[HN Gopher] Game engines as an art form
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Game engines as an art form
Author : hajimehoshi
Score : 76 points
Date : 2021-12-28 10:58 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| bullen wrote:
| 3D A&V multiplayer is the final medium/media.
|
| Game engines are the final craft.
|
| Programming is a higher art than painting or music.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Team Shanghai Alice / Zun (aka: that one crazy developer) does
| all his own artwork, music, and programming for the Touhou
| series.
|
| A lot of people joke that his artwork is sub-par and the music
| is repetitive, but frankly... the integration of all three into
| a single product / series of games is pretty amazing.
|
| ---------
|
| I don't know if gaming is the "ultimate" form of art. And no
| one is going to say that Zun's art or music is the best in the
| world.
|
| But the fact that Zun can do all three and have them play off
| each other in his games is pretty masterful. There's a big
| difference in feel between people who only have mastered say
| Programming, but rely upon a team-member to do the art and/or
| music.
|
| Having the sound-effects integrate into your musical scores
| (thanks to understanding music theory / beats), as well as
| generating artwork from programmatic features (the pretty
| "bullet patterns" of Zun's games) is pretty unique.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8JmfCYmtHo
|
| Zun can make bullet patterns that look beautiful, while
| simultaneously is fun to dodge / play with, and with sound
| effects that integrate well into the music.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Full stack ownership of a game is what can make it truly good
| art imo.
|
| AAA games have art in them (the assets made by individuals),
| but the entire pieces are less art than product after being
| ground to completion by an org chart.
| dragontamer wrote:
| > Full stack ownership of a game is what can make it truly
| good art imo.
|
| Good is not quite the nuance I'm trying to say here. Final
| Fantasy VII remakes are "good art" and good enough
| programming, probably top-quality music as well despite
| being made by a giant organization.
|
| ------------
|
| Integration is probably the thing I'm trying to discuss,
| which is "good" in its own way. The Touhou games are
| probably the best example of that, but maybe that's a bit
| niche.
|
| Supergiant Game's "Bastion" was probably the best
| "integration" I've seen in more recent years of art / music
| / sound / programming. The way the narrator responded to my
| button-pushes and actions was downright creepy at times
| (creepy in a good way though)
|
| AAA games like Red Dead Redemption, try to accomplish the
| same thing but its just not quite as tight or as well done.
| I give them props for the effort (and getting further than
| most other AAA titles), but its just really difficult to
| compete with the level of integration that smaller teams
| can provide.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I think Arkane, Looking Glass, and iOi have come pretty
| close. This is coming from an experienced oil painter and
| novice programmer.
| munificent wrote:
| _> A lot of people joke that his artwork is sub-par and the
| music is repetitive, but frankly... the integration of all
| three into a single product / series of games is pretty
| amazing._
|
| I'm reminded of a Tim Minchin quote where he said he isn't
| funny enough to be a comedian or gifted enough to be a
| musician, but he can be the funniest musician and the most
| musical comedian out there.
|
| There's something to be said for having an interesting
| _combination_ of skills even if you don 't maximize any one
| of them.
|
| I recently finished writing a giant book. I wrote it all,
| hand drew the illustrations, and typeset the whole thing. I'm
| not a particularly talented artist or designer, but I have
| the unique property of _deeply understanding the source
| material_. So even if the illustrations and layout aren 't
| the best, they are informed by the source material in ways an
| outsourced designer wouldn't be able to do. When I draw a
| little diagram, I know which boxes to make biggest because
| the concepts they represent are the most complex. When I
| choose to split a snippet of source code across pages, I know
| where to split the code to be least disruptive.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Zun is a particularly cool example.
|
| There are plenty of excellent artists out there. If your
| video games inspire them, you can have a large fan-base who
| can contribute fanworks... from (amateur) manga/comics and
| other online works, to fan art, and maybe even some
| professionals remixing your works (most noticeably in the
| music world for Zun, where professionals / dedicated
| musicians take his speedy tunes and add a more subtle flair
| to it)
|
| The "Bad Apple" fanwork is a great example of how the fan
| community interacted with Zun
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkgK8eUdpAo). The shadow
| art was its own thing (though clearly based on Zun's
| characters / Touhou characters), but the song itself was a
| remix based from an earlier game
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNKyPkQ-_ug)... and
| professional level remixes to Bad Apple have entered the
| world.
