What is your most time consuming part of making a game and how did you avoid lost time?
For me it is art, I am no artist and art takes a lot of time to create with drawing, sketching, animation, etc… I feel when working on art it takes away from development time, so I use assets temporarily while I am making my games until it’s at a point to swap the art over or have another person work on the art while I am developing the game. But that’s if I am in a team of course.
I am curious on what others replies are. Thanks for the topic point @Amigo54 it’s a good idea!
For me, it’s the initial mechanic design. Like, I prefer to start with a single scene/level and get as close to 100% on every mechanic. There’s loads of external events to make sure that when I boot the next level, everything loads up the same, but all of the setup takes forever. Once that’s done, it’s smooth sailing.
And so, for me, as i am not graphist or artist, i lose a lot of time in creation of the backgrounds of my actual project (Rick Dangerous 1). I have been stupid to put in my platform game, every tiles by hand, one by one. And because there are many thousands tiles in every level, i worked during some weeks on the level2 just for that.
Solution:
Beginning the level 1, i decided to put only the tiles used for RIck to move on the platforms and of course, the objects like ladders, etc. and the background himself.
The avantage in time is about 5 à 10 times faster, depending of the objects manipulated.
About 40-50% is over after 7 days of work.
But there is certainly an disadvantage: the memory used, specially if the game must run on devices like Android a bit powerless.
Below, a screen with tiles put on background to be platformers objects.
Whenever I’m making a game at all, the most time-consuming part is usually creating pixel art for my game, or level design if I have no problem with pixel art. I always struggle to make my art look good, and whenever I don’t find a preferable match, I just give up halfway through, and that’s pretty much the reason why I design concept art first before pixel art. Now for level design, I don’t really have a clear mindset on how the level should play out. I want it to be like those SNES platformers, but then, I realize that whenever I want to design slopes/ramps, enemy placements, secret paths, or anything in-between, that’s when I start to get irritated, and I haven’t really used such tilemap editors like Sprite Fusion, LDtk, or Tiled. So yeah, that’s why I draw concept art before either pixel art or level design.
First up as an artist: myself would never use an AI to create sth. for me. It is my personal quality standard that everything I create is created with my own hands.
Visual art creation consumes a lot of time including animation.
(Especially if it is pixel art: Limitated by the small size of the canvas one wants to create sth. new and never before seen assets.)
Usually for a song composition I need a few hours (sometimes I create more versions of a certain composition, in that case it takes logically more time). And all of my songs are original, note by note composed.
The longest time of course is the game development itself. Even GDevelop offers pragmatically fast development because of its brilliant event system. There are the small things that takes a lot of time: asset import and its placement, variables management, testing tweens and so on…
(As an aside to initiate a conspiracy theory: I really don’t get why some other games take a really long period of time to finish (I don’t want to mention specific titles…). One could think that some titles are intentionally developed more slowly for specific reasons , (even if there are a whole teams of people involved). Especially 2D games are so easy to develop nowadays thanks to GDevelop…)
Without a doubt I spend a lot more time doing level design. It needs creativity to make several different levels with difficulty gradually increasing, new mechanics being added to please the player, fair challenges and so on. It takes a lot of tests to do this.
The game I’m working on has two characters that can be chosen. One of them can glide in the air. Just because of this I need to test every level for both characters and eventually this character that glides in the air spoils my level design that would work perfectly for the other one that doesn’t glides.
The second thing that takes me the most time, but that still doesn’t compare to level design is drawing large paintings. But I’m not talking about background because for my games is usually make it very simple, but more elaborate frames to tell the story of the game or even when you finish the game are much more complex, as the characters often appear in large proportions, sometimes some city or something that needs perspective…
If it is permit to add something to this post, i should say that for me, alone in my project, TESTING is the most time-consuming thing when you create game with games engine.
I evaluate it more than 50% and depending of the project (size, complexity and of course precision of the game creator)
Art can take a while, but since mine is pretty mid once I start drawing I can produce a lot of assets quickly.
What takes a lot of time for me is bug testing and making code that actually works
Sometimes I may waste 1-2 weeks trying to solve issues in my game which drains my motivation.
Bug fixing. There have been many times where I release a game, and it would take like a weeks worth of updates for all of the bugs to be fixed (and that’s if I find them, or fix them at all)
You can thank @Amigo54 for the topic idea and it was a great topic suggestion! Thank you for sharing your point of view on this and it was a great reply.
Oh i bet it takes a lot longer making the levels because of this and the gliding mechanic you talked about. Hopefully its well worth it in the end!
