Enix now owns Hitman and Tomb Raider

[Mental]

Honestly, download XNA, get in touch with ZUN, and ask him if he's interested in having you port the Touhou engine over to XNA to make bullet hell shooters for the 360. Programmers who can write clean engines like that are pretty rare and my guess is that he has one of the best reusable shooter engines out there. You'd be way, way ahead of the curve in trying to have access to a real reusable, modular, and scalable engine.

[Don]

Do you have a 360, Don? If you can understand Touhou, then you can probably take a stab at XNA, which I'd highly recommend for you as a way to try to see if you can make a start at putting your ideas into something practical.

Even if you don't end up making a full game, it's a great way to see what something vaguely resembling modern console development is like and it can be a pretty awesome feeling to see something you made running on your own 360 anyway.

I got a 360 but I'm well aware making a game is a lot of work and since I'm not getting paid for it I probably won't bother. Besides I prefer to think of ideas since that's the part that's hard in game making, not the actual programming part. I remember talking to my friend saying I really like the grid system in FF10, wonder how hard it was to program it, and he was like 'probably not very hard at all', and after thinking about it, it obviously cannot be very hard to program such a thing (grid system is probably some kind of linked list). But coming up with the idea is what made it good, not the programming effort needed to make it possible

I think there really needs to be a way to turn good ideas into a presentable game. It won't necessarily be a blockbuster but if it's a good idea, people will appreciate it. Concealed the Conclusion looks worse than just about any of the Touhous since TH6, but thanks to development tool Touhou Danmukufu it didn't look like something that belonged in the NES era. Maybe it'd still play as well with 8-bit graphics but having a passable presentation sure did not hurt it. If you look at the Touhou fan world, you can think of ZUN as the big guy since he is the one with all the resources (his game engine is obviously way better than Touhou Danmukufu) and experience. But a small team of quasi developers working with a weaker engine and decidedly worse graphics can still crank out a game that is well received even amongst the ZUN-worshipping fans of Touhou.

You might not be able to topple an empire. In the world of Touhou, ZUN is probably like Wii + PS3 + XBox 360 put together, but even with this kind of insurmountable advantage, there are plenty of people who thought Concealed the Conclusion was a good game. I have thought about sending money to the developer of Concealed the Conclusion over ZUN if you didn't have to go through so many loops just to buy their product. And if you got enough of these good ideas that ultimately become games, it has to be better for the genre as a whole.

[Mental]

I got a 360 but I'm well aware making a game is a lot of work and since I'm not getting paid for it I probably won't bother.

Actually, you can release your own games via XBox Community Games and sell them yourself on the 360. I have no idea if anyone is actually buying them, but if you finished something and managed to sell some copies you would indeed see some income.

Besides I prefer to think of ideas since that's the part that's hard in game making, not the actual programming part.

Hmmm. No. This is absolutely wrong. The programming part is almost always very, very very hard. Try it if you don't believe me.

Everyone in gaming has ideas. Nearly nobody can turn them into playable games. It's not due to a shortage of ideas at all.

I remember talking to my friend saying I really like the grid system in FF10, wonder how hard it was to program it, and he was like 'probably not very hard at all', and after thinking about it, it obviously cannot be very hard to program such a thing (grid system is probably some kind of linked list). But coming up with the idea is what made it good, not the programming effort needed to make it possible.

I think that's debatable. The grid system in FF10 itself was probably not that hard to program COMPARATIVELY speaking. I have some idea of what's involved, though, and you still have to program a zoom system, write all the copy for all the various grid entries, program special exceptions for the Quickenings that make them reappear or disappear for every player, tie in the splash animations, tie all the abilities back to the various characters and make sure they tie in properly, program the 2D camera they used to move the field around, and more things that I'm probably forgetting. These things don't generally come to mind until you're halfway through programming the menu system, at which point it's too late to go back and realize that the problem was harder than you thought.

I'm not meaning to be insulting here, but I think it would take you a lot longer to do that than you think. Again - try it. Also, the grid system is not really representative of the complexity of some upgrade systems that are out there. Try figuring out how to do the Sphere Grid from FF10 well and you'll see that these problems can snowball fast. They often have one or two people doing nothing but these grid/upgrade systems (though often there are more), but you have to remember that these games take two or three years to do and these guys aren't doing anything else in all that time.

I think there really needs to be a way to turn good ideas into a presentable game.

...

And if you got enough of these good ideas that ultimately become games, it has to be better for the genre as a whole.

I don't disagree in the least. But there is a major, major difference between "needs to be" or "should be" and "is" and wishing it was different will not help create these systems any faster.

To be honest, I really kind of feel like you're just going to be pissing in the wind here unless you actually get some firsthand experience with the kinds of challenges I'm talking about. I'll keep on discussing this with you, but I feel like we'll be spinning our wheels if you keep trying to declare how things "should" be. They aren't. All the "should" in the world won't make it different.

