Member-only story
The Time Intensive Parts of Game Development
It’s not where I thought it was
Programming is hard, but easily scalable
Recently I’ve been dabbling in programming with Roblox or Unity. Both have been fun and doable with my programming experience, while my friend and nephew have been taking more of the art/design side upfront.
(An aside: the most difficult programming challenges are already solved if a game engine exists. Figuring out how to do complex lighting or physics simulations is the job of the folks that maintain Unreal Engine and the like, but game programmers that work on top of that are operating in a much less complicated space.)
What tends to be the most difficult programming challenge is trying to solve a novel problem you can’t just copy paste from online or watch a tutorial for. But once you have enough tools and know the landscape of the gaming tool/engine, you start to realize that programming is hard but scalable, i.e. the script you use to make one enemy move can just be copied to the next one, or referred to from one place.
There is an immediate reuse element to programming so that it takes an hour or more to make the first enemy move, and then seconds for the next one (a simple copy paste/ import statement).
