Making Games

People saying that it&#x27;s &quot;easy to make games&quot; surprise me. Are you actually trying to make something real, or is this just speculation? If you&#x27;re on the sidelines or a dilettante, why speak? You&#x27;re just adding noise.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m in the trenches and making games is _hard_! Sure we have faster computers and better tooling. We also have _much_ higher expectations... Still, it&#x27;s incredible to make games. I&#x27;m so lucky to work on them each day.<p>If you feel what I feel you don&#x27;t make excuses about &quot;luck.&quot; What the hell is luck? Of course &quot;success&quot; is out of your control... But you control what you make. You can choose to make something beautiful, to hone your craft, to stir a feeling. What could be better than that?!

The game industry is much more cutthroat and high stakes than it was a decade ago during the indie explosion.<p>Many of the indie darlings from that era would be lost in the noise now, and the quality bar expected of even an indie game is insane. Outside of Jonathan Blow and Pope, I struggle to think of game creators that would stand out of the crowd nowadays.<p>By all measures, I had pretty good success shipping an indie VR game in 2016. Competition was low and our low poly art style was passable because the game had personality to make up for it. I am 100% confident that even a few years later the game would’ve sold 4 digit copies. Even with the success, I still would have made more money as an engineer elsewhere. Of course having successfully “done the indie thing” has a high non-monetary reward that made it worth it for me, but I was also financially well off and could afford that loss.<p>I’d counsel anyone at this point to find a AA indie team or even go AAA and consider just working on something you have passion for on the side. Drastically less risk if you go that route, as you can quit when you know you “have something”. Or just enjoy throwing your game up on itch or Steam and have fun seeing other people play.

Last year, I finally worked up the nerve to make a free web game into a real, complete game and release it on Steam.<p>Since I was doing it for fun, I decided to make the game free (this meant I missed out on learning if people liked the idea enough to pay, and also I couldn’t use sales to drive interest).<p>I grudgingly set up a Discord server and released the game.<p>I was lucky that someone with millions of followers recommended my game, and that the overall response was positive (“very positive” on Steam, briefly), but what did I really get in the end? A couple of fans, a few hours of talking about my game with strangers, an interesting story (“a billionaire beat my game!”), and witnessing people beat me (handily) at my own game.<p>Was it all worth it? Should I do it again? Honestly, I don’t know. I’m still processing it all. I do have a nagging feeling that my tech skills could be put to better use, or at least help people I know, instead of strangers.<p>Like I said: still processing :)

This article couldn&#x27;t have come at a more perfect time. I slogged through myriads of tutorials for unreal and unity. I watched dev logs where people seemed to effortlessly build their ideal worlds and then go viral for it on youtube. All while thinking &quot;if I could ever just take some time away from my web dev career, I could make games too. But it takes so much time to get started.&quot;<p>Enter Godot. I have LOVED it. It has absolutely changed the way I think about game dev, and the journey with it so far has been refreshing. It feels natural to code in, things are organized in a way that I don&#x27;t need a degree in the engine to understand, and the UI is simple and clean. This post inspired me even more to keep going full bore with Godot. Thanks man.

Andrei Tarkovski:<p>“An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=V27XlEDLdtE">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=V27XlEDLdtE</a>

Thank you for the thoughtful, honest, introspective essay[0]. I have a 15-year old son who -- like a lot of kids -- is interested in making games for a living. I&#x27;ve shared other pieces with him about &quot;what it&#x27;s really like to write software in the computer gaming world&quot; and after clicking the link, quickly sent him this one. I just assumed it&#x27;d be something along those lines so I sent it before I read it.<p>These &quot;real life in the world of game development&quot; pieces are usually the kind that serve only to discourage a kid from wanting to write games (and really any other software for that matter) which is not really what I&#x27;m aiming for. I simply want him to have a more realistic view of what game development really is and I suspect he&#x27;d be interested in a lot of <i>other</i> corners of software development.<p>You basically nailed it, here[1]. In fact, as I read it, I imagined my son writing something like this in the future -- albiet with some details changed. He&#x27;s an incredibly intelligent 15-year old kid who has pretty serious ADHD and struggles due to family circumstances. He had similar issues with friends -- mostly related to being homeschooled until last year[2].<p>[0] Looks like submitter is the author assuming the HN profile is accurate.<p>[1] As a fellow Christian who was praying about his son this morning, I suspect this was something He sent my way ;).<p>[2] He&#x27;s got friends and makes friends easily but the school he was put in was a small (unfortunately awful) Christian school with kids who had attended since Kindergarten ... it was hard to break into.

