If you’re this guy, You’ve gotta be a really good writer and you gotta write it first.
“Ok, I did the overall plot. Who’s doing the dialogue?”
Sounds like you have a small fraction of a game Idea that could be generated by an AI trained on tvtropes.com.
The fable of the Chicken and the Pig is used to illustrate the differing levels of commitment from project stakeholders involved in a project. The basic fable runs:
A Pig and a Chicken are walking down the road.
The Chicken says: “Hey Pig, I was thinking we should open a restaurant!”
Pig replies: “Hm, maybe, what would we call it?”
The Chicken responds: “How about ‘ham-n-eggs’?”
The Pig thinks for a moment and says: “No thanks. I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”Damn, that’s a lot fucking darker than I’d thought it’d get on reading the title of the fable.
I think it’d be rarer to find a fable that wasn’t dark.
Tortoise and the hare isn’t particularly dark.
You obviously didn’t read the version where the hare gets eaten.
Tortoise kills hare in horrifying video. More at 6.
Edit: it was a seabird
It was actually in my management textbook XD
I heard of it from a Reddit comment about an easter egg location in Diablo 3 called “The Fowl Lair.” It’s filled with chickens and a single Greasy Pig.
I know it’s not the point, but I love the completely arbitrary bit where they’re walking down a road together, and has absolutely no bearing on anything the happens.
It has one bearing: it puts them in the same location together
Substitute “walking down a road” with: “having dinner at a conference”, “chatting over lattes at the local coffee shop”, or “at a neighborhood cookout” as makes sense.
So this pig is fucking a chicken, and the chicken says…
…stop cluckin around back here! We’ve got customers to serve.
The same damn attitude of some “open source” projects looking for free labor, as if paid labor isn’t exploitative enough
I’ve had game and software ideas swirling around in my brain, but for the longest time I couldn’t program them. But now, I have enough knowledge to build parts of my grand deckbuilding game idea: An arcade style deckbuilding game with strong meta-progression. It’s playable at superspruce.org.
As for some other ideas, including the simple idea of a weighted shuffle music playlist where each song has its own weight, they are still currently out of reach, mostly due to trying to access the filesystem and whatnot. Better than a month ago, where within the last month I found out how to make the browser play music
Have you considered making your deck building game an mmorpg?
But only if there’s multiple endings and my choices matter.
Cool game but it is missing a lot of features, most importantly tutorial and art.
On the technical side: Do you self-host or in the cloud?
It’s hosted on GitHub, but I really want to self host one day.
What other features are missing? I’m still pretty much a beginner so it can be very tricky to implement things.
Just coding, 3d modelling and art. But the idea is great!
Me fr
Don’t we all.
Sure as long as you donate 100,000 USD a year to my bank account.
Put it on GitHub and some tryhard will do a bunch of free work on it. Source: am tryhard
I would volunteer… for money
“Sure, we’ll pay you 2% of the profits”
As long as it is in advance it is okay.
How big did you say your sales projection was?
“Sorry, but we can’t pay in advance, you’ll have to put the work in first”
i mean, provided you actually want to put in effort that’s called “being a game designer”, it’s perfectly valid to not write code or create assets.
Asking for and/or expecting unpaid volunteers is most definitely not valid.
If he wants to pay them properly, then I would agree.
Sounds like most AAA games we where promised but never got
There are probably a ton of incredible banger games out there that don’t exist because the person who thought of it just doesn’t know how to code
deleted by creator
This is actually one thing I’ve been thinking AI and deepfake tech can potentially do good. Let’s say you have an idea and can code… You have an idea for music but no instrumental talent, so the best you can do is hum it. You can’t afford voice actors or other professionals.
Or maybe you’re artist with an idea who can storyboard but not code. Maybe you can make 2d designs but not 3D models, or aren’t great at animate.
But… there is software that can take what you say and change it to a different voice. It can animate a model to match the words. Similarly, software that could generate instrumental sounds from humming is possible. An AI can generate interactive dialog. It could also provide assistance in the generation of music, debugging of code, and eventually more advanced 3D modeling.
