Lessons From The Lost - help lower the entry barrier for gamedev

"Instead of spending our time moaning and griping how hard it is to make games or complaining about the frustrations, we spend some time encouraging people to have a go at it themselves."

That 1 sentence is what the whole post says over and over. It's not actually -helpful- to anyone. If a cheerleader could actually help people finish a game, there's be a lot more indie games.

He also talks about how when people ask how to start, they get a million different answers, and he thinks that's people trying to out-do each other. NO. It's because there are a million ways to start! And they're almost all valid.

Starting is the EASY part. Finishing is hard. If you can't even install a free IDE and get typing, there's no way you're going to bring all that logic and art together into a game.

People don't need encourage, they need information. Some need to learn to program altogether. Others need to know where to focus their efforts. Some just need to know how to do 1 specific task.

If there was a 1-size-fits-all answer for this problem, it would have already been found.

If you want to write a game, start writing a game. Don't diddle about looking for the perfect language or framework. Pick anything that looks halfway decent and has a community and just start working on it. If you find out half way through that it won't do what you need, you can switch. It's a bit heart-wrenching, but you will have learned a TON of lessons along the way already. It will have been worth the time.

You know, I wanted to give you the benefit of a doubt, I really did. But I couldn't get past the condescension. Let's take a look at where you went wrong, apart from sneering at a lot of people.

First of all, let's take a look at just how high the barrier for making games really is. Go and visit Kongregate, Armor Games and Newgrounds. Stop at Jay Is Games, too, while you're at it.

Now, as you might have noticed, what you can find on those sites ranges from utter "what the heck was the author smoking" crap to amazing "I would totally buy this on PSN" jewels. Some of that stuff was obviously done by coders who don't have substantial talent for art. Some other stuff was obviously done by an artist who couldn't code to save his (or her) life. And some was done by teams of people, each one proficient in one or more areas. But the aspect I'd like you to focus on, at this point, is the sheer, enormous quantity of games.

With that out of the way, let's delve deeper into your post and acknowledge that you weren't really complaining about making just any old game. What you claim is that people who wanted to develop games felt that "stealing content was the only way to make an ambitious game become reality".

No, not really. I know a lot of people who want to make ambitious games and "stealing content" is not an idea that has occurred to any of them.[1] If you ask them, they'll come up with plans that might be naive or realistic-but-hopeless, but they won't think of stealing. And if you offered them to "shared" or "recycled" assets, they would probably think you were well meaning, but seriously misguided.

See, the barrier for making "ambitious" games has nothing to do with the availability of the assets. The real barrier is twofold:

1) Making a good game is hard.

2) Selling games is even harder.

You acknowledged the problem #1 in your post, but you don't seem to be taking it seriously enough and it tells, because you said that "making games isn't hard". Sure, compared to "heart surgery", it isn't hard. Compared to most other forms of software development, it's damn hard. And making good games is a hell of a lot harder than that.

Incidentally, this is why a lot of people will react with what you call "exclusion" against people who ask "I want to write a game but I don't know where to start." It's an impossible question, unless the asker elaborates. What is it you want to do? Do you want to do the coding, but don't know what to use? That's just nuts and bolts and I'll happily point you in the right direction, but it won't help unless you have a group of people who'll help you make the game (or you're incredibly multi-talented) and you've played a boatload of games available in the same place where you intend your game to end up and, well, you know where you want your game to end up. Which brings me to the heart of the matter.

The toughest part of the barrier is the problem #2. You don't need someone to share, recycle or otherwise give you assets. There are people out there who are perfectly capable of creating those assets. Most of those people feel disinclined to do it for anyone who can't answer the big question: "How are you going to pay me?" Even for "non-ambitious" games, such as those you'll see on Flash portals, selling your game is not a trivial matter.

To sum it up, the real barrier for game development is not that people who have done it or are doing it on a regular basis are elitist snobs. It's not the lack of freely available assets either. The real barrier is that it's an entertainment industry. Sure, you can "get into" music by picking up a guitar and learning how to play. You can "get into" game development by picking up, say, FlashDevelop, Flex and FlashPunk. But there's no magic formula to make you a star.

Regards,

Vojislav Stojkovic

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[1] Sure, mine is just an anecdotal claim, but then again what do we call a claim based on the story of one game featuring exclusively stolen content?

Every day on Kongregate and Newgrounds you can see guys who're producing shit but at least giving it a go, and on FlashGameLicense.com you can see everyone trying to take it to the next level and turn their hobby into some kind of revenue stream.

There's a community at play there that does actively help, offer feedback, collaborate, offer quality art,graphics and support etc, even if some of the players are douches.