[Don]

Honestly, download XNA, get in touch with ZUN, and ask him if he's interested in having you port the Touhou engine over to XNA to make bullet hell shooters for the 360. Programmers who can write clean engines like that are pretty rare and my guess is that he has one of the best reusable shooter engines out there. You'd be way, way ahead of the curve in trying to have access to a real reusable, modular, and scalable engine.

I'm sure ZUN's system is proprietory. Touhou Danmukufu is not his engine. It's something someone put together probably based on years of people trying to hack into the Touhou engine. It is not as powerful as the actual system that runs Touhou (it doesn't seem to be able to handle graphics nearly as well), but it supplies the basic elements of a vertical scrolling shooter quite well. It is not very efficient either but it's a workable system. I suspect having function calls like playmusic("stage1.mp3") or loadbackground("picture1.jpg") isn't going to rank high on efficiency, but it's certainly very easy to follow.

I messed around with it some because I was trying to figure out a way that'd beat the Lunatic difficulty without needing to spend hundreds of hours (ended up just increasing my shot damage from 2 to 200). It is far from the best tool you can use to make a shooter but it lets you make a shooter that is perfectly presentable. I have a hard time justifying playing let alone spending money on a game that looks like it came out of the stone age no matter how good it is, and I suspect most of the population will agree with me here. Therefore you must have something that is at least presentable.

And yeah I think you're right about how much the wheel gets reinvented every time. The funny thing is if game developers are afraid of looking like another game, they sure do a good job making all the games look the same at the end anyway. I remember reading about Vanguard and Brad McQuaid seem to have an attitude like: "We're going to make a MMORPG that is totally unlike WoW in every single way." There are obvious design decisions at the designer level for many games too. Sometimes you go play a game and it's like they've thrown out everything useful we ever learned about whatever the genre is.

[Mental]

The funny thing is if game developers are afraid of looking like another game, they sure do a good job making all the games look the same at the end anyway.

Yup. Pretty insightful stuff, there. In the end, you just kind of have to sigh (or laugh) at it all, spend a few minutes visualizing the way things ought to be, and then get back to dealing with how things are. It would be a pretty valid criticism to write in to a gaming mag with, though.

I do commend you on your analysis. You've got some very valid points. Hopefully within the next decade we'll see some real progress towards change, and there are some really good reasons right now to believe that it'll happen.

[Don]

I don't see how something like FF10's sphere grid can be a significant resource consumer relative to the resources the whole game has. It might not be somethign you can do in a few days but there's no way you will have to use most of the resources just for that. If you assume someone else is doing the GUI for the actual grid, then the programming basically goes like this:

Tidus is at node X and has Y movement points left. The node keeps track of what its attribute is (if any), and who has activated the node. Currently Tidus does not have the node activated. Node X has a property of ("skill flee"). Node X is adjacent to node A, B, and C. If Tidus has an ability sphere, he can change the status of node X from not learned to learned.

Clearly you also have some hidden grouping of all the node attributes, like 'abilities' 'stats' 'black magic', and so on. If Tidus uses a Black Magic Sphere, then he is able to select all nodes that are of the 'black magic' type.

I'd bet coming up with the graphic representation of the sphere system would take far more manhours than the underlying logic. But this is mostly grunt work. It's not something that requires a stroke of genius to do. When people credit the success of Metal Gear Solid for Kojima, it's not for work like putting the graphical representation of a system. It's for coming up with the system itself. Obviously somebody still has to do it, but the difficulty is mostly just needing a lot of time and testing, not because it takes some incredible programming skill to do this.

I remember one of my friend went to EA as an intern, and I think all she did was like enter people's stats for some sports game. Now you won't have a sports game without stats either, but the person entering that soandso has a passing ability of 99 also isn't the guy that was responsible for making the game great. That's not to say what he did wasn't important, but that's just work, not talent.

[SineSwiper]

WTF? 12 hours later and there's more than 2000 words here...

[Kupek]

Don, Andrew's point is that the programming for the FFX grid system is not hard in concept, but with so many things going on, it's hard because it takes a lot of people coordinating over a long period of time to do it well. Building a skyscraper is a solved problem, but it's still considered a "hard" task because of the level of effort and coordination involved.

In the startup community, there's a saying that ideas are worthless because everyone has them. The value is in the execution of those ideas. I think that's too extreme, but I agree that the execution of good ideas is orders of mangitude more valuable than a good idea itself. Look at Friendster versus Facebook. Same idea, one was just done better. A good idea executed poorly is still bad.

In games, I think you're not going to get a good idea without some implementation. You're not going to have an "Aha!" moment, implement that idea as is, and get something fun and original. That requires testing and iterating.

For example, the first Prince of Persia (well, the recent first one) was such a fun game because the core mechanics of moving around felt so fluid and acrobatic. They didn't arrive at that through one good idea - what would it have been, even, "Let's make it feel good"? They arrived at that by implementing a prototype and working on it until it felt right.