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itch.io Community » Game Development » General Development

What TYPES of games are the most challenging to create?

A topic by 40wattstudio created Jun 01, 2020 Views: 411 Replies: 11
Viewing posts 1 to 3
40wattstudio4 years ago

I've learned that some games sound easy to make . . . but then when you try and create them you find that they may not be so simple after all!

What has been your experience with the difficulty of making some of these different types of games?


Text Adventure

Point and Click Adventure

Top-Down Shooter

Platformer

Puzzle Game

Racing Game

RPG (Role-Playing Game)

FPS (First-Person Shooter)

RTS (Real-Time Strategy)

Tower Defense

Etc . . . 

In my own experience while trying to program a Top-Down Shooter . . .  good grief! I had no idea one had to use Arrays so much!  Definitely not a game-genre for the mathematically faint at heart!

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No Time To PlayModerator4 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.

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40wattstudio4 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.

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No Time To PlayModerator4 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.

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40wattstudio4 years ago

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

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No Time To PlayModerator4 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.

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Afloof.devModerator4 years ago(+1)

I like making games of different genres, as that’s more fun than making games that look alike. So far I’ve made games with the following genres:

  • Puzzle
  • Idle
  • RPG / clone of a popular game where you capture monsters
  • Infinite runner
  • Platformer

Based on my experience, I would say the most difficult is making a game of a genre you’ve never made before. I think the difficult part is organising the project, and if its a project that you don’t know how its supposed to look like when finished, it will create a lot of frustration while working on it.

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40wattstudio4 years ago

That makes sense about any new genre game being the most difficult. So I'm curious, if you had to make another game in those genre's, how would you rank the "difficulty"? 

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Afloof.devModerator4 years ago(+1)

You mean in a new genre? I imagine a genre that is the furthest away from the ones I’m comfortable with will be more difficult. In this case, I can only think that physics-based games might be the most intimidating.

I lack some experience in implemented real-time gameplay, as I prefer making turn-based games, and physics is a problem I never really had to deal with.

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40wattstudio4 years ago

Sorry, I meant if you had to make a new game in one of the genre's that you've already made games in.

I think you're right about any game needing lots of Physics being naturally difficult, like if you had to make a version of Kerbal Space Program or something.

Having played around with both, I'd have to say that turn-based games are "easier" simply because the game "pauses" at regular intervals, making it much easier to evaluate different things. In a real-time game, I frequently have to press the Pause button to evaluate the coordinates of sprites or see if damage is being calculated correctly (or at all).

I have another suspicion that 2D games are easier to make than 3D games . . . but I can't say for sure because I haven't made anything in 3D yet.

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Afloof.devModerator4 years ago(+1)

Ah, if I had to make a game on a genre I’ve made before, I’m not sure if I would rank difficulty on it at all. The only difficult part would be to implement something new that I’m unfamiliar with.

For example if I was working on a new platformer, I’d most likely add a new feature, to make it more interesting for me to make.

I prefer 3D games myself, as I think once one gets the basics done, it’s way easier to make a game, than with 2D.

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40wattstudio4 years ago(+1)

That's encouraging to hear about 3D games. One of these days I hope to progress to that level. 

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