Why do you make games?

tau · Post by **tau** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:11 am

I'm in a strange mood today...
Just wanted to know why do you make games guys? Is it because of fame? Money? Passion? Self-exposure? Something else?

I make games because I like to build worlds, sometime obscure ones, but the living beings on their own... Is it a fatherhood call?

ajs15822 · Post by **ajs15822** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:44 am

Passion, creativity, expression; the ability to take someone to a different world or time.

I come from a theatre bent (got my scholarship in it) and so helping people 'escape' has always just sorta been my 'thing'.

bibiteinfo · Post by **bibiteinfo** » Fri May 25, 2007 3:03 am

I make games for the intellectual challenge of always going further and trying to make something great and to be always learning something new. It keeps really motivated compare to others area where at some point it's becoming always the same thing after a while.

jomunoz · Post by **jomunoz** » Fri May 25, 2007 3:17 am

I'm looking for a career change i like C++ and like games. Here in colombia most people don't work on what they love, but on what crosses in their path.

I ended up in web development but don't like it too much.

deficite · Post by **deficite** » Fri May 25, 2007 7:41 am

I've been making games since I was a wee lad (around 7 or so. Of course, the "games" I made back then were quite embarrassing, lol. QBASIC wasn't that bad, though, all things considered).

I think what's always drawn me to programming and game development is the amount of creativity involved combined with my deep love for gaming. I remember sitting in the car and bugging my mom as I'd draw level designs for Super Mario World. I'd sit there for hours designing worlds and levels in the worlds. I did stuff like that ALL the time. I wonder if my parents thought I was retarded or something, lol.

I don't think that's just it though. It might be just the way I am. I've always been the type that says "I could do that better!" and "Why do people make things so complicated?" Whenever I do programming, it's like I'm walking into unexplored territory. The only limit to what a programmer can do is the scope of his/her imagination. When I play games, I think about what's happening in the game play and think about how the developers may have accomplished it.

The best feeling is when you develop something that actually accomplishes something and you sit back and play around with your own program with the same enthusiasm as somebody else would when they first saw your program. The first time I made a game that was good enough to show my friends, I remember hearing all the kind words they had to say about it. I never thought anything I did was that amazing, but all the people I knew ate it up and were actually passing floppies around school with my games on them.

It could be the logic. I'm a perfectionist in nature, and programming provides a challenge to me, because no matter how well you design your code, there's always a better and cleaner way of doing things, whether you know how or not. I make the simplest programming issues into the most complex, almost philosophical debates (remember that I'm just coding in my free time; I wouldn't act in this manner if I were programming for someone. Unless I was aiming to get fired). I think my early exposure to computers, gaming, and programming is the reason why I excel in math and the sciences.

Another, weirder reason that I might be drawn to it is the feeling that I have created something. I'm one of those people that believe that it will one day be possible to make a computer "feel" in the way we humans do. That is, computers are like living things in that they can respond to stimuli and can be trained behavior. When I make a program, it's like I'm training a very intelligent dog. When you make a game, you're making your own universe. You define how this universe works, and how all the things in it react to each other. Quite a powerful feeling, eh?

Sorry that I haven't really answered your question. The reason why I haven't is because, I honestly have no idea why I love programming, and why I love making games. What I do know is that it has always been a passion of mine, and I'd feel empty were I to stop programming. I tried it once. I had withdrawal

. The only thing I can compare it to is the enjoyment I get out of playing a musical instrument (another passion of mine: Guitar, drums, bass)

ajs15822 · Post by **ajs15822** » Fri May 25, 2007 8:03 am

ditto.

nicely said thar, deficite

raicuandi · Post by **raicuandi** » Fri May 25, 2007 8:38 am

Out of passion, to express creativity, because "its freakin' cool", because I love games, because a job in this industry wouldn't get repetitive. Commercial success is a dream of mine too

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Fri May 25, 2007 9:33 am

Well, I do it for fun. I feel its more fun to make one than to play it.

It feels good to write a program and say, "I made this!", and play it, see that your logic is working, see your thoughts and imagination in action. You feel happy that your logic actually works. It feels even better to see someone else play it on another computer. You feel "Hey! My game must be fun, because I play it to test it, while this guy must be playing it because its fun!". You think, "Ok, at this point he'll turn 20 degrees clockwise", and he actually turns. And when your game gets to the point where its not just a tech-demo, but an actual, challenging game with a reason to play it, its even better. You see your friend playing it, he loses and he says, "Gah... I'll surely get it this time!", which shows that he likes it, and wants to play it again. Sometimes, my friends come over to my house and say, "Nikki, can we play GraLL?", and I feel really happy.

