Boring Parts of Game Development

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by luniac, Feb 13, 2015.

  1. luniac

    luniac Well-Known Member

    Feb 12, 2015
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    brooklyn
    #1 luniac, Feb 13, 2015
    Last edited: Feb 13, 2015
    What are the parts of game development you don't enjoy? I'll start...

    I don't like anything not involving actual gameplay,effects, stuff the player actually sees, interacts, and reacts to.

    I hate OPTIMIZATION the most... it's obviously supremely important for framerate and memory purposes but it's not something i get excited about doing...

    Refactoring code is not fun. Actually i don't even like programming itself that much either... it's just a means to an end.
    The best part of game dev is when you already programmed your level editor and can now make your game without worrying about coding.

    Dealing with textures is annoying too, sitting there making sure visual quality doesn't suffer, texture sizes aren't too big... etc etc etc...

    Polishing the game is a double edged sword, it can be maddening to tweak a bunch of variables for HOURS to get that right feel that you're looking for, but it does feel great when you nail it!

    Social Integration is SUPER boring and really annoying to test... but a necessary step for any viral potential...

    adding ads is boring but simple so whatever...
     
  2. Rogue

    Rogue Well-Known Member
    Patreon Bronze

    Feb 9, 2011
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    Oh man I love optimising code. Running the profiler and working out the bottleneck so I can squeeze extra frames out. Getting those precious resources back and letting me reallocate them for other things.... so delicious

    I have an art monkey partner *points* so from an art perspective I hate having my shonky coder art in place until he replaces it with something nicer. I find making things in paint with magenta gets them worked on faster....

    Refactoring I hate but it can help with 1) optimisation (see above) 2) allows me to expand features or 3) makes future work easier. So I kind of suffer through it regularly.

    Not a big fan of adding stuff in itunes connect and google play for leaderboards etc.. That is probably the most boring stuff to do IMO. I did that a few weeks ago... leaderboard for each of the 53 levels. Cutting and pasting etc
     
  3. Columbo

    Columbo Well-Known Member

    Sep 1, 2014
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    Integrating third party libraries like facebook, twitter, gamecenter leaderboards, ad networks, iCloud, etc is pretty demoralising.
     
  4. luniac

    luniac Well-Known Member

    Feb 12, 2015
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    brooklyn
    well ill admit that using the profiler isn't so bad, but imagine not having one! i use Unity3D FREE since i can't afford pro version yet and i had to get access to a pro version temporarily to use the profiler with my project. That back and forth process was really irritating, although i did solve all my optimization issues, and then some.

    I buy plugins for that crap, it's still annoying as hell but wayyy simpler then having to go through massive API, in fact i don't think im good enough of a programmer to have the patience of doing that... Id open a random facebook API page and have absolutely no clue wtf is going on, meanwhile the clock is ticking and im only getting older...

    I'm only willing to dive into the deep end if it directly relates to gameplay, anything else i just simply don't have the interest to understand in greater depth... but that's what plugins are for right? and libraries... no need to reinvent the wheel.
     
  5. krisix

    krisix Well-Known Member

    Jan 4, 2015
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    For me the hardest thing is the last final touches on game - sometime it takes days to finish the game.
     
  6. Destined

    Destined Well-Known Member

    Aug 11, 2013
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    Making screenshots and videos for every resolution
     
  7. luniac

    luniac Well-Known Member

    Feb 12, 2015
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    brooklyn
    Fighting the feature creep is hard towards the end...

    oh lord yes... hell making the game look properly at different aspect ratios was a challenge in itself, until i figured out a good workflow to more or less automate it.
     
  8. q8phantom

    q8phantom Well-Known Member

    Apr 26, 2013
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    Game development
    Kuwait
    That is really something I don't like either, integrating with Facebook, twitter .. etc
     
  9. ThumbSnail

    ThumbSnail Well-Known Member

    Jan 13, 2015
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    One-Man Game Developer
    Under a Raincloud
    Resizing all the art assets so that they fit and look good on all these different devices. Maybe there's some program out there that expedites this process, but, man, when you have to do it by hand.......
     
