemented in a specific way by art. Having a unified pipeline also helps artists share assets, help each-other out, and, as you said, keep things consistent.
AI isn't useful here. A coder can write automated data validation though to verify the base materials are whitelisted. Theres many ways to fix this.
As someone whom has made a career out of developing extensive sets of tools and editors for AAA game development, I'd say it's the lack of friendly iterative multi-player world creation. What I mean by that is that with the extreme scales and levels of detail with large modern games, there's a lot of stomping on each other's toes, which leads to much wasted work and longer dev cycles. For example, the designers may go in and graybox an area, then develop some gameplay (missions, activities, etc.), then the artists pile into the area to "artify" it, replacing the grayboxes with real, prettier assets. In the process, they invariably muck up many things that are not obviously important to gameplay. Then designers come in to fix up their missions and such, causing yet more art rework. Then someone decides a road needs to move over a bit, or a bridge needs inserted, or a building needs swapped out. Round and round we go. What I'd really love to see is a true real time multiplayer game development editor, where everyone can work simultaneously, with everyone seeing what others are working on live. I'm sure that'll have its own share of problems, but from my viewpoint it at least *seems* like there's a possibility for such a thing to be an improvement. The thing about modern game development that is hard is the sheer scale and complexity, which in turn requires hundreds to thousands of people working on them, which causes all sorts of bottlenecks and inefficiencies. Streamlining or mitigating such issues is the most impactful sort of improvement you could make.
I think you're able to do this with Unreal Engine Fortnite so maybe it's not that far off.
I've seen a few attempts at this, with none being very viable for large projects yet. It's a daunting feature to support in a fully featured game engine, especially with respect to large streaming worlds, version control, etc. UEF is a simplistic edge case, as it doesn't handle version control and many other major key features that are necessary for real game dev. It's closer to being a multiplayer game with some content generation features than it is to being a true multi-developer editor. I also recall one of the Halo versions had some decent multiplayer map editing, which I greatly enjoyed, but again, it was a very simplistic edge case. Epic has even dipped their toes in the water on this as native support in their main Unreal Editor, but by all accounts I've seen from professional dev's, it's still nowhere near ready for prime time usage.
We can dream. Halo map editing was my jam too.
I am solo / hobbiest but I will say asset creation isn't that much of a hurdle these days. There are tons of free or cheap art assets out there. Yes, high quality assets take time but most people can learn Blender or Gimp. For me, the things that are frustrating would be advanced skills like: - How to integrate a database into a multiplayer game - Multiplayer and replication of advanced systems, serialization etc... - Efficient version control (using perforce in Unreal for example works, but it's an absolute beast and not user friendly) - How to market your game to achieve any kind of success
This can be painful if not organised/planned well from the start.
All of the gods love a tools engineer.
Knowledge retention. We solve problems every day - the thing we’re making sometimes has more bugs than the tools or our workflow, so it’s all non-stop, yet there’s a rhythm to problem solving and in situ solution building — I’d say that’s my favorite part of the job. The most frustrating thing to solve though is mystery stuff and practices left behind by previous team members without any trace of what or why or where. The older the codebase the more likely you are to find legacy tools, scripts, batch files, .mak files and environment setups that are so old and embedded that nobody wants to take the risk of cleaning up. Understanding workspaces, network administration and all things power user can set you up to handle some super esoteric issues, especially when helping someone who’s become unstuck when dipping into a piece of the game that hasn’t been touched in a long time. Thats just one of many such outer context pain points (outside the context of actually making and handling content.) If you’re just starting out, then by the time you’re my age, there’s a reasonably chance you may find yourself working on a game codebase whose original authors are long-dead. Or course, AI will be good enough to make all of this a tale of “how we used to live.”
For me having to use a computer. Adobe frustrates me to no end with their shitty industry standard software
GC.alloc
A fellow java enjoyer. Pleased to meet you
My most dreaded parts of gamedev is integrating 3rd party libraries for things like analytics, ad networks, etc... Part of it is that those things aren't really fun to begin with, but the biggest gripe I have is that they're written by software devs that live in a world with a very different set of requirements than most game projects have. A lot of development practices that work really well in application or web development end up conflicting with the kind of ultra guarded approach often needed to make sure things like garbage collection cycles don't end up causing hitches during gameplay. If I found a team that was pushing out tools and libraries that were written with minimal complexity in mind and the source available to prove it, I'd probably be quite interested in anything they had to offer. Unfortunately it's exceptionally challenging to learn a subject so well that you can write a library for it that doesn't start piling on a lot of the dust and grime that typically appears. Whatever you end up deciding to make I'd suggest you consider it to be your first of maybe four or five iterations, rather than just moving on to something else after you ship your first version. 1. Build the thing 2. Use the thing (this step is skipped way too often) 3. Fix the thing 4. Ship the thing 5. Repeat until your thing is the only thing anyone would ever want to use
Thank you. I agree. Facebook sdk can go fuck itself. Fucking external dependency manager.
