I'm just wanting a rough estimation here, but I, like most of the 4chan community, have ideas for games, or movies, or what have you.
So I'm learning C++, and I'm doing pretty good with everything I've learned so far. I'm only taking a beginning course in my college, but I'm still doing good in it.
So, if I wanted to create a platform game, or a fighting game, or even a tile game (Pokemon Clone), how hard is it?
If I already had all the graphics, all the story written out, and all the gameplay mechanics worked out, how long, and how hard would it be to create a game from scratch, using just C++?
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Anonymous2007-03-10 12:37 ID:u7UAGQB8
doesn't really matter what language you're using, coding a game is hard. c/c++ have a decent array of libraries available which help in that task, but it's still hard. i recommend starting with a text adventure.
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Anonymous2007-03-10 12:43 ID:7UPHy861
The general rule about coding games is: if you have to ask, then the answer is "impossible."
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Anonymous2007-03-10 13:07 ID:ztW5E/NX
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
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Anonymous2007-03-10 13:23 ID:gk6HE5Im
Elaborating on the two comments above; you can only really estimate how long it would take once you have the knowledge needed. As for how long any average game would take... Hrm, there are just too many things to take into consideration to give an accurate guess, such as the skill of the development team and the complexity of the game itself.
If you're trying to make a game yourself, it's probably best to ask around Gamedev.net. I think they have an FAQ set up just for this kind of thing.
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Anonymous2007-03-10 18:08 ID:AoYKmY/s
It depends on the kind of games you would like to make a text adventure is really easy but don't even think about a MMORPG
Really hard. Consider the fact that big-budget video games take budgets in line with movies. There's an indy market out there, but if you want to do anything professional, you'd better have the $$$ and experience to back it up.
Now thats just mean. What I would say, is that if you have the patience to learn / become proficient with DX or OpenGL or both... and database programming and tuning, artificial intelligence, server lag / rubberbanding smoothing issues and other general network comms issues, collision detection, Game theory / mechanics, economics, 3d modeling in a program like 3dsmax, shader languages like hlsl or cg, creation of textures / bumpmaps, sound programming/engineering/recording/postprocessing... you might be almost ready to start making all of the mistakes that will make you efficient enough to make a game that might be played by people other than youself and your friends. Or maybe it might not..
>>8
You don't need databases, you hardly need game theory and economics to create games of most kinds, and you don't always need to deal with networking, lag, etc. You do need to do C/C++, OpenGL (or buy an engine, but you'll still have to do stuff), AI, 3D modelling, textures, shaders, animation, physics (or buy Havok), sound (or buy sound FX from a library), and music.
Yeah, except I don't think most game engines use the STL - they all end up writing custom classes. Last time I looked at the Doom 3 / Quake 4 SDKs they didn't have any STL references.
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Anonymous2007-03-17 15:18 ID:1WPAQ7/Y
The reason for the multi-million dollar game budgets is that >>8 hints at the magnitude of creating a game nowadays. Nobody expects prospective employees to work on half of those by themselves --that's why you have experts. Any old 8-bit Nintendo game (mentioned because they used tiling and looked simple compared to the 3d stuff we see today) had a large cast of at least 3 people per area: graphics, sounds, "ai" programming, map design, and even overseas advertisement were needed. And you can't expect a musician to be a programmer. Makes sense? Bump map guys probably work in a team oblivious to code for database engines.
Pro-tip: Run a Live CD version of Linux just to check out its games. Then look up their respective sourceforge.net homes to see how long the projects worked for and how much open source code is behind them.
>>15
If anyone knows of a port of STL to C, please guide me
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Anonymous2007-03-17 15:40 ID:CRHPWgUq
If anyone knows of a port of STL to C, please guide me
Doom3's engine is in C++. The SDK is in C++ too.
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Anonymous2007-03-17 16:24 ID:KYcIs+B3
>>1 if you are really serius, i would recommend SDL (http://www.libsdl.org)
I also strongly advice you to create a very basic game before you continue with you grand plans, maybe like a minigame in your larger game plans.
>>17
?
Thanks for the info, but I meant plain C. I have a good free compiler whose biggest problem is the designer doesn't feel like supporting C++. So every time I have to handle botch strings via char arrays, ignore the possibility of lists, and forget about MS code because their documentation is at least MFC C++, I cry a little.
iostream, dynamic casts and assembly that GNU's jerks refuse to support in GCC-derived stuff, are also a pain. The funny thing is C claims to be better. C compilers lack these things. Meaning C itself sucks for game programming, because you reinvent the wheel or miss all the available book code-snippets.
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Anonymous2007-03-18 20:38 ID:3DzRf+KI
I don't care about making some grand game to put Valve or Squaresoft to shame. I just want to make a pretty good one. Better than Knytt or Seiklus(both made by complete non-programmers), but probably not as good as Doukutsu Monogatari.
I share basically the same motivation as the OP. I've never made a game before but I really want to because I have tons of ideas. I'm already a competent programmer though, so I thought it maybe wasn't *too* out of reach for me. I spent a lot of my free time recently learning about game development and this is what I've gathered:
Once you get to the point where you know how to write everything you'll need, whatever estimate you make at this point is going to be a factor of 10 too little, if not a 100. To paraphrase a common saying "The first 90% is easy, it's the last 90% that kills you." After a few months when you were planning to be done you'll realize that writing the engine and first level is only a fraction of the time that designing the remaining 12 levels is going to take.
Since you really wanted an answer to your question, I would say if you already had all the sound and graphical assets, and a pretty clear idea of what you want your game to be (to say you know *absolutely all* the game mechanics and level design ahead of time is probably naive) then you are going to have over 6 months of work to do, and probably a lot more. To put it into perspective, a full time professional indie developer making a bonafide casual game to be sold on web portals is spending about 6 months. (Incidently, reading developer blogs is a great way to find information about these kind of things.)
To be honest, if you haven't programmed before I'm not sure how hard it is to learn what you need to know. You can get there though, I have no doubts about that. Learning programming is no harder than learning any subject, and you'll at least be passionate about learning this. Just don't start programming something bigger than you *know* you can finish, keeping the above adage in mind.