Ok, I can keep talking (typing, actually) about this for hours, but you get the picture.

Klaim · Post by **Klaim** » Fri May 25, 2007 9:59 am

Same as deficite here, but i don't play any music instrument

For my current game, i'm trying to make something commercial too, that would be the first part of my plan to conquer the world. (By brain-washing indeed).

Making a game, for yourself, is verry expressive. I think people that feel it's gamt that is the best medium to express something are people that think it's hard to express something with rightness without building a full world , a full context to explain it.

I like to draw comics too because it's faster to express something, and making something "linear" (like playing a music partition?) help to equilibrate with the frustration of working a logn time before finishing a game.

Anyway, making a game, a great game, is a feeling that make you addict

raicuandi · Post by **raicuandi** » Fri May 25, 2007 10:01 am

Klaim wrote: Anyway, making a game, a great game, is a feeling that make you addict

Man, you can say that again!

Van · Post by **Van** » Fri May 25, 2007 12:44 pm

Because I'm a moron and didn't fully comprehend the shear horror of what I was getting myself into. The now required educational video Noob make MMORPG hadn't been released yet and a bunch of us gamers thought "We'll write the best MMO ever, our hero will start out in a medieval village and become a space captain...."

Seriously though, I've been a programmer for 20+ years and I must say that writting an MMO has been the absolute most challenging thing I have every undertaken. I have written some pretty neat software too - from typical accounting stuff, to aerospace, to airline, all the way up to industrial automation (making machines move!). Developing an MMO from scratch has been the most difficult and challenging to date - especially when your not being paid to do it.

I do it for the challenge - and eventually maybe make a couple bucks.

Lacero · Post by **Lacero** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:13 pm

I make games because I believe games will turn out to be the best way to teach things to people. We're not there yet, we're barely close enough to start because we're just not good enough at making them. But eventually I think the game "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" in Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" is where we'll end up.

Klaim · Post by **Klaim** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:41 pm

I think games are the fastest way to trigger fast brain evolution of the next generations of people.

That way, humanity will have more chance to survive unknown external problems like alien attack

Seriously, i'm certain that game let people enhance their ability to manage new kind of situations. Something like a deep need of learning to survive.

syedhs · Post by **syedhs** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:51 pm

Well let me tell you one thing: games programming is notoriously difficult

It takes some time before one can actually delve into games programming without stop asking stupid questions

And you can pretty much hire a fresh graduate to do business application for you as long as the system design is intact. I mean as long as all the flow from A-Z is properly documented. But not so in games programming. And I just realized that there is this one particular difficult project that I completed a few years back.

And just now, I take a quick look at the source code, and duhh.. it looks easy. I guess the almost 2 years of games programming effort has indeed bear some fruit...

Duncan Mac Leod · Post by **Duncan Mac Leod** » Fri May 25, 2007 2:56 pm

Van wrote:Seriously though, I've been a programmer for 20+ years and I must say that writting an MMO has been the absolute most challenging thing I have every undertaken.

100% TRUE - I am also coding for more than 20 years and it's quite challenging...

Van wrote:Developing an MMO from scratch has been the most difficult and challenging to date - especially when your not being paid to do it.

Not being paid during development is another challenging factor - needs more than passion

Van wrote:I do it for the challenge - and eventually maybe make a couple bucks.

...same situation here!

Klaim · Post by **Klaim** » Fri May 25, 2007 3:19 pm

Well let me tell you one thing: games programming is notoriously difficult

True

raicuandi · Post by **raicuandi** » Fri May 25, 2007 3:38 pm

Besides, there is always place for innovation!

(I actually find it that some of the most successful games have started with a technical innovation, like in rendering or a cool gameplay feature, and just a story around it; I dug some interviews and other materials on both oldies like Keen and Quake, and new games too. Looks like when iD Software came up with this cool soft-scrolling technique, the guys with Mario said "no" to a PC version, so iD just rolled up the story of Commander Keen, and what do you know? a side-scroller hit...)

JohnJ · Post by **JohnJ** » Fri May 25, 2007 4:18 pm

deficite: What you said about game programming is almost exactly the same for me (except I play the piano)

Also, I enjoy the technical side of game programming almost as much as the creative side. I like thinking of optimizations or graphical tricks, and making them work. I remember my first optimization was rendering a group of trees, and looping ones behind the player around in front so they were basically infinite.