|
| ---------
|
| So Zun was "good enough" at art, music, and programming...
| but also did a great job at inspiring and leading the
| Touhou community / fanbase.
|
| In many ways, the "game designer as commmunity leader"
| model is apparent. Braid, Touhou, Minecraft, and even
| Factorio all had community leaders and fan-growth that was
| superbly done.
|
| The music / art of the Touhou community though really
| elevates that particular community into true artistry. Both
| of the classic kind (just straight up good drawings / music
| being made), as well as of the programming / interactive
| kind.
| HansHamster wrote:
| And the Touhou fanbase is really big both in Japan and
| outside. For music alone there are probably hundreds of
| artists and groups and there are lots of fan comics,
| videos, games, memes... the rabbit hole (no pun intended)
| goes really deep.
| bullen wrote:
| The definition of art is somewhat hard to find, but to me an
| artist excels in his/her field. The trick here is to see
| value, a painting or song has only consumption value, it
| produces nothing except feelings that in turn can
| materialize.
|
| Programming is the weave of everything digital, like the
| matrix glyphs it can describe all, be all, modify all. It
| rules all crafts by an infinite amount. As a single
| programmer in a 3D multiplayer system, you become god.
|
| The truly amazing game makers like Pixel f.ex (Cave Story)
| are not incredible because they can make graphics, music and
| code. But because they actually manage to release code that
| works while being good at graphics and music. The rare skill
| is programming, not drawing or music.
|
| 99% of programmers don't take resposibility for their
| creations long term, including John Carmack and Tim Sweeney!
|
| So it's a trifecta: Be creative (discover things nobody did
| before), manage to release live products that work, take
| responsibility = work on your own.
|
| The most underrated skill in human history is this kind of
| programming, eventually it will become the only skill worth
| having until all energy has depleted. Then we're back to
| sticks, stones and cave drawings! :D
| et1337 wrote:
| > If you had asked me why I'd been so dedicated to developing the
| same game engine for so long, I probably wouldn't have had a very
| good answer for you until somewhat recently. Perhaps I would have
| cracked a joke about game engine development being a basic human
| need for me, right up there with food, water, and oxygen, but
| obviously we all know that's not a real answer.
|
| I was exactly this person for a long time. I took a lot of pride
| in the fact that I wrote my engines from scratch when everyone
| else was using Unity. When people asked what drove me, I would
| joke that I had a disease. I _had_ to make games. After getting
| some counseling and getting married, I 've realized that game
| development is a great coping mechanism to help you feel safe and
| in control. You are the master of your own universe. For some
| reason it also helps you feel worthy, like you've accomplished
| something.
|
| I'm not saying gamedev is bad, but I think a lot of people
| unknowingly use it to self-medicate.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Knowing a lot of creative people with a drive that could be
| interpreted through the lens of pathology, on the other side of
| it, what does healthy look like?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| What is pathological? The need to feel safe and have some
| control? That is perfectly healthy. How you do it - that is
| where unhealthy things can happen. Is art an unhealthy way to
| do it?
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I'm doing this right now on my language platform.
|
| On one hand, I'm inventing a new way to build online
| experiences (games, social apps, collaborative apps,
| small/medium business)
|
| On the other hand, I have no customers
|
| I have 100% code coverage for many of the packages.
|
| I'm building my own gossip failure detector right now using
| some blockchain ideas so I can gossip really-really quickly at
| an exceptional low rate.
|
| All this madness started because I was building an online board
| game.
|
| Fortunately, I've retired from big tech and can afford a few
| years to indulge myself.
|
| Check it out: http://www.adama-lang.org/
| munificent wrote:
| Are you me?
|
| I spent much of my childhood working on a tabletop RPG with my
| brother. Then decades later working on and off on various
| gamedev projects.