A lot of game design software is much more a GUI to an environment/model and triggers etc than stuff like writing hardcore backend C++ code etc. AI could take that even further.
Then add VR. Drop somebody into a blank-slate where they can create a whole world with a word, a gesture, and a great idea.
One day, that might be a reality.
The creator still needs to know “what” to ask and how the pieces fit.
As a coder, I’m constantly taking whatever AI gives me and rewriting it. AI is just a better lorem Ipsum generator.
You mean like an MMO where different maps are arranged in an infinite hexagonal pattern that’s randomly/procedurally generated based on different biomes, that also keeps track of how many players have entered/completed each hex and begins scaling down the difficulty in said hex and evolving it into a more peaceful zone, that way the higher traffic areas eventually form safe zones/towns for low level characters while low traffic areas encourage high level characters to visit and explore, with the highest level characters able to survive unexplored areas and expand the map for all players, all while having developer tools to specifically add unique dungeons/events/items directly to tiles so that the game doesnt feel a mile wide and an inch deep but instead as if the whole world map is alive and constantly changing?
Yea… That’d be cool.
Definitely some cool ideas there but how do you deal with the long term effect of the map becoming too big?
The bigger the map the more the defs would need to stretch their resources to adding cool stuff.
Also, at some point, the inner hexes will be essential all complete cleared and new players will have to wander for a while as soon as they level up a bit.
Unlocking a new hex would be fun at the beginning but how fun will it be after 100+ have been unlocked and any more just will inevitably just feel same-y because even the best defs will eventually run out of ideas
You have found the Wayne’s World dungeon.
Welcome to Wayne’s World: The Game You find yourself in Aurora, Illinois, the hometown of Wayne and Garth. You’re on a mission to help them prepare for their biggest public access TV show yet. Scene 1: The Basement You’re in Wayne’s basement, surrounded by music gear, posters, and a comfy couch. Wayne and Garth are brainstorming ideas for their show, but they’re stuck. They need your help to come up with a killer opening segment. Do you: A) Suggest a musical number with Wayne and Garth performing a duet of “Bohemian Rhapsody” B) Recommend a comedy sketch parodying a popular movie or TV show C) Propose a special guest appearance by a local celebrity D) Suggest a “Top 10 List” segment, à la David Letterman Choose your response:
…
You have found the Encino Man Dungeon.
Encino Man: The Adventure Begins You are Brendan Fraser’s character, Link, a caveman who has been thawed out and is trying to navigate modern life in Encino, California. Your goal is to make it through each scene without getting into too much trouble. Scene 1: The Thaw You wake up in a block of ice in a backyard. You’re confused, hungry, and thirsty. You see a garden hose nearby. Do you: A) Drink from the hose B) Try to break out of the ice C) Look around for food D) Take a nap Choose your response:
LLM to generate ideas, history to check uniqueness
“games out there that don’t exist” how high r u rn
Yeah man, didn’t you know. We have thousands of cheap and effective treatments for cancer that don’t exist.
Nah.
That’s like saying a lot of banger songs could exist but the person doesn’t know how to write music.
Absolute delusional bullshit.
Verifying the idea is good is also part of the process. Play testing, making hard decisions, smoothing out jank, juicing up the experience… The whole implementation can make or break a game.
I had to learn that the hard way, but with a comic/manga idea I used to have.
Long story short: I worked way too long on an idea (almost 10 years), all while my taste etc. changed. It would have been way too hard to get it working after a while without a complete revamp of the whole idea, so I ditched it completely, maybe reuse elements and character concepts in other things, including video games (yes, they’re easier to make, unless your comic’s artstyle is stickmen figures).
It’s like saying there are so many great novels out there that we have never seen because the authors can’t write for shit.
Not “great novels” but great “great world building”. I’ve seen some absolute bangers out there where the concepts, characters and even the overall plot blew my mind away. However, the authors couldn’t write decent dialogues or a coherent chapter of their life depended on it. So, most people wouldn’t be exposed to their ideas.
The inability to detail the idea all the way down to the level were something concrete can be made from it kills it well before the lack of coding skills.