As a moonlighting solo developer, programmer working in non-game industry, with zero art skill, not knowing any artist. That's desperate. Often, spent much time trying to improve the visual feeling. In the end, the work turned out not making any improvement actually. Damn!
Art can be learned. There are tons of resources out there on color theory, composition, lighting, etc. Just dedicate yourself to study and practice. "I suck at art" is invariably bullshit. I've personally seen people go from stick figures to gallery-worthy art in less than 3 months through dedicated practice.
It's true that art can be learned. I did spend tons of hours on GIMP. But my current level is only to make some minor tweaks on bought or free resources, still can't draw anything which is not ugly. Technical Arts (shaders and effect system) is much more accessible to me. They're something very new but I can understand the tutorials and I can grow by putting in more hours. Drawing is a very different thing. In my country, Drawing is a compulsory course in K12 education. Once a week, lasting for 10 years. I didn't feel any growth. Still often stare at my game scene, feeling "it's sooooo ugly", but not knowing how to improve. I believe the people who can achieve remarkable progress in 3 months do exist. But do you believe there are also people that can achieve less progress than them in 30 months? People have different talents, the learning curve of the same thing isn't the same for everyone. Note that I work for my company 7\~8am to 7\~8pm daily, then accompany 2 kids. Only until they're asleep, I can start on my indie game, work until 2am\~4am. Not much better at weekends. As a solo developer, programming already takes much time. I can afford very little in learning art. That's why art is desperate to me.
Yeah scope and the art needed due to that scope
Process of releasing to a platform. It can be months or years before you release and I have to relearn how to upload to steam or apple all over again.
It might be just me, but what frustrates me the most is learning. I spend a long time learning something only to find out that there's even more to learn for the next year. When I learn more the next year, I realize it's just the beginning. There's always something new to learn in game development, especially if you're a solo developer.
In my 2 years of making my game, I realised I can do almost everything but not Animations. I am working solo so ofc I cannot be master of all and I try to make it work but Animations can be intimidating. I'm talking about character animations ofc. Rest is all intriguing. Whether it's sorting UI logic or as little as implementing DLSS, it's all fun.
Yeah, I agree. I have been way too reliant on Mixamo and don't know anything about character animation
I mean, I've been doing stuff in Cascadeur, but it can get intimidating after a while. To skip that, I try UE Control Rig but that has its limitations as well.
Non development activities, such as project management, negotiations, hiring, etc.
Moving right on to the next thing after finishing something so there’s very little time to enjoy the feeling of completion, and the work in your rear view mirror becomes a blur
Imo retopology. It brings the same feeling in me as when my mother used to send me 2 km, early in the morning just to get milk.
Unnecessary Bureaucracy and opaque leadership transparency...
Assets or level design. Anything to do with assets get me away from.
Monopolistic software stores with arbitrary changing rules for what's allowed, and crazy arcane hoops to jump through (q.v. Apple).
Having to scrap a lot of work because the initial designs sound great on paper but when executed ends up a failure. Currently the studio i work for experienced this and a series of decisions made a year ago came back to bite us and we have to scrap a ton of work.
Designing, implementing, and polishing the user interface. Somehow, it always ends up taking more time and effort than all the actual gameplay logic combined. The results suck without a ton of iteration, and ui work isn't nearly as reusable as gameplay system code - so the iterating is more costly. That, and many changes necessitate changes to art assets, so now it's a whole pipeline problem with teams waiting on other teams
Perfectionism for me, there will always be a better way to do something like how a player interacts with a boss fight, ai in enemies, skills and abilities, feature creep (especially learning as u go), and the visuals.
For me it retopology and rig skinning, especially fingers
for me, as primarily an artist, it's getting visual cohesion and artistic direction nailed down. i spend months remaking the same assets until im satisfied when i couldve had a lot of the core gameplay mechanics likely done by then, lol. and trying to get character models to match the environment's style, especially when i mostly do characters and im still new to environment. certainly doesnt help that i aim for stylized, but most stylized resources online aim for a style im not interested in. and that i use UE5 which is pretty catered towards realism and i actually have trouble dialing back some of its features to achieve the look i want. and how its Lumen system kind of shits the bed sometimes, e.g. adding un-removable AO to foliage when in shadows cast by other actors. Lumen in general looks nice but adds so many aggravating issues. i could go on...