|
| I used to beat myself up for never finishing anything. Only
| with therapy over the past couple of years did it finally click
| for me that many times these projects were _escapes_. The point
| was _not_ to finish them so that the were a safe place I could
| retreat to when my life felt uncontrolled and chaotic.
|
| I was absolutely using it unknowingly to self-medicate. I still
| do so--I literally just took a break from hacking on my fantasy
| console project to check HN--but I'm a lot more mindful of my
| motivations now. It's OK to want some escapism now and then.
| Certainly with the pandemic, it's entirely reasonably to want a
| space where one feels they have some control because we sure as
| shit don't have control over COVID.
|
| But I try to make sure I'm not using it as an unhealthy way to
| avoid chaos that I should be tackling.
| galbar wrote:
| > I've realized that game development is a great coping
| mechanism to help you feel safe and in control. You are the
| master of your own universe.
|
| This is THE reason I started programming when I was 11 years
| old! I was always dreaming of this universe that I would
| create. I even tried to make an RPG game using Game Maker. I
| stopped when, after a couple of weeks, I had a barely working
| fighting system and nothing else. I learned that games are
| huge!
|
| Later, while I was in university, I implemented four gamedev
| frameworks. Every time I decided I was done, I would develop a
| small game with it and I always found something I didn't like.
| A few months later I would start from scratch having learned
| something new and trying to find a solution to what I hadn't
| liked. At some point I realized I enjoyed better writing the
| framework than the actual game.
|
| Funnily enough, I never went into game dev professionally.
| Although I still implement libraries that nobody, other than
| me, uses from scratch in my free time.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Because it actually is a massive accomplishment!
|
| It's funny how just about everyone who codes has dreamed
| about writing games early on, and then it turns out games are
| some of the most complicated projects possible, maybe the
| last thing you want to try as a novice. I've only recently
| done a side project game and it's got a lot of the challenges
| of HFT, plus more.
| amelius wrote:
| > I've realized that game development is a great coping
| mechanism to help you feel safe and in control.
|
| Would this also work for, say, programming language and
| compiler design (which is also in a way about creating new,
| abstract worlds)?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| It works for anything that makes you feel safe, in control,
| accomplished, etc. It's not related to the means. Every human
| has done it since the dawn of homo sapiens, and probably our
| ancestors too. It was done before computers, before books,
| etc. Paint something on a cave wall, if it works for you!
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > I've realized that game development is a great coping
| mechanism to help you feel safe and in control. You are the
| master of your own universe. For some reason it also helps you
| feel worthy, like you've accomplished something.
|
| > I'm not saying gamedev is bad, but I think a lot of people
| unknowingly use it to self-medicate.
|
| Great insight - IMHO, among the most valuable people can have
| in life. Of course it is not particular to games or
| development; it's the motivation for many of us doing many
| things. Some go to the bar and pick up sex partners - or get in
| fights, some fix up their homes or cars, some knit, some run
| marathons, some make FOSS, some do drugs, some bully other
| people or abuse their pets, some play Call of Duty, etc.
|
| I think the trick is to realize what you are doing - coping,
| feeling some control, etc,. - accepting that it's a good,
| healthy instinct, and finding a good healthy way to do it. Art
| is a great outlet, serial sex partners - usually not so much
| (not judging, just observing).
|
| The fundamental metric is not to get stuck on 'do I feel better
| _while_ I 'm doing it' but to choose based on, 'do I feel
| better _after_ I do it ' and also, 'is the world slightly
| better after I do it?'.
| moritonal wrote:
| Reading this whilst waiting for Unity to finish importing..
| yeah. It's my holiday, and a piece of me can comfortably think
| that I'm improving my skills, making something that might one-
| day sell for a bit of money, but realistically just cheers me
| up to make something pretty.
|
| I guess you gotta ask yourself if it matters whether anyone
| else ever sees it.