Some of this resonated with me, some did not. I don&#x27;t think there was an insecurity I needed salve for as a motivation for writing games. Neither do I think that programming generally has been a &quot;power trip&quot; for me.<p>But like the author I came to see my writing of games as satisfying an artistic (and also a technical need) I suppose I have. Why express yourself artistically in software? Maybe because I am not as skilled at painting or music to hope to express myself in that regard.<p>And I think early on, perhaps still, I wrote games to make tangible the idea for a game that <i>I</i> would like to play. (That others might also enjoy the game should not come as a surprise.)<p>In fact, plenty of times when learning I can program, I have had non-programmers tell me about their own great idea for a game and ask if I could write it. I feel a little uncomfortable when they do because frankly it&#x27;s difficult for me to be inspired by someone else&#x27;s idea. Often, I tell them, &quot;Why don&#x27;t you teach yourself to program?&quot; I know how dickish that sounds but in fact I am essentially telling them to take the exact path that I took myself, ha ha.<p>:<p>I agree indie game writing is art.<p>When I first wrote shareware when I was in college any money that showed up (maybe $10 a month) went directly to buying a pizza and two cokes for my then-girlfriend and I that Friday night. It just seemed like gravy.<p>But when programming became a career for me, and the internet added a more realistic means to monetize software, there did come in this creeping expectation of making enough to &quot;live on&quot; from games. I am coming to see now that this kind of ruins it for me.<p>Having recently retired, I used my time to rewrite one of my early shareware games for Steam. It was fun to go back to C for the nostalgia, fun to modernize the game using a cross-platform library (SDL), fun to see 60 fps so easy....<p>But I sunk $1000 into the thing if you count buying a Steam Deck, paying Steam $100, and the various controllers and such I purchased (for the oft-neglected PC&#x27;s I pressed into game-development service — I am normally a Mac guy but I wanted to try cross-platform). All told I have made about $570 from the game and I don&#x27;t expect to make much more.<p>I think I&#x27;ll write another game or two for Steam but, and perhaps this is a healthy mindset, I don&#x27;t expect to make any money doing it. But in a way I feel I am slowly coming back to my college days and can begin to look at any sort of recompense as ... having paid for the Steam Deck at least.<p>I am glad the author has come around to a similar conclusion. I think it can make game-writing fun again. (I am also glad the author seems to have exorcised some childhood demons in the process — congrats.)

Hi Evan, I enjoyed this blog post a lot. I released my first indie game this February, after working on it since graduating college. It has made 3x my normal job&#x27;s salary -- I&#x27;m still torn about whether to make a sequel and go full time, or stick with my usual 9 to 5. Let me know if you have any good tips!<p>I think gamedev was also a very big escape for me since middle school, and your post reminded me a lot of those dark times.<p>I also agree that games are an art, I went from drawing -&gt; modeling -&gt; rendering -&gt; programming, so it was easier for me to reach those conclusions.<p>Making a game to show off your cleverness is definitely not the best motivation, but I have found that it can improve the game&#x27;s &quot;experience&quot; if you can harness that feeling. Straddling the line between personal interest, feasibility, and market value is maybe the most important thing to get right as a solo developer in my opinion. I could see developers who got lucky with their obsessions getting absolutely devastated with their lack of hits afterwards (something I&#x27;m afraid of doing myself!).<p>The comment about the twitter gamedev scene being driven by terminally online people is very accurate, although I still admire some of the more educational&#x2F;resource oriented ones for their sheer willpower.

I get pretty dismissive when I hear someone is designing a custom engine for their game. It often seems like they’re stalling for one reason or another, or have something to prove. Mother 4 is a good example.<p>I read tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow w my girlfriend. She didn’t understand why building an engine is such a bad idea (for a modern pc game). I compared it to a hobbyist car designer starting to design a car by formulating his own rubber for the tires, and building the engine and transmission and wiring from scratch.

Interesting article. I landed on &#x27;game development&#x27; as a way to keep some form of artistic practice alive while I have a 9-5 because they&#x27;re affordable to make (albeit time expensive) and essentially act as gesamtkunstwerks that can absorb as many other hobbies and interests as you can cram in them. Photography? Analogue synthesisers? Geopolitics? Shader coding? All material for building your game world. There&#x27;s also the slim but not impossible chance your creation sells a few copies. At the very least, you might pick up some useful skills for your dayjob.<p>My first game (not available anymore, but it was this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cQfMHzbFL-w">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cQfMHzbFL-w</a>) sold maybe a few thousand copies, but it briefly hit the front page of reddit, indirectly led to some other fun opportunities, and got the chance to get a feature on the App Store (...though I didn&#x27;t see the email until way too late), which was probably some of the most fulfilling stuff that has happened to me online, as someone that keeps a minimal online presence otherwise. But commercially? It would be considered an abject failure by any studio that had to keep the lights on. As far as hobbies you don&#x27;t have to leave your desk for, game development carries with it so much possibility. Which is also what makes it so dangerous and alluring for so many, I think.

