What consumes the most time when you work on a game?
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It really depends on the game. When trying to get my Chess AI to work, then I took 20% of the time to implement it and 80% to try (and ultimately fail) to optimise it. Same with my abandoned light game.
The current animated puzzle game took two evenings to implement the chore game engine, and now I have spent twice as much fixing little details. I expect the most of the time will be spent on creating levels.
I spend 0% on drawing new sprites and graphic stuff, cause I don’t like that. All graphics I use is taken from the media library or created in the code.
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Making it fun is the hard part for me. Sometimes I make something that feels nice and is really cool on a technical level, but then no matter how much I play it and tweak it it's missing the fun factor.
The first version of SMAB was like that- It pushed F4NS to the limits, had really cool effects, and generally played well, but always felt like it was missing something big. The second version found the fun by adding customizable upgrades, special abilities, new enemies, and generally upping the difficulty. Pushing the strength of the player up while also making the game harder (in a fair way) made for a winning combo, especially since the player has a choice of what kind of upgrade they want. It feels like it has a lot more replayability now, and while developing it I couldn't stop playing it!
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Getting the core mechanics down for sure, and then polish. Polishing the game takes forever, and it can be relatively tedious, especially once it's down to just fine tuning numbers for weeks on end.
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@CasualTie5 I had an instructor that was on the other side of the room fussing with something for half the day when he finally asked me to look at his code to see what was wrong. He was working in C language and had typed "If" (with an uppercase "I") instead of "if" (lowercase "i").
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Most of the time I waste with creating waterproof paper concepts and then not executing them.
Just to see that someone else did that a week later... Was the same with among us and my idea of a 2d Traitor game...
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It depends on the game like when I worked with galactic bolts it took me a while to get the third person camera to work and figure out how to make the player face the right way and go the right direction. Bug hunting and polishing is on of my favorite things but it can be time consuming depending on how big the project is and what needs fixed so I would say 50/50 split on those two.
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For my current game I'd say I take a lot of time planning how the game will look. Its features. And a lot of reading. Sometimes my projects might take more than a couple months due to educating myself of the skill and knowledge I need to complete the project.
What I can say however, is that each project leads to more ideas that are added on to another project which leads to even greater improvements to your code, knowledge, experience, and overall confidence in oneself.
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@casualtie5 Ha, definitely.
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For me, it's making the functions that will allow the rest of development to go simi-quickly.
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Play testing consumes a lot of time!
Also spriting/ creating images although I haven't created many images yet, since I'm still new to FUZE⁴. XD
Butbit'll probably become a time consuming part of my work in the near future. chuckles
Unfortunately I have no dock and no USB keyboard, so typing in text also takes a lot of time. :/ Especially because I always get stuck when I have to type a "z" or a "y" since I am used to a german keyboard layout! XD
