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Mattias Gustavsson
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Joined: 10 Nov 2007
Posts: 457
Location: Royal Leamington Spa, UK
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 Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 4:12 pm Post subject: Re: Making games is too hard |
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| Hajo wrote: |
I'm under the impression that it's often a matter of the right tools. Sometimes of the process. I face the same problems, though - currently I'm looking for a tool to graphically display a dialog tree, and to laod/save that in a format that I can easily convert to/from what my project will use. |
In my experience, it's a very common mistake to spend a lot of time looking for or building a tool that is supposedly going to make things a lot easier/faster etc.
I've rarely seen it been a win though, as generally more time is spent on building the tool (or wrestling an existing one to do what is needed) than it would have taken to do it without one.
I think you need to decide if you want to make tools or if you want to make games. It's difficult to do both.
You need a few basic tools obviously, but anything game specific, you're probably better off without...
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Terry
Spectral Form
Joined: 16 Jun 2002
Posts: 798
Location: Dublin, Ireland
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 5:18 pm Post subject: Re: Making games is too hard |
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| Mattias Gustavsson wrote: | | I think you need to decide if you want to make tools or if you want to make games. It's difficult to do both. |
That's my entire opinion on the matter summed up right there :)
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Jinroh
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Joined: 30 May 2008
Posts: 173
Location: U.S.A.
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 6:08 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, and if you're making a game/game engine don't write something like a Physics engine yourself. o_O if you want ragdolling and such anyway. Use Tokamak or something like it.
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Mao Mao Games
The wolf and his mate howl, taking solace in the silver moon. Pressing ever foreward to see what the future holds.
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Hajo
Demon Hunter
Joined: 30 Sep 2003
Posts: 779
Location: Between chair and keyboard.
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 8:16 pm Post subject: |
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I rather meant using tools, than making them. Matthias is right though, time to search, time to learn to use them is time that one does not have for the project, and must be caught up again later.
I don't really know to what extend tools are useful.
I'm more the engine/tool developer type than the game developer, so I naturally lean towards making engines and tools of all sorts. I know it's not necessarily the best way for quick progress, but once the tools are there, work on the game is easier and more fun. That is something that I appreciate much :)
And we all use tools of some sort, text editors, painting tools, map makers, animation packages, sound and music tools ... question is on which level we feel comfortable, that we have the right tools. And this line will stay blurry and is different for everyone I guess.
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Scrim
Mandrake's Little Slap Bitch
Joined: 05 Apr 2007
Posts: 69
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2008 11:40 pm Post subject: Re: Making games is too hard |
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| Mattias Gustavsson wrote: |
I think you need to decide if you want to make tools or if you want to make games. It's difficult to do both. |
I suppose it depends on what your goals are. It's true that you can spend a lot of time doing things instead of making games if you aren't careful, but if you realize that going in, perhaps it is okay. In my case I'm happy to work on anything as long as I'm learning something, so putting together a map editor is not something I personally would consider a waste of time, even if it means it takes me longer to make an actual game. On the other hand, I'm not a fan of "grunt work", i.e., tediously integrating game content by hand.
But that's me. Mattias is probably right: if your most important goal is to finish a game, don't spend too much time time on auxiliary stuff.
Like a lot of people, I tend to start a lot more projects than I finish, and so I made a rule: always make at least one thing in the current project that can be salvaged and used for future projects. Editors could easily fall into that category.
For example, in my competition entry I used a GUI system that started life in strategy game, and wrote all the game dialog and text using a custom editor I made for doing that in another RPG project (sorry Hajo, no dialog graph support. Though that is a really neat idea...)
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RedSlash
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Joined: 12 May 2005
Posts: 331
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| Posted: Wed Aug 06, 2008 12:45 am Post subject: |
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For my own game, which has quite a bit of text, I basically use a scripting method very similar to the one described by Rainer. Just like programming, I try to have the files and labels appropriately named and statements nicely indented and commented. For testing, I write a dialog simulator, which simulates the dialogs with extra debugging capabilities. I find this sufficient for my purposes.
A visual editor would be awesome, but there's no such tool out there and never will be due to the level of game specifics in my dialog system. Thus, for such an editor to exist would be to create my own, but I have decided it is not worth my time and will put up with the tediousness of modifying and tracking scripts in linear text files.
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