That's the meta game, where the author of the game enjoys building the game as its own game. Not productive if you're trying to ship a game, but definitely sounds fun.
(I’ve been working on an unreleased unusable IDE for a little over ten years, but the end is in sight for me!)
Also, you only write what you need. Honestly I can never find a library that is good enough for what I want to do. Games have so many possible features that it's impossible to cover them all with good libraries.
So it's better to aim low, with simple enough features, and make them yourself so that it's tailored for your programming style, and for what you want to do. You're not reinventing the wheel (I'm not talking about making a graphics of physics engine).
Having made a physics engine is cool, but having a working physics engine that makes the product fun is also rewarding, and a shortcut to that reward can pay greater dividends on the time to get to the finish line -- or the likelihood of getting there.
Often the shortest path is writing something yourself, of course, and not everything has to be done for instrumental reasons -- a hobby project can be its own reward.
I try to take a counterfactual approach -- say I'd done Box2D first. Would I think a custom physics rewrite would make sense? It'd still be really fun to do, but would take time and likely move the product backwards. (Though of course that's unfair -- you don't know the Box2D thing will be successful in the first place.)
It's hard to stay focused on building a shippable product when you have no stakeholders. It's something I struggle with myself when I have 'build yourself a side-gig' time. At the end of the day, no one really cares if you fail.
You know... for customization and some obscure problem that one person ran into...
Some highlights:
365 days of pixel art
109 points eigenbom 3 years ago 34 comments
(https://medium.com/@eigenbom/365-days-of-pixel-art-f6131f280...)
A game whose source code fits in one tweet
162 points eigenbom 3 years ago 51 comments
(https://github.com/omnus/tiny-twitch)
I'm 2 years into development of my sandbox game, Moonman
128 points eigenbom 5 years ago 71 comments
Ask HN: What are some poorly written but very successful open source software?
35 points eigenbom a year ago 32 comments
3.5 years of open development for a procedurally-generated adventure game
15 points eigenbom 3 years ago 4 comments
(http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21997.0)
Moonman: 3 Years of Solo Gamedev and 2 Left to Go
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9011787
13 points eigenbom 3 years ago 8 comments
I'm a dad
11 points eigenbom a year ago 9 comments
Finding excuses is vital, but it's important to have both excuses for not shipping the beta and excuses for why beta is almost here and there's no need to think the past history of delays bodes ill for the project.
Here's a HN comment back in January where the poster says Haiku's beta will be out "this quarter" (Q1 calendar 2018), I laugh at that, and another HN poster says OK, but definitely by _next_ quarter (Q2 calendar 2018).
> New OS are in a bad situation: those build on top of Linux doesn't seemn to attract contributors (I blame personally a lack of imagination: a kernel isn't an OS!)
I think these two statements are, effectively, the same thing. Why have we (Haiku) stayed around so long, and all the others died? Somehow we managed to accumulate enough critical mass to not have heat death. I think the novelty of having a complete system is an attractive one, rather than "just another Linux distribution, why use that?" indeed.
And then, you know, maybe it's possible that what we've been saying this entire time about having a kernel and base system optimized for GUIs instead of just throwing one on top of them might actually be the case. :-p
> but those who use their own kernel are doomed for the lack of drivers..
We're so doomed, I've been able to boot, run, and use Haiku on just about all PCs I've tested it with so far!
But yes, drivers are an issue. An issue we have mostly solved at this point, with the exception of hardware-accelerated OpenGL, but still...
There's no need to personally attack me like that.
I mean, this guy took 13 years to make his dream game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b0tSu0QDQ0
Duke Nukem Forever infamously took 15 years to make.
And well, as Metacritic shows in this list, 5/6/7 year development times are not too uncommon in general:
http://www.metacritic.com/feature/games-that-shed-vaporware-...
It gets all the more insane with mods and hacks too, since fan projects don't have any real pressure to get released at all, so overly OCD creators can spend decades on projects without having a publisher telling them to hurry up.
Mushroom Kingdom Fusion started in 2007 and only got cancelled in 2015, with the last demo being version 0.5. Brutal Mario had its first known demo released in 2006, and is still (presumably) in development in 2018. May be longer, said first demo was actually number demo 6.
In the Doom community, Mordeth apparently started in 1997, and was (probably) still in development just a few years ago. If it ever does get finished, it would have been in development so long that Duke Nukem Forever would have started and finished its own development in the middle of this game's dev cycle.
Really, games can take a really long time, especially if you don't have much in the way of monetary pressures or nagging publishers. And hey, who knows what projects will turn out to join that list in future. For all we know, thousands of people may have been working on games since the 90s, with their finished product only being released sometime in the next few years.
Very very few people and companies have that kind of runway and patience.
They also have video presenting great tips for prolonged development such as ‘different mechanic for every rooms’ and ‘stick to your original plan’.
_edit_
Nvm figured it out :3
I have to say I have trouble differentiating these games, though. From what I can see Terraria, Starbound, and Moon Quest seem to be generally the same style of game, but it's not clear to me why play one over the other.
For games, frameworks and such like there's so much choice that it's unlikely you'll come across all in a niche - so you're choosing from the few little islands you happened to come across. One or two of those discoveries will have a wrinkle or two that appeal and there'll be the occasional surprising diamond.
Only much later when the SaaS or game closure is on the front page of HN do dozens of others get to hear of the thing and make posts along the lines of "wish I'd heard of this earlier..."
I far prefer the world of Indie games to the tedious repetition of AAA titles.
Hmm. I can't say I feel the same about all these choices, which is why I made the comment I did: to me this set of games is somewhat of an outlier in how homogeneous the games appear. I'm not saying they are homogeneous, just that they appear to be, which might purely be a marketing problem.
For me, among FPS, among RTS, and among Western style action RPGs there are a lot of differences that make me prefer one over the other. It's pretty clear what is the difference between StarCraft and Age of Empires 2, or between Grim Dawn and Path of Exile.
But when I look at the Terraria-style games, it's hard for me to tell what makes them different besides very subtle details (i.e., I think Starbound has space maps; there's probably a different style of resource gathering between the games). The art styles are similar, the gameplay seems similar, all sets of games seem to involve exploring, collecting items, and building.
> I far prefer the world of Indie games to the tedious repetition of AAA titles.
My post has nothing to do with AAA vs indie whatsoever. There's also plenty of tedious repetition among indie titles (there's a very large number of retro-style platformers and roguelikes for obvious reasons), so I am not really seeing the point.
Oh man I knew this was going to be a disaster when I head they were going straight into a grad degree.
I'm still on the fence about if CS students can actually program before working in industry, but doing a grad program that isnt paid for by Industry was a major red flag.
On the bright side, it sounds like OP learned tons and tons and tons. While the game flopped, I bet they could throw together a top notch program in a year with their lessons learned.
Although I see he got some freelancer artists and a musician. At least he didn't have to learn to compose music (people have done just that).
It looks great and plays well (notwithstanding early access); congratulations to the author for shipping at last.
Don't forget to save all of your work locally, on the cheapest hard disk with the highest failure rate. That way, when your hard disk fails 2 years in you can start from scratch.
[0]: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017963/Obsessive-Compulsive-D...
Development began in 2002, and the main author says 1.0 will be out in 14 years!
Extremely complex generative world with a vi-flavored interface. The game itself is like no man's sky/Minecraft.
Change game engine mid-beta.
Replace dev team mid-beta.
Keep adding game mechanics post-release.
"Beta" has no meaning. Just release whatever you got whenever you feel like it.