I actually find it that some of the most successful games have started with a technical innovation, like in rendering or a cool gameplay feature, and just a story around it

True, people do like fancy graphics. But some of the most successful games in the world (the Sims, for example) were created from a good idea, and built from there. Personally, I think good technology is very important in a game, but it shouldn't be put before the gameplay or storyline. This doesn't mean you can't develop technology first, just that you don't make your games look like big "techdemos".

Well let me tell you one thing: games programming is notoriously difficult

True, it can be difficult at times. But I've found that if I focus on the "destination", and not the "road", the difficulties become fun challenges.

tau · Post by **tau** » Fri May 25, 2007 5:34 pm

Wow, thanks for sharing that, guys! I did not think I've tapped such an interesting topic

Seems like a lot of people do it because of the challenges and the passion for games...

The challenges are indeed there...

What about passion for gaming? What's special in it? Is it like loving your girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband and wondering sometimes "what's in it" without being able to answer such "simple" question?

I found recently that I'm more into gameplay if it's involving other people,.. seems like playing solo is not that exciting unless there is an involving story that puts you through the chapters...

Lee04 · Post by **Lee04** » Fri May 25, 2007 7:08 pm

I started out doing Ai for mobile robots and building them...
The first back in 1977

Then I made a 3D simulator for them back in 1982.
At the time there was really no PC 3D cards to talk of.

Later I decided with a freind to take our AI and our robots and make a game with them because the CPU was freed up from the 3D work when the first 3D cards came. Whe started updating my 3D engine but found DirectX5... at the time.

Sence then I been pushing it in the games technology.

Reasentlly I have been doing AI for massive crowds drawing them with instancing. A team effort where the goal is to make instancing play well with a scene manager using hardware occlusion queries.

It's strange what turns life takes.
But eventually I will go back to robotics I guess, when there is on in each home...

Jerky · Post by **Jerky** » Fri May 25, 2007 7:40 pm

For me, when Wish was cancelled, that got me thinking. If a game that I know would have been great can't make it in this world because of finances, something needed to be done. Thats when I took action.

Over the past 2.5 years since then, my motivations and mission have evolved. It was originally just to make an MMO. Now that I know how much it is going to take to do it, I want to prove that it can be done (thanks xavier

). I have also added the desire to bring innovation to a gaming industry in dire need of people who are uncompromising. Money has a bad effect on things, so its going to take someone who isnt effected by it. Having no budget helps :/.

I can see if we are successful, fame could come into play, but that is a far cry away. As for money, I could just flip the bird. I would love to do this for a living, but that is not my motivation.

I think my biggest motivation is the passion to learn new things. Since beginning PW, I have become quite proficient at many things that I knew nothing (or next to nothing) about. Web Development, Project Management, Software development, 3d modeling, texturing, uv mapping, shaders, pipeline design, Web admin, linux, c++, the list goes on. Many of this I now get paid for in other projects and work, all because of PW. I owe a lot to this driving passion of mine.

nikki · Post by **nikki** » Fri May 25, 2007 8:38 pm

Duncan Mac Leod wrote:I am also coding for more than 20 years

Woah... I've learnt all this in 2 years (but I started C++ 1.5 years back). Imagine what one can do in 20+ years!

deficite · Post by **deficite** » Fri May 25, 2007 9:17 pm

Also, I enjoy the technical side of game programming almost as much as the creative side. I like thinking of optimizations or graphical tricks, and making them work. I remember my first optimization was rendering a group of trees, and looping ones behind the player around in front so they were basically infinite.

Optimization is something I've also always enjoyed. The very fist game engine I made was a tile engine. Graphics? Mode 13h (320x200x8).

I've taught myself everything I know, and that can sometimes lead to me doing something in a really stupid way and then beating myself up later

. I enjoy the process of experimentation much more than just reading a tutorial or a book on a specific topic. I like just thinking about something and coming up with my own solution. Anywho, back to the tile engine.

100's and 100's of lines of if statements. This is C. 100's and 100's of lines of if statements. And goto statements. Again. This is C. The way the engine determined what kind of tile to draw at a certain point is by going through a list of if statements (for example: "if (tiles[j] == TILE_BRICK) ... else if (tiles[j] == TILE_THISISRIDICULOUS) ..."). Collision detection? The solution I came up with was to make an array of bools the same size as my map, true means the tile is blocking, false means the tile is passable.

The most hilarious part of my engine? It used getch() for input. Yes. You had to press "Enter" every time you pressed a key. Also, as you all know, getch() is a blocking function. I had absolutely no idea at the time how to get around this barrier, so I just left it there with a "TODO status". Once I made the tile engine (I stayed up all night one summer night to make it), I started work on a battle system.

