Why Video Games are Hard to Make

Is writing video games software harder than other forms of software development? In his biography of a handful of video games, Blood, Sweat and Pixels, Jason Schreier answers it with an emphatic Yes.

 

First, he points out, video games are interactive. Which means they don’t move in a linear fashion, unlike say an animated movie or a movie like Avatar. Secondly, the game consoles (e.g. Xbox, or PlayStation) have newer, faster, better hardware capabilities every year. If you don’t come up with a game that can use those newer capabilities, your game will look tame and old. But that hardware is still under development, which means things are continuously changing:

“Making a game is like constructing a building during an earthquake.”

 

Third, games need other software tools like photo creators, and physics engines (you don’t want to program the laws of physics each time, do you?). These tools keep changing. Or the tools could do so much more with the improved hardware (see the 2nd point), and thus need to be updated and improved. That just adds to the list of moving parts the game developer needs to work with.

 

Fourth, as we know all too well, software development is notorious for its delays and schedule slips. Video games are the worst within that category. Because they have to contend with topics that aren’t objective: Was the game fun? Too hard? Too easy? Would the buyer want to play it again and again?

 

Which brings us to the last reason: it’s impossible to know the answer to the above questions (fun? too tough/too easy? addictive?) until one actually plays the game. Which means the feedback (internal, external, demos) can only be obtained via (partially) working software. And based on the feedback, you may to have re-do a lot of things, or worse throw out everything and start all over.

 

Besides, video games can’t be predictable, can they?

“Isn’t that (unpredictability) one of the reasons we love video games in the first place? That feeling of surprise when you pick up a controller and know you’re about to experience something totally new?”

 

All of which is why Schreier quotes Matt Goldman on the topic:

“Game development is… like being on the “knife’s edge of chaos,” where the sheer number of moving parts makes it impossible for anyone to find predictability.”

And yet, despite all the challenges, some video games do manage to become insanely popular.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more