| pengstrom wrote:
| Knowing that the "computer nerd" is the archetypical male
| fight/flight hybrid coping mechanism from childhood trauma,
| this is unsurprising. A lot of my own life struggles became
| easier to understand when I started unwrapping my trauma with a
| therapist.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| I think that applies to making anything completely by yourself,
| a DAW, a drawing app, a house. The only problem I'm facing is:
| I keep going deeper and deeper in making tools and never made a
| game since (game engine -> programming language -> OS), tbh I
| am a bit jealous to see people already using Unity making cool
| effects, where I would have to spend weeks learning the maths
| and engineering behind those
| kello wrote:
| This hits hard for me. The part about being in control
| especially.
| HellDunkel wrote:
| So what exactly is it that we are self-medicating? The
| disability to fit in with others? That would be too much of a
| clichee for my taste. When i was young i could always imagine a
| greater game, no matter how great the games i had. Out of this
| grew the desire to make. Of course i failed. But isnt this
| quite an appealing conditio humana after all?
| DizzyDoo wrote:
| I think the more people creating game engines and open-source
| game frameworks the better, since every now and then something
| like Godot will emerge and continue to prevent a Unity-or-Unreal
| mono-culture. Which, to be clear, I don't think we're close to;
| to pick just one example Monogame, for instance, has been doing
| its thing for ages now and is going strong. As someone who's
| full-time job is working in Unity I think this sort of thing ends
| up being healthy for the whole developer ecosystem.
| bitwize wrote:
| I've found a good strategy is to focus on the game, not the
| engine. That is, don't go in hoping to write the be-all and end-
| all of game engines. Instead, sketch out a game that you would
| like to play and build as much engine as you need to support
| _just_ that game.
|
| It's easy to build an engine and then spend an eternity
| bikeshedding it to accommodate all sorts of games, while not
| actually writing any games. What you _should_ be doing is
| focusing on getting a _game_ out there, and letting the engine
| serve this goal and _only_ this goal. Any engine work that doesn
| 't directly contribute to a specific game reaching completion
| should be postponed or cancelled altogether.
|
| I know because I used to be That Guy, the one who was going to
| write the awesomest game engine ever and use it to build awesome
| games. But the engine code seemed to get in the way of building
| games, and changing it took up a lot of time. So I pivoted to
| just writing a damn game, from scratch, and that so much better
| that the engine I wrote to run this one game was even awesomer
| than my universal engine.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I miss working on my C++ game engine with my old business
| partner. We got so far with it, all the way to cross-compiling
| stuff like Ogg Theora/Vorbis video and audio playback around the
| time the iPhone arrived. Maybe a dozen rather large frameworks,
| before stuff like CocoaPods. Which provided us with a bare-metal
| environment, kind of a Unity for 2D gaming with blitters and
| basic OpenGL quad rendering.
|
| Unfortunately, a game engine can only get as big as planned
| obsolescence dictates. Apple especially, deprecates stuff on what
| feels like a 2-3 year cycle. So just when we'd think we were
| done, another module in our engine would require refactoring
| because the system framework it depended on got axed. Not to
| mention that Xcode has reached such a level of burden on
| developers, compared to anything in web development, that I could
| no longer endorse it. I got tired of rewriting code for the
| eleventeenth time and called it quits around 2010.
|
| The prime directive of game engines IMHO is to not make a single
| direct system call. Go through a layer like SDL, or you'll never
| get free of maintenance.
| bullen wrote:
| I think OpenGL (ES) 3 / OpenAL is probably the final APIs you
| have to worry about for eternity. Metal/Vulkan/DX12 adds
| nothing of gameplay value.
| Matheus28 wrote:
| Guess what, Apple has deprecated OpenGL too :)
| bullen wrote:
| I know, that is more proof tha Apple is heading in the
| wrong direction than anything else.
|
| They can deprecate all they want, they will never be able
| to remove it!
| ffhhj wrote:
| Game engines are the nearest we can get to ideal no-code tools,
| and after all the typing saved we still need a whole lot of code
| to define game mechanics, effects, interactions, and so on.
| turnipsoup wrote:
| Ebiten actually works fairly well. I believe there is an example
| of a game made using Ebiten that garnered 100,000 downloads on
| the Google Play Store. I am even more impressed after perusing
| this article. Thank you for sharing.
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