I made a Final Fantasy-esque battle system. It actually wasn't all that bad, all things considered. I made a menu system (It'd draw a blue box of pixels and then plot text via letters that I drew by hand in BMP format, monospace of course). I never did make the AI system, but it kept track of stats, and even had spells with effects (I can't remember all the spells, but I remember a fireball one that would shoot a fireball sprite I made at the enemy. It was really, really slow and you'd see it in one position, you'd wait for the screen to get drawn, and then the screen would clear and you'd wait for it to get drawn again, and the fireball was quite some distance farther then, and so on. I also made an electric spell that shot electric bolts. It even changed the palette to make the rest of the screen darker during the spell).

After the battle system was to the point where you could fight monsters that would just stare at you, I called what I had "Alpha 1" and gave the disk to a couple of my friends. The engine I was making for a game I was going to call "War of the Unknown". I had a rude awakening whenever he ran it on his computer. This was back in 2000, and my computer (not really mine, the family computer) was a 486DX 33MHz with a 1MB Trident SVGA graphics card.

My friend had one of those newfangled pentiums of some sort. I timed my game by long while loops that set a variable to equal itself over and over. All of my crude 3-frame animations for walking was based on this "timer system" I had made. Needless to say, I pressed "D" (for down) and then enter, and the screen flickered for less than a second and my character had flown to the next tile. The battle system? You'd select "fireball" and press enter and it'd go back to the map. It went through the animation, displayed how much gold and exp you got, went through a cheesy transition I made, and returned to the map so fast you couldn't even see it happen.

I made two more alphas after that. The first one added "loading" of a second map. In reality, the maps were just two arrays of equal size of int's (I wasn't enlightened to the beauty of unsigned variables, let alone the awesomeness of unsigned char's). It also added some hacks to fix some issues I had when I ran the engine on another computer. Whenever you started the program it'd ask you how many iterations of the timer loops you wanted to use. I made some presets (one for a 486DX and one for whatever my friend had). It also displayed information about where it was looking for the game's sprites, etc. and had loading messages.

The other alpha was a graphics upgrade. I made some slightly less crappy programmer art and added lighting effects. Yes. Lighting effects in Mode 13h. The only thing that I had that made use of it was a candle tile. I don't remember exactly how I did it, but somehow I modulated the pixels around the candle in a semi-circle of specified radius and got lighting to work (I probably just added a lighting constant with the pixel colors around the candle). It was colored light too. You could make the light red, green, yellow, etc. (I chose yellow). The second alpha also extended to menu system to allow for a main menu when it started.

Wow. I didn't realize I'd make a post-mortem of a game I worked on when I was about 12. My friend thought it was neat that I could do that, and he tried teaching himself too. He started carrying around a Turbo C++ 3.1 book he found at garage sale. I'd help him out with things he couldn't understand in the book. You know what's interesting? Hearing a kid going through puberty trying to say "polymorphism". I'd say it just to impress people .

But to tie into what I was saying about optimization. What I just wrote is probably what caused me to worry so much about cleanness of code and optimization. A year later I had made the second version of the engine (from scratch of course). I made my own map format, and it was loaded off of disk. I reduced the 100's and 100's of lines of if statements into about 14 lines of code (which ran SO much faster ). Blocking was set by the tile type, and each tile had a script in a crude .INI-esque file format. I implemented scrolling (before the map could only be the size of the screen if you wanted to see everything ).

The scrolling I used wasn't too optimal, however. When I loaded the map I blitted all the tiles onto a buffer (Tilesize*number of tiles wide x Tilesize*number of tiles high). Every loop it'd draw the entire buffer at a negative origin based upon where the map was scrolled to (if I moved over 50 pixels to the right, I drew the buffer at the origin -50,0) I had a better computer, I did input correctly (so now I actually could do logic at all times), and I could only muster about 14FPS on a 8MB Via 3D accelerator. I posted the program on message boards asking people to try it on their faster computers, and they were getting low FPS too. I knew it was my code. So I thought and thought, and then I had an epiphany. Maybe, just maybe, memory isn't as fast as the CPU! I noticed that my program was using a LOT of memory, so I figured that if I reduced the amount of memory used, maybe I can get a speed improvement? So now I did scrolling correctly. I drew all the tiles that'd fit on the screen in whole plus an extra tile (so you wouldn't have a black edge around it) and my FPS shot up around 60FPS. After that I continued on to make AI, a better menu system (with scripted dialog with other actors), and I made a simple little RPG with it. This time the graphics defaulted to 800x600x16 (you could change it to anything you want, as long as VESA supported it).