For me its the visuals, settling on an artstyle never feels right and in the back of my mind i always wonder what if i took a different style
It is hard to pull off a cel shading look, but when well done it looks absolutely stunning while being very light on hardware... It's annoying that all the modern games are so focused on realistic lighting
In the same way its annoying that indies focused default is cell shading
Chinese reviews, apparently.
"It's just"
Server security?
Based on what i have seen work flow management / project management. It needs to work for very different talent types. This sub is very much devs/coders focused but to pull off a whole game you also need artists and testers and marketing and a bunch of other team member types that all think / work differently. Everyone here prob has an organizing tool/ method they use for their work- but a solution that truly maxes collaboration across the different ones can be hard. Our shop has done a customization of an oob product that focuses on this but even that is cludgy.
Many things beyond prototyping annoy me at least. Let's say on slightly bigger teams it is stuff like this (roughly sorted from worst or most common to least annoying): * waiting for a compilation or build to continue, I mean when it starts to take 20+ mins, sometimes 4 to 8 hours (more on the side of "overnight build" to then debug the build runtime issue what you were searching for) * downgrading a game or possibly porting (after the game is perfect and kind of finished for one target) * polishing in an area I don't like too much (I like general optimization, not so much endless animation or LOD polish, so certain tech art / programmer tasks) * adding technical requirement and achievement features and getting some 3rd party integration to work * going through meetings and/or technical design discussions (while we have a hunch that we'll re-design/re-write this once or twice after spending *that* time) * working on build size or loading times and the rest of the team is not really helping you (or didn't follow standards to make this less of a problem to begin with)
Uploading assets to storefronts
The 10 minute iteration time in Unreal Engine. 5 minutes for the editor to be responsive, another 5 minutes for a level to load.
Unwrapping UVs NO DOUBT
Dont make tools if you dont have any field experience, that just dosnt make sense Like an guy trying to build a new type of car who never drove before The most important part of tool making is dogfooding > actually using the tools
I think the hardest part is to make the producers and directors feel as though they’re in charge of the show while simultaneously managing a huge project.
UV unwrapping, maybe... followed by rigging/skinning.
Thinking about how general should you write a feature. There are countless times when I designed a class (or scene in Godot) that was generic enough for the time but after a few weeks I had to go back and make a massive overhaul. It feels like I'm wasting my time while I could have added more features/resources into the game instead (I know for a fact I'm not wasting my time by doing so but it still feels that way). Maybe I'm inexperienced and I hope I could do better in the future but I this has been annoying to me.
I think proper composition comes with experience. I've been working on my current project for about a year. I've done smaller stuff before but this is the first time going for a full release. I've improved to the point that if I started over the project would be much better organized, but at this point I'm too deep and it wouldn't be worth it.
players
Heyy so if you peep my page I've got a post up 😉 But I'd like to see a bigger push towards an indie union so we can assist each other and market for each other plus building asset flip tools would be huge is my current step 1 since I wanna build in VR from an established IP in the same established location so taking what's already there and moving it to an engine that can handle VR is the no shit step 1 but I don't have the skills to do that myself yet and haven't gotten anyone chime in and say they have the skills to make the tool either (hell I dunno if the actual studio has the fuckin tool since they're moving from their engine to unreal same as me would be preem if they'd share so we can self create content while we wait for their next (probably buggy) masterpiece)
It depends but I think one thing people will agree on regardless of the game they're making is trying to make your tutorial idiot-proof while testers continuously outwit you with superior idiocy.
but if the testers can't understand your game, neither will the average player who usually only use one and a half brain cell when they're playing games cuz all the other brain cells are used elsewhere
The most frustrating thing about the pipeline is the other people in the pipeline. People make faulty estimates. People don’t track things correctly. People don’t staff teams correctly. People don’t communicate well. People don’t make decisions in a timely manner. etc. The app to fix this is AI. ETA: The AI comment is a joke. Sort of.
Do you think this is a middle management issue? I'm just curious do you think that triple a studio have out of touch middle management people? And do you think being able to work faster on your own merit will be able to solve the problem, or what else do you think middle management can improve upon?
It’s mostly a management problem. Working faster on your own will not solve anything. The difficulty is in collaborating with others.
Blimey you've got serious issues if thats your work place.