I think the whole trope that “making a successful game is close to impossible” is overly cynical.<p>I’ve found a few people online say that they don’t understand why their game did really poorly even though it’s like X and does Y AND Z. So I ask them to show me their game. I haven’t found a single scenario where the game wasn’t unfinished, janky and&#x2F;or just plain unfun.<p>I want to go against the grain here and say if you have a game idea, just make it. But don’t expect people to buy it if it sucks. Like with all good artists, you have to be conscious of whether the thing you’re making is a good product or not. I think the author of this article realized that eventually.

great post—it resonates, deeply.<p>I won&#x27;t bore you all with the full tale of my similar story arc, but, in short: physically moving away from the scene, eventually mustering the courage to kill the full-time indie gamedev dream for good (after a few increasingly desperate attempts and monetizing this thing I spent my whole life working toward), and then finally finding myself slowly progressing elsewhere in life as a result (meeting the woman who I would go on to marry and start a family with; starting a career working a mundane but decently-paying programming-ish job for my hometown school system) has been one hell of a ride, to say the least.<p>I eventually reached conclusions that are very, very similar to those that the author reached: game development was, as it turns out, almost entirely a coping mechanism for avoiding progressing forward in life, by maintaining an internal illusion that someone, <i>somewhere</i> would care about the cool stuff I was making, such that it would all be worth it in the end—all the while giving me the feeling of <i>control</i> over something, even if basically nobody else in the world cared about it but me.<p>I still make games, but I&#x27;ve fully come to terms with the fact that it&#x27;s almost certainly never going to be more than an interesting and fun hobby. this might not end up being the same conclusion someone else treading more or less the same path comes to, but, it&#x27;s where I ended up, and I&#x27;m much better for it.

I posted something along the lines of &quot;games are too easy to make&quot; on reddit and got expectedly lambasted. My fault, don&#x27;t tell people with new found ability that the only reason they have it is because it&#x27;s 100 times easier than it used to be.<p>A long time ago, I got interested in computers to make games but immediately veered into other kinds of software. No worries - I always planned that once I was &quot;done&quot; in the application&#x2F;startup space, I&#x27;d head back and make those games.<p>Sadly - I waited too long. Like music, books, or photography - the supply-side is so inundated with content that the market is more about marketing than creation or merit. Mind you, never did I expect or even care if I made money. That was never the goal. But now I realize just to get some people to play my game would be a huge undertaking requiring tons of luck - just to rise above the noise. That was the deal breaker - I don&#x27;t care about making money - but I do care about eventual players, at least if something will take months or years* to create. I wanted to make games, not do marketing.<p>The bright side is there&#x27;s no shortage of fun games to play. I&#x27;ll stay on the player side of the equation!<p>*Wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if something like ChatGPT allows games to be made in days in the semi-near future. If so, I just might make games anyway - still not for money, and now not for players - but just to finally let those ideas out of my head.

I can totally relate to this but in a different way. Music is very similar, especially nowadays when everyone has an opinion about what you should create, and it&#x27;s easy to get lost in the sea of YouTube tutorials of people telling you which way is the right way, or even listening to what&#x27;s accepted in the mainstream and attempting to contort your own work to fit within that structure.<p>After all, any form of expression can be seen as art, be it music production or games, and the constant battle we feel as artists can be overwhelming at times, especially when you want others to acknowledge and validate you.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be cool if your son and his son could look back and say, &quot;Look what my dad&#x2F;grandfather created&quot;. For me, that thought is a-lot more full-filling than worrying about what the rest of the world thinks.

&gt; Why had I tried to make personally meaningful art and make money from it? Isn’t that a contradiction?<p>This is somewhat where I am now, working on an indie game that I must realistically guess will not pay the bills, once I release it.<p>I took a somewhat backwards&#x2F;opposite approach, though: worked at a &quot;real job&quot; for decades, got some savings, and now am finally scratching that itch. If it fails financially, it will still be an emotionally and personally satisfying journey for me (also painful, but that&#x27;s what happens when you care about things :)<p>I appreciate this post for its honesty, and it&#x27;s presentation of issues as the author&#x27;s own experiences and self-discovery, not trying to wrap it up as advice per-se. I find it much easier to take advice from people who aren&#x27;t pushing it as such.

