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trying to get into gamedev is usually a shitty experience to me...

being a web dev OTOH feels like the opposite. There are css libraries that can make your site beautiful for you (albeit kinda generic).

so when you look at the screen when working on something, you can see something pretty, and it feels like progress.

you can show this to people and they'll be like "wow, look at you and your fancy site".

Show an expertly coded but cssless site to people and they will ask you if you did it with digital crayons.

That's how it feels when I try to get into gamedev, shockingly embarassing.

If I do my own assets, it looks like shit and takes forever. If I use other people's assets, it feels unoriginal.

I used to believe that gameplay is everything, graphics are nothing. But I'm not certain about that right now.

A very common advice to get into gamedev is to start with games that are already made. Like doing a tetris.
Great, that's exactly what I need. Doing a game that looks like shit, with a gameplay I'm not dying to program.

Another thing that makes me feel incompatible with games is the possible reality of that saying that goes "art is never finished, only abandoned", and games being art in a sense.

I'm not sure if I have that mentality. I think I am more of a results type of person, and doing games feels a bit opposite to that.

All of this is making me a bit sad, because video games have been and still are my number one interest, and there has been countless times where I wished I had the role of game designer so I could define in actual projects what a game would be. Like all those "wouldn't it be cool if you could remove X and add Y to this fame" feelings.

Comments
  • 1
    @irene maybe that works...
  • 2
    Being a game dev is guaranteed to be a shitty experience.

    If you're trying to make your own engine you'll spend countless nights figuring things like collision detection, rendering, occlusion, and it's going to suck in the end anyway.

    If you focus on gameplay and use an existing engine, your work will become boring. Half of the time you'll be loading assets, and the other half you'll spend drawing decision trees and writing if sentences, then going through the same scenarios literary hundreds of times to test those conditions.

    Every now and then somebody comes up with tetris or flappy bird or some other equally simple yet interesting game, but even most online games took countless hours of monotonous work to make. That's simply what reality of making games looks like.
  • 2
    Check opengameart and kenney game assets. Nice assets for free
  • 1
    @rutee07 i feel the same way about most AAA games, but imagine if stardew valley looked subpar, I imagine people would not even play it in the first place out of "this looks like Steam trash, I'm not gonna waste my time",

    also harvest moon and SD are games that rely on art, it's a big part of the pleasure that the world looks innocent and pretty. I can't create any of that shit. If I only knew an artist...
  • 1
    @hitko Your perspective actually seems more healthy to me, I see myself carrying through it more knowing it will be shitty.
  • 1
    @rutee07 fuck I actually got excited... lol
  • 1
    There are ASCII or text games which could look beautiful without drawing skills.

    Graphic is nice, but you could achive visually pleasing game with minimalistic graphics. Look at Broque, Dwarf Fortress (both ASCII and different tilesets - some of them has a lot of artworks but other don't and both could be nice or awful).

    If you want to code your own game do it, there is plenty of genres which don't require almost any artworks. Also aim small and do MVP first. Graphics could be add later if core.is interesting enough
  • 0
    @hitko Sadly, that is so. Even as engine developer, you may get to read some obscure C++ code all day long, written by people who speaks no english and with deadline for yesterday, and you just fix missing null terminator and everything works... Very unrewarding. And you will probably have bunch of people whipping you to go faster every day, which are younger than you.
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