Writing games is hard!

General Discussions
#1

I’m surprised I havent found a discussion of this elsewhere on the forums, on account of it being on Slashdot and many other places, but there is an acmQueue story here making the obvious point that games development is hard.

I think it is worth linking here because anyone who has decided that they are going to write a game should read it in order to understand the magnitude of the task they are setting themselves.

I also think the stuff about multiplatform development and the problems involved are particularly relevant to us, even if just because we can be really smug about them. Just as soon as we get the console jvms, anyways…

#2

It’s interesting how they go on about waiting for builds etc. etc. when of course that hasn’t been a problem for us for years… that alone is a major, major time saver. Not to mention hot code replace in the debugger.

There is also the seriously excellent refactoring tools we have for Java, and the dynamic impact analysis, and general vastly simplified structure of applications. For a big commercial project aimed at the desktop you’d be pretty mad to think about using C++ these days if you had an eye on the bottom line.

It’s just that console problem isn’t it…

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

Actually:

http://www.java-gaming.org/cgi-bin/JGNetForums/YaBB.cgi?board=cluebies;action=display;num=1078015619

Someone posted it in newless cluebies (not really the right place, but… I don’t think Gergis is around to moderate at the moment)

#4

[quote]It’s interesting how they go on about waiting for builds etc. etc. when of course that hasn’t been a problem for us for years…
[/quote]
Some people are surprised when we tell them that we don’t do “nightly builds” - that there’s no need, and little (if any) benefit.

There are still some problems, mainly because Sun’s javac compiler doesn’t always guess dependencies correctly and you periodically have to do a complete recomplile just to be sure - although we’re moving to a new SCM that looks like it’ll probably get rid of that problem, which will be very nice.

[quote]It’s just that console problem isn’t it…
[/quote]
Indeed; seems to be the only one that comes up regularly as a “deal breaker” for java in commercial projects…

#5

I was sure someone had already posted it but I didn’t think to look there.

That is possibly the right place for it, because most people come to developing games with the idea that they can write Doom 3 in about a fortnight and it will be cushty and this kind of article makes a pretty good reality check.