This ended up to be much more about the author than about &quot;making games&quot;. Obviously nothing wrong with that but it wasn&#x27;t where I thought it was going.<p>I think there are plenty of artists that make money. I think there are plenty of spaces where people are known inside the space but unknown outside. I don&#x27;t know whether most indie developers want to be &quot;known&quot; or not, but obviously the <i>vast</i> majority of people in any space are not known, inside or out.<p>I don&#x27;t know. Indie game dev is a niche profession with a low success rate, and even those that have some success often leave.

This resonates more than not. At some point game development (or development in general) becomes an escape from even external validation. In my youth I got lost there for a long time and I&#x27;m not sure I&#x27;d do it again outside of a hobby interchangeable with painting.<p>All the turmoils and joys of art bundled into one.

If I had the kind of brain to grok vector transformations, I&#x27;d build my own game engine. But I don&#x27;t, so I decide to write stories on the side instead.<p>The guys who can do that stuff are wizards

I&#x27;m the co-founder of a fantasy sports game, so I&#x27;ve come to know the real money side of gaming somewhat intimately. As much as people scoff at the money component in a game...it leads to hyper engaged users. Our folks are incredibly stick and while it&#x27;s a small cohort, it&#x27;s a positive sign. They&#x27;re spending over an hour playing everyday, which I&#x27;m proud of.<p>I think if you&#x27;re building a traditional game (with no money component), you have to go into as a labor of love. You&#x27;re competing for attention among a _vast_ canvas of alternatives. That is so hard to do.<p>My dream is to one day build a command and conquer successor. That market is tiny and the whole genre has pretty much moved on. The people who&#x27;d want to play it are millennials like me. I&#x27;d need to completely alter my motivations and expectations going into it.<p>I think as more people are wide eyed about this, we&#x27;ll see less of the &quot;punch in the gut&quot; stories like these.

making a living off indie gamedev is not realistic because of how easy it is to do the same as software engineer.<p>so why not both? a few years on, a few years off, repeat. remote work makes this even easier.<p>i’m just starting gamedev, and am building just to see if i can.<p>i like the game i’m playing, but i feel like it could be better. i’m impressed with what’s possible, but wonder if current technical limitations are surpassable. i accept that industry sees odd things as cost centers, but how would things change if they didn’t?<p>individuals will make the next breakthroughs in every field. software is unique in how powerful an individual can be.<p>gamedev is probably the hardest thing there is. it combines everything. your bank account will grow smaller, but you will grow bigger.<p>failure isn’t just an option. failure is the plan. what an amazing opportunity. what a time to be curious and to wonder.<p>last nights vid:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;r2.nathants.workers.dev&#x2F;jetpack_mantling.mp4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;r2.nathants.workers.dev&#x2F;jetpack_mantling.mp4</a>

&quot;The marketplace is the enemy of the artist.&quot; --Orson Welles<p>I&#x27;ve made my peace with the idea that I love making games but do not want to participate in the game <i>industry</i>. If my games remain forever outsider art, so be it... at least I made them. Little worlds for me and anyone interested to play in, ships in a bottle for my shelf.

I found this rather profound and moving. It makes me reflect on my own motivations in creative work. It’s interesting that you’ve come full circle - from living with a need to be seen through your work, to recognizing that that is an unhealthy driving force, and then back to accepting it as natural part of making art.

I believe that desiring to be truly <i>known</i> by more than a couple of your closest relations is unfortunately a losing proposition. I&#x27;m just making up numbers, but I think about 90% of people&#x27;s caring about other people goes to the people they are around all the time. Then 90% of what&#x27;s left goes to people like The Beatles, or Trump&#x2F;Biden, or whatever celebrity. Trying to get the attention of others is fighting for scraps of scraps.<p>I did this once, at work. Worked on a passion project that I poured my sweat and soul into, didn&#x27;t even receive a &#x27;good job&#x27; (this team had some organization issues and I wasn&#x27;t even on the radar of almost anyone who worked there). It was truly demoralizing but a necessary dose of reality for me. Probably working at an early stage startup or small independent team where everyone who works there is actually best friends with everyone else is the only way this would really pay off.

This is kind of what I like about Japanese e.g. Comiket culture.<p>The official Touhou circle table is just a table like every artist in the hall (well, maybe positioned to accommodate the wait line). People will have favorites, but it&#x27;s an equalizer. Touhou itself is that root - some drunk programmer releases his random game with memes in it and ends up being The Guy.<p>Western indie gaming... kind of lost that spirit.<p>I vibe more with the meritous sort of game more than some elements of WIG - there&#x27;s no profit, it&#x27;s just some guy that busted out libSDL and other free software and made a game with it. He even released the source GPL&#x27;d eventually.