I guess these two post-mortems are another example as to why I enjoy game programming. I confronted problems, thought them out, and solved them on my own with no help whatsoever. The next problem I solved was porting my engine to windows. That's when I learned that GDI is REALLY slow. I decided to teach myself everything I could about the Win32 API and found SDL and Allegro. I chose Allegro. My game looked even better then because I could go to higher resolution, it used DirectDraw, so I could make it look better due to its much faster blitting, etc. etc. I got bored with 2D after a while and tried teaching myself OpenGL. I thought it was too hard, so I switched to DirectX 9 (which just came out right when I started doing 3D stuff). I had to get somebody else with a broadband connection to download it (dial-up sucked). I found DX9 to be much easier. Some time later I turned into a Linux guy and forced myself into learning OpenGL. Eventually I tried Irrlicht, hated it, and then I found OGRE. I couldn't find any tutorials of how to use OGRE without ExampleApplication, so I ended up not doing anything with OGRE until a month or so later when I found an article about how to get OGRE to work without ExampleApplication, and it's been love ever since .

Whoa nelly I got off topic. I guess I can relate all that to the fact that I have always liked learning new things? Oh well. There goes way too much of OGRE's bandwidth. Sorry guys.

kcbanner · Post by **kcbanner** » Fri May 25, 2007 9:35 pm

I make games to learn

I had done quite a bit of non-game stuff in other languages like Perl, and C, but I was growing bored creating tools and utilities, chat bots, etc. So I started doing some games programming. I have quite a good programmign background, just not in the games field.

I had done some 3D games programming in the past (when I was like 10 years old with 3D GameStudio, I remember reinstalling the 30 day trial on all my different computers, I had a 486 at the time). It was basically a point and click game editor, I had made a small crappy FPS with it. At that point I hadn't done any more programming that QBASIC and VB, lol.

My first real game project was a multiplayer (well I called it Small MMO at the time, lol) game where players connected to a persistant universe. I was basically re-creating Ultima Online to learn how. I did my server in Perl and my client was Java (using an awesome lib called Slick, if your making 2D games in Java you MUST try this). I actually got it working, I could have multiple players running around on a smooth scrolling tile map with particle effects, even a simple GUI system for stats was in place. The networking code was all homegrown, I had my own packet system with 2 bytes that identified the type and subtype of the packet (AVATAR and AVATAR_LOCATION) for example. It worked quite well actually, but development wasn't really going anywhere (I was mostly stopped by the horrible thought of doing pixel animation).

So now I'm 17, learning C++ and coding a game engine using Ogre. You can check out my current project here: http://code.google.com/p/unlimitedworlds/ its a persistant world space sim. The goal is to be able to walk around motherships in an FPS view, teamwork for players (pilot, gunners, engineers, etc). The goal is to create a more realistic space sim, where you actually have to run around and do things onboard your ship to keep it flying. Then theres small 1 player ships that you pilot with a joystick, freelancer ftw.

Anyhow, I digress. The point is that games programming has forced me to learn OpenGL, C++, and just given me a whole load of problem solving knowledge that you wouldn't get programming business apps.

@deficite: I experienced the same thing starting with Ogre, I hated the idea of using ExampleApplication, and I couldn't find any tutorials on the "real" way to do it, until this: http://www.ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Pr ... pplication

Which kinda showed me the ropes and got me started.

ajs15822 · Post by **ajs15822** » Fri May 25, 2007 9:59 pm

Lol, my life-story is as illustrious as the next.

In fifth grade, I picked up learning Q-Basic. I had found a book on it at my local library and god knows what possessed me to pick it up, but I did. In the months that passed, I made the most simple of programs. (I won't bore you with the details, moving right along..)

In Junior High, I received my first TI-83 and began programmin' the hell out of that, eventually moving on to do really fun stuff (crude games) written in ASM.

I've been involved in theater since, well, forever, and I needed something to do during long rehearsals and so I picked up a book on C when I was 13. It was a massive book and my thespian friends would give me strange looks about it. Nonetheless, boredom dominated and soon I was learning C++ and Java as well.

High school flew by. Ninth and tenth grade, I took Comp Sci classes, they were below my level. I instead opted to found a BLOCKED class at my school and basically taught that for the next two years. After some talks with the principal, I established a program for BLOCKED students to receive awards and letters (for letterjackets) at graduation. Thus, I was commended at senior graduation for my efforts, was pretty nice.

Now I'm in college pursuing a degree in software engineering, it's summertime and that's why I'm here.

Games are only fun to develop because of the people who use them.

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