Article: Five Things I Didn’t Get About Making Video Games (Until I Did It)

[Minor Annoyance]

I remember Seth MacFarlane saying the say kind of stuff after directing movies his movies. That he finds it much harder to crap on movies when he knows how much time work and money goes into it regardless of the outcome.

 

[Malachi256]

I appreciate the point of the article.

Nonetheless, I wonder if anyone has data on how many dollars were spent on the graphics team for a game like CiV, vs. dollars spent on the AI team.

 

[Manannan]

You may have information offered to the rest of us publicly, but I disagree that makes you "understanding of Firaxis' internal workings". You may have an opinion, fine. But we don't have the facts.

I don't claim to know Firaxis' internal workings, nor do we need to to come to a conclusion here. We have some facts about the game and it's development, we can infer other things, and we can come to reasonable conclusions with a degree of certainty that precludes having to qualify these statements as merely being possibilities. I'd like to think the people reading this are probably by and large grown adults, many of whom are at least partially educated, and that they can figure out for themselves when they read something like this that it's not based on any official information but is instead a logical conclusion based on what information we do have. Whether or not they agree with that conclusion is one thing, but whining that someone is drawing conclusions?

 

[Kutuzov]

Heh heh. There's a new patch for Europa Universalis 4 today and, as usual, the Paradoxians are arguing about the changes made to the gameplay. Phrases like 'incredibly stupid' are being thrown around, threads are getting locked up.

In spite of all the incredibly hard work that the Paradox team do to communicate with their fans, they just can't make everyone happy. There is also some discussion of 'stealth changes' not mentioned in the patch notes, especially the '50% national ideas in one group' restriction. Designing games really isn't as easy to do as we think it is.

I guess what I see here is schizophrenic game design. It's ping ponging all over the place. I have played this game less and less each patch. We've seen some pretty large changes -- changes that keep on over correcting for the previous change -- patch after patch.

Sounds familiar?

And there's a thread entitled 'Idea to Reduce Forum Anger on DLC Release' which makes for familiar reading

 

[Minor Annoyance]

If internet forums have taught me anything, it's that everything used to be perfect and has been getting worse ever since.

 

[Kutuzov]

If internet forums have taught me anything, it's that everything used to be perfect and has been getting worse ever since.

LOL. Gunnergoz, who used to post here had a nice signature that expressed a similar sentiment that ran along the lines of:

Things are getting better. Not as good as yesterday but definitely better than tomorrow.

A Russian proverb which made me laugh.

Funnily enough, I frequent some real, hard-core war-game forums and, apart from the odd 'grog war' type of threads where frenzied grogs rip pieces off of other grogs arguing over the type of rivets used in manufacturing tanks or whatever, they are remarkably pleasant and civilized places to hang out, discuss the game, the historical period and actually to learn something interesting and meaningful about it.

Strategy forums are not quite so placid.

 

[Hail]

I need to write a game to obtain the privilige to criticize others. wat?

I pay for the end product, not the effort. I do not give a rat's tail about who and how much time and energy put into the game. I do not care how many iterations the game went through before launch. I do not care how many bugs were discovered and fixed.

Kutuzov, next time you buy a car that can't steer - give the guys some slack. producing cars is hard.

 

[poom3619]

I need to write a game to obtain the privilige to criticize others. wat?

I pay for the end product, not the effort. I do not give a rat's tail about who and how much time and energy put into the game. I do not care how many iterations the game went through before launch. I do not care how many bugs were discovered and fixed.

Kutuzov, next time you buy a car that can't steer - give the guys some slack. producing cars is hard.

There are plenty of "It's a hard jobs, give him some break" in... everywhere. I am neither agree or disagree with it, but I am with you in making video game.
I know coding is hard, Designing 3D model is hard, Optimizing game so that it can be played on my sorry laptop is hard.

But I and most of us who able to complain in internet forum live in society where we can choose which game we can pay for. If Firaxis will not release great game in the future for whatever reason. We can support the company who do and let Firaxis logo live on in games like Civ4, Pirates and SMAC

 

[Kutuzov]

I need to write a game to obtain the privilige to criticize others. wat?

I pay for the end product, not the effort. I do not give a rat's tail about who and how much time and energy put into the game. I do not care how many iterations the game went through before launch. I do not care how many bugs were discovered and fixed.

Kutuzov, next time you buy a car that can't steer - give the guys some slack. producing cars is hard.

LOL. Nobody is saying that you do but nice try . It does help to have some understanding of how something works when you are making a judgement of it. An uniformed opinion is still an opinion and you're entitled to express it here but it's not going to hold much water with me so don't be disappointed or outraged if I don't agree with it.

And your car analogy is absurd. You're better than that. Again, nice try

 

[Gorbles]

I need to write a game to obtain the privilige to criticize others. wat?

I pay for the end product, not the effort. I do not give a rat's tail about who and how much time and energy put into the game. I do not care how many iterations the game went through before launch. I do not care how many bugs were discovered and fixed.

Kutuzov, next time you buy a car that can't steer - give the guys some slack. producing cars is hard.

A car that can't steer is broken.