It’s like what separates having an idea for a book and writting an actual book that is enjoyable to read: there is no “knowing how to code” barrier in there and yet most people can’t actually pull it off when they try or it ends up shallow and uninteresting.
have you ever smoked weed? ideas are cheap - even ones that seem good. ACTUAL good ideas are only proven good when they are implemented AND become successful.
(X) DOUBT
I had a cool idea that I completely gave up on because I tried to learn how to do it and realized what I was asking was so insanely complicated and time consuming that I couldn’t do it. I play a lot of games, I know what would make a good one, there’s just a gaping chasm between knowing and creating.
The problem is that this complexity isn’t just a one-off thing you need to get through. There’s a ton of details which matter, which you will not have thought through as part of your idea.
Many of these details, you will encounter as you write code. As in, you’ve just worked for three weeks on a feature and then realize a glaring problem in one of the details. Then you spend another week trying to find a solution. And worst-case that solution is to rip out that month of work and start fresh.
This has been my biggest learning from dabbling in gamedev for a while: Make a stupid paper model first.
Even if you spend a week glueing sheets of paper, and you don’t really even get that close to your actual idea, the more of these details you think of upfront, the higher your chance of getting anywhere (or scrapping your idea without wasting months trying to put it into code).
Well, and the other big learning was: Holy crap, gamedev is hard.
I know how to “code”. I’m a senior developer and have worked on multiple large-scale software projects.
The scope of the game I was trying to create, was laughable in comparison. As in shitty 2D, tile-based, turn-based.I encountered performance problems like I’ve never had to deal with in my career, because it turns out the whole games industry is fueled by smokes and mirrors.
Know how ray-traced lighting is the craziest new technology? Yeah, that’s literally just a matter of hardware being strong enough that we can simulate lighting in the way it actually works. It’s conceptually simpler than the ever more sophisticated bullshitting we did beforehand.
I can code but I can’t do art. I can make a game, but it will look ugly as fuck.
This is why AI has been a boon to creators.
I’ve generated some great pixel art that required a tiny bit of Photoshop to get it in a good state.
Especially if you just need placeholder art you can use AI to drop in general ideas and later replace the art by a partner or contractor.
If you get a demo off the ground with “alpha” graphics and look decent you can market it better and maybe build a team.
I think a big benefit for this is also motivation. You no longer have a blocker due to missing art or issues with an artist.
Uhh… need a character design for the mayor. <<AI art placeholder>> ok now text… <<AI first draft dialog >> ok now code…
No more excuses!
Same boat… But I had some success with low poly 3D models which I found are pretty easy to make. Learning a bit about color theory, how to match colors, as well as learning a bit about level design goes a long way. You can make a great looking game this way.
But my dream game is 2D pixel art, and I really suck at it.
But I had some success with low poly 3D models which I found are pretty easy to make.
Same. I find that for non-artists 3D is easier than 2D because:
- You get things like depth and shadowing for free.
- Animations are easier. Or, at least, it’s easier to keep them consistent and to control their pace.
- 3D software has much more tools that non-artists can somewhat grasp.
Of course, my 3D models still look like crap - but it’s better looking crap than my 2D sprites…
And also, you can sort of brute force things to look good it with shaders.
Build a MUD.
I do want to make a sci-fi Dwarf Fortress clone with just ASCII representation.
Do it dude - if you’re passionate about building a rich simulation game then there’s a good chance you’ll create something awesome. We’ve seen huge successes with Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld - those sort of complex simulations can be both fun and dazzlingly interesting in terms of their emergent game play.
It’s relatively simple to get started, just simulate one thing or render one simple 10x10 grid, and work your way up. Remember that video games take a lot of effort and set reasonable goals and milestones to recognize your progress… DF originally played on an, essentially, fixed map with no z-plane - wildlife was non-existent and sieges were just pre-planned events.
If you have an idea in your soul go for it!
I once read an article about a guy, whos just doing this. He is selling gaming ideas to studios. But to be fair, he did develop some indie game by him self. He just realized, that he is not good in developing and the hates the whole programming and design part. He only has good ideas.
