Browse GamesGame JamsUpload GameDeveloper LogsCommunity
Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags
No Time To Play3 years ago(+1)

Seriously? That's what's bothering you about shoot'em ups? :P In my experience they're the easiest games to create. Sure, you'll have to work with arrays, while in a text adventure you can get by without, but a text adventure needs a lot more work on the content, and the testing, and the polishing. That it's less technical doesn't mean it's easier.

But the most trouble I had making roguelikes. And the hardest part of that has been... balancing content. Because you have to set up a progression without the ability to place each enemy and health pack manually. But it's still more about the content than the programming.

Reply
40wattstudio3 years ago

It makes a big difference if you're using a game engine or not. In my case, I'm hard-coding everything, so while setup of something that uses arrays in Godot or Unity might be a piece of cake, it's a lot harder when you're trying to accomplish the same thing from scratch. There are a lot of game engine "built-in" mechanics that I think a lot of developers take for granted. 

You're right about text adventures -- if you don't have lots of content they can be really hard to make. I remember reading about some of the more popular text adventures in the App Store and a lot of those have word counts of 100,000 or even more.

So roguelikes use  a lot of random number generation? That's another area I've found unexpectedly frustrating. You can tell the game to pick random numbers between 1 and 100 and after a while you start seeing some patterns. From what I've read, it's very hard to achieve "true" random number generation.

Reply
No Time To Play3 years ago(+1)

Uh... there's a bit of confusion there at the end. Indeed, games normally use pseudo-random number generators, and for good reason! Those can be made to yield predictable sequences, which is vital for testing. But it doesn't mean roguelikes are random: try plopping down wall tiles at random on an empty map and see how well it works. No, roguelikes are procedural, which is not the same thing. They use randomness as a tool: just one input into the process.

And text adventures are hard because you need a lot of content to flesh them out. Much more than new authors expect or realize. Doubly so if their writing experience is limited. Then you have the expectations of publishers and/or audiences, that inflate the numbers even more.

Reply
40wattstudio3 years ago

I wasn't implying rogue-like level generation was random, but something like item-drop frequency could be randomized (and probably is).

Reply
No Time To Play3 years ago

Even that isn't going to be random, but based on a formula, that depends on what level of what dungeon you're on, and likely other factors.

Reply
AboutFAQBlogContact us
Copyright © 2024 itch corp · Directory · Terms · Privacy · Cookies