That’s very interesting, I would love to see this and how it would look. It does sound challenging and time consuming that’s for sure.
I’ll add concerning the tests that it is better if there are extern testers. It is well enough if you test yourself your game but you’ll not see all things to correct because you will have “la tête dans le guidon” as we say in France.
Bug fixing is DEFINITELY a HUGE issue in game development.
It takes WAY too much time to fix a bug, especially if it’s a new things you don’t know how to fix at all.
Exactly! I saw that when i had searched a solution for moving the Rick’s enemies but i must also say that the solution (among others of course) was finally easy. It’s necessary to take distance if you dont’ see, at first look, a solution to yours problems. As i said recently in another posts, “ne pas avoir la tête dans le guidon” which we can perhaps translate by "“Dont’ have your head in the handlebars”.
As im making my first game i havent experienced it all yet. My philosophy is that its not about time, but about fun. If i can have fun working on something i love for 2 hours instead of watching a movie for example. Then that is saved time for me, as a whole. With this in mind i would say that what takes the most time are the things i dont enjoy. Which is mainly unexpectedly falling down a rabbit hole of frustration trying to achieve a vision that is really stubborn about being dysfunctional. Im not a coder but i love problem solving. So gdevelop is perfect for me. And i absolutely love to plan how to tackle the obstacles of what i want to do (right now its an inventory system).
Graphics and music is what i do naturally, so thats fast and easy. I think for someone thats struggling with that its good to learn the right tools. I learned Dragonbones as i started making games and it both increased quality and speed as animation was relatively new for me. As for art in general i think it’s good to decide on a style that we can handle to be consistent with, to find that sweet spot between beauty and efficiency. All of this is individual to me. Its about fun. And if i got my head on straight (which happens sometimes) then nothing takes too much time.
After reading the post of Writhan, I’ll also add that it is very useful to maintain well his brain, specially when you are not really young (like me!)
In addition and as said by Writhan, creating something as games but not only, brings pleasure and i think it’s good also for the brain.
I agree with that. Game development can be pleasure, it can be fun.
If I got into one issue like bug fixing or sth. else: I loved to solve those issues like finding out the hidden wrong variable value, or finding out ways for a better game performance.
Every step while developing feels rewarding, the artificial world one is creating comes to life, step by step.
I think many game developers need to ask themselves why theyre making games. If its for money, well… only about 4 percent of indie developers make money enough to sustain themselves. And if money is the motive, its gonna end up a real crappy game. So why make games if it isnt fun? And if it isnt fun; its a waste of time. Coz youre not making anything else. And life is short. I believe the only way to keep making games sustainably is to do it with passion. Quality of life is the real reward. As @Amigo54 said, there’s many rewards to mental health. I know im a lot better at math now.
Its a work of endurance, as its damn hard to make games. And doing it for the right reasons might motivate you to finish them and reap monetary rewards too. Enabling you to make more games, or expanding the one you love. Forget money, and money might come.
So all these lil games people make to earn money, im not sure they understand the money they need to invest in fraudulent ads to make them sell.
Ok i feel a rant coming on so i better shut up now.
I’d say probably drawing all the pixel art takes a good chunk of game development time. However, I do draw a lot so drawing pixel art is quite fast for me.
Testing the game takes time as well, as the game previews take quite a while to load each time whenever I test my game. For the game I’ve been working on, Kinesis, I’ve spent quite a long time bug fixing and getting the mechanics and physics of the game down.
I agree with @Writhan - its more the fun than the time.
I’m an artist and so I like the art bit. Apart from when i decided to change the look of a sprite based character half way through my first game and realized there’s 10 animations , each with at least four frames to do it on.
I like puzzles and so solving logic flow problems - i like that too, even when it takes me a while and i’m cursing the computer and realize the next next day that it’s something so stupid that i hadn’t even bothered to check it.
BY FAR the least fun that i’ve had working with g develop - is developing a multiplayer. There was something about testing in multiple windows and adjusting the order of actions until it eventually worked that drove me up the wall.
Hi Dave!
Exactly! What a pain if all you created, worked at the first try, no?
Except if the correction of a bug takes several weeks (that would be the proof the game is bad designed), it is the job to do and also to fix bugs in addition to make the game of course.
So i repeat that because for me it is true, take distance between the game and you when you meet issues. The proof: yesterday before sleeping, i founded a solution to one problem which was persistent)
, (even if there are a whole teams of people involved). Especially 2D games are so easy to develop nowadays thanks to GDevelop…)