This article strikes very close to home. My current project is a web based multiplayer game that I’m working on as a hobbyist.<p>Games are complex creations. I didn’t fully understand what I didn’t know until I started programming games. Learning has made me a much better software engineer.<p>There’s also too much noise and too little signal in the game pedagogy space. I spend a lot of time synthesizing information to really understand how to make a game because I have to.<p>I’m excited to unveil my current project as it’ll represent a release of the type of software I wanted to be making from the start of my game dev journey: multiplayer experiences.

People have been doing things for the sake of doing them for centuries. Sometimes one person creates something - a painting, sculpture, book, game - that resonates with the public and is lucky enough to get noticed. It&#x27;s a mix of talent and luck, which includes being at the right place at the right time.<p>I believe that the mistake is to <i>expect</i> that you will be rewarded for your efforts just because you created something that resonates with <i>you</i>. It might happen, it might not. On average, I think that game developers make less money than food servers at McDonald&#x27;s. And it was always like that, someone creating speculative work and trying to probe the market almost always makes less money than someone working on a guaranteed, time-honored market need.<p>The question is - was the trip worth it? Lots of times, it isn&#x27;t. But let&#x27;s take someone who spends a year of their life backpacking around Europe or wherever. Was it worth it? Moneywise, it was a huge loss of money, not &quot;profitable&quot;. But it could have been personally profitable, it could have been the best thing this person has done in their life and one of those &quot;deathbed joys&quot;.<p>If you approach hobbies and game development this way, I think it&#x27;s much easier to accept a market failure. It must be worth it to YOU, otherwise you&#x27;re in for very likely disappointment.

It takes a lot of courage to be this vulnerable and write this kind of stuff online with your real name. Kudos to that!<p>Common failure mode for a lot of people in such a crisis is they try to go to the other extreme of who they are. A better way to deal with this is to just deal with the pain points, instead of trying to be the opposite of who you are. So I&#x27;m glad the author is still making games, but has a healthier outlook towards them.

That had a great turn going that I find is probably true in my own life. I spend a lot of time on things that I think are neat, but that I think will please others at times at the expense of myself and my family. The idea that games and game dev (of any dev) can be a coping strategy for past injury is also enlightening.<p>As someone who always wanted to get into game dev, but saw it as something that was continually further and further from my reach, I was expecting a primer and got more than I thought. Thanks!

I always find gamedev discussion interesting because a lot of it seems to come at it from a very different angle from my own. When I think of the time I&#x27;m spent on &quot;gamedev&quot;. Im reminded mostly on the time I&#x27;ve spent learning and producing art, stressing over writing, playing with music-etc.. Sure I can and I have programmed but that&#x27;s not the.. Emotional? aspect of it all. It&#x27;s just busywork that I have to do to tie the ends together. I&#x27;d pay someone else to if I had enough money.<p>So it&#x27;s really difficult for me to see myself, so to speak in a lot of writing about gamedev. Which mostly-and especially here centers around the coding.<p>Sometimes I wonder if I have more the soul of like a webcomic artist but games are just so much extra clickety clackety...

I followed the Lemma development&#x2F;game thread you had on Facepunch loosely; I would check up on it occasionally to see how things progressed since I was interested in parkour games at the time.<p>I don&#x27;t really have a point to make, but I thought I&#x27;d share.

It&#x27;s interesting to me that &quot;games&quot; has become a synonym for &quot;video games&quot;. I play board games instead of video games, so when I clicked the link, I went in thinking it would be about board games. I suppose this is an example of majority rules. The majority play video games instead of card&#x2F;board games, so &quot;games&quot; has defaulted to &quot;video games&quot;.

While I&#x27;m not religious, everything else in this wonderfully written, honest article mirrors much of my own past and psychological development.

The games industry is a very unforgiving one. Players are fickle, large studios are often abusive, platforms are territorial. I think games are wonderful, but like any art form, they have to be fulfilling on their own. Your happiness cannot be built on someone else’s opinion of your work. Of course, that could legally be said about anything.

Exit through the gift shop. A tale about the commoditisation of what people thought was art. This is that. Indie game devs are the legions of graffiti artists whose purity and form will never pay the bills, regardless of how superior their underlying passion or technique is. Because money don’t care.

The best part of this post is the irony of sharing it on HN :) But we feel you, bro.

For anyone interested in making games at a lower level, Gustavo Pezzi&#x27;s course on pikuma.com is an excellent resource. Just finished the one on game physics and I learned a ton.