  10. luniac

    luniac Well-Known Member

    Feb 12, 2015
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    brooklyn
    instead of resizing it i just do one 800x1280 on android and add black borders at the edges of my game space. Then for a smaller height like 800x1000 as an example, id shrink the game space proportionately to avoid streching and it would just expose a little bit of the black edges on the sides of the screen.
    It doesn't affect gameplay at all, and the resolution ratios are never so off that theres a huge black borders, isn't this how TV does it too?

    same process for ios, except i use a different reference size...
     
  11. Stingman

    Stingman Well-Known Member
    Patreon Bronze

    Aug 14, 2012
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    The Bay Area
    UI... anyone out there who loves programming the User Interface? If so you are crazy!!! To me it encompasses boring, time consuming, not challenging, tedious... must be something else to describe it I can't think of...
     
  12. ThumbSnail

    ThumbSnail Well-Known Member

    Jan 13, 2015
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    Under a Raincloud
    @luniac- Yeah, I'm thinking that's a better way to do it. I'll have to see how to implement that in future games since it seems like it'd save a lot of time.
     
  13. luniac

    luniac Well-Known Member

    Feb 12, 2015
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    brooklyn
    i use unity3d so i have the 2dtoolkit plugin which comes with a special camera that literally does the resizing for me, 0 coding unless i change to landscape in which case i just have to flip the reference size to 1280x800.
     
  14. Destined

    Destined Well-Known Member

    Aug 11, 2013
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    i love interface design. It is such a critical part of software design because it is how the user interacts with your game. A bad UI can make an awesome game such. A good UI can make a simple game fun. When I do UI's I do lots of research to determine what others use and what will work best. It is also where you do a lot of testing to determine if people use the UI the way you intended!
     
  15. Stingman

    Stingman Well-Known Member
    Patreon Bronze

    Aug 14, 2012
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    The Bay Area
    Agree, it's critical, but do you enjoy programming it or just designing it? It's the programming part that irritates me. It can be very time consuming.
     
  16. Destined

    Destined Well-Known Member

    Aug 11, 2013
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    I have got to a stage (and written a bunch of reusable stuff, although with the new unity UI a lot of my stuff was essentially the new UI system for the specific bits I needed) that the coding is pretty quick. The design for me takes way long. Implementation is fast normally.

    Coding in general doesn't bother me as I find it rewarding when you get it doing what you intended.

    I find it exciting cause you are at the point people can actually use it the way you intended!
     
  17. Rogue

    Rogue Well-Known Member
    Patreon Bronze

    Feb 9, 2011
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    Games Developer
    Brisbane, Australia
    I have all my UI stuff pretty reusable at this point too. Only seems slow and painful if I need a particular UI element I have not already got coded up. Otherwise UI is pretty easy (but I agree with the general consensus: pretty boring)
     
  18. IronNinjaGames

    Jun 17, 2014
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    That pretty much covers it.

    But I'll add that I hate that general feeling of uncertainty you have about novel features. "I think this is cool... but maybe it won't really matter to anyone..." It's just part of the process.
     
  19. sfjohansson

    sfjohansson Well-Known Member

    May 17, 2014
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    Game Developer
    London
    For me it's more about the activity and rather than the area...

    So as long as it's more exploring/figuring out it's exciting and interesting...but implementing whatever it is another 100 times generates some friction..with the exception of polish that could be seen as some kind of laser focus activity that even if being repetitive yields hopefully some cool results :)

    Refactoring a really old piece of code that one has no interest in understanding better and is reasonably complex could be quite painful.. =O

    But yes redoing UI or something to work on different devices sounds like the contender for worst part.. =O
     
  20. iamagame

    iamagame Active Member

    Nov 19, 2014
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    Adding achievements with their icons and descriptions.
    Adding multiple languages
    Fixing UI layout according to various screen size
    Adjusting effects: timing, patterns, size, duration etc.

    but optimization is very fun for me.
     

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