A game that you don't subjectively enjoy the a) AI of, b) balance of or c) graphics of . . . isn't broken. That ain't what broken means.

You're going to have to do better than that

 

[Bandobras Took]

If internet forums have taught me anything, it's that everything used to be perfect and has been getting worse ever since.

Heck, the Bible covered that in the first few chapters of Genesis.

 

[Minor Annoyance]

A car that can't steer is broken.

A game that you don't subjectively enjoy the a) AI of, b) balance of or c) graphics of . . . isn't broken. That ain't what broken means.

You're going to have to do better than that

Also, cars are pretty much all the same in basic function, and they've been around for 100 years. Now when cars start running on xenofuel, with firaxite electronics and floatstone alloy frames, then we'll see some kinks. Furthermore, it takes one second to test a steering wheel and it's a physical object that follows well known laws of physics. Computer programs ain't dat.
Forget the game, this criticism is broken.

 

[Ryika]

A car that can't steer is broken.

A game that you don't subjectively enjoy the a) AI of, b) balance of or c) graphics of . . . isn't broken. That ain't what broken means.

You're going to have to do better than that

Why would a car that can't steer be broken? It works perfectly for anyone who only wants to drive in a straight line.

And I mean, what would you rather have: Them spending their time and money to make sure that car has breaks that work properly or them implementing a steering system?

I don't know about you, but I'd rather drive in the car that can't steer than the car that may kill me every time I drive downhill. 8)

 

[Minor Annoyance]

Why would a car that can't steer be broken? It works perfectly for anyone who only wants to drive in a straight line.

And I mean, what would you rather have: Them spending their time and money to make sure that car has breaks that work properly or them implementing a steering system?

I don't know about you, but I'd rather drive in the car that can't steer than the car that may kill me every time I drive downhill. 8)

Furthermore, trains don't have steering at all but they work very well as a transportation method.

Elevators: They use buttons.

Riding on someones back: No manual steering necessary, but may respond to voice commands.

 

[kingsbury]

As someone who is in the process of making my own animated film I can attest to #2. When you are working on a project that you take a lot more seriously than you would something that you are just whipping together for the hell of it, for the majority of production it looks like complete garbage. The trick I have found is keeping faith in your idea and making sure you get the important things right rather than falling into the trap of making sure that all aspects of production are in a presentable polished form. In the end no one cares what your placeholder graphics look like or what your concept art looks like, what matters is the quality of the finished product.

 

[rastak]

Nice article......I wonder if the vocal few on this forum can comprehend what it really means.

 

[Ryika]

As someone who is in the process of making my own animated film I can attest to #2. When you are working on a project that you take a lot more seriously than you would something that you are just whipping together for the hell of it, for the majority of production it looks like complete garbage. The trick I have found is keeping faith in your idea and making sure you get the important things right rather than falling into the trap of making sure that all aspects of production are in a presentable polished form. In the end no one cares what your placeholder graphics look like or what your concept art looks like, what matters is the quality of the finished product.

I think that's actually one of the hardest things to manage in almost any kind of creative work. Doesn't matter if it's drawing, sculpting, game-design, web-design, whatever - getting the basics right while having to imagine what the end product is going to look like and resisting the temptation to go into too much detail/"fluff" too early, because if you do that will delay and distort the overall progress immensely.

The only form of art that I can think of that is very different from that is actually writing. Many people seem to just lay a very crude foundation in terms of their plot points and then just go with the flow of their writing. A very different experience.

 

[JokerJace]

A car that can't steer is broken.

A game that you don't subjectively enjoy the a) AI of, b) balance of or c) graphics of . . . isn't broken. That ain't what broken means.

You're going to have to do better than that

But a very crappy car is still a very crappy car, even if it's not broken. And you still wouldn't give the producer some slack. You're always smart-assing about terminology as if it would strengthen the points you make. Besides, a game with this amount of bugs and systematic flaws can be called broken. 'Not working as intended'. That's the definition of broken. And I highly doubt that the developers intended the game to be in it's current state. And yeah yeah... You don't need to tell me that you don't perceive the game as flawed and that this is only my subjective opinion... blah blah...

Moderator Action: Please find a more appropriate way to address his points than attacking him.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889

LOL. Nobody is saying that you do but nice try . It does help to have some understanding of how something works when you are making a judgement of it. An uniformed opinion is still an opinion and you're entitled to express it here but it's not going to hold much water with me so don't be disappointed or outraged if I don't agree with it.

Not knowing the values of variables you decided to be irrelevant in the first place is not being uninformed. Hail said what matters is the result and I agree with him. So not knowing the heartbraking stories of the developement process does not make him uninformed. He knows the game is terribly bad (or so it seems) and that's all the information he needs to decide whether he detests it.

 

[Gorbles]

If you think it is categorically broken, please take up a class action for an non-working product (at least that flies in the EU).

Otherwise, please stop posturing and accusing others of "smart-assing" while doing exactly the same thing! My definition of broken, as a software engineer, is pretty accurate. You need to do some convincing on your end to persuade me that I'm incorrect in that definition.

 

[Acken]

As much as I think the game is poorly designed it is certainly not broken.