Game Dev Is Hard

I think anyone who is seriously into video game has had a dream or at least a thought of wanting to make their own game at some point.  With the rise of indie developers making huge numbers of sales on platforms like Steam, why wouldn't you want a piece of that pie, right?  However game development is INCREDIBLY hard.

I've been trying, for a while, just to make my own piece of shit game in RPG Maker.  Now maybe it's a problem with the genre I'm trying to develop for but before you even start doing anything on a computer there's so much that you have to think about.  I feel that if you don't go in with a decent plan then the project is going to, maybe not fall apart, but get pretty confusing pretty quickly.  You have to have all your ideas and how they are going to work together straight before you really begin.

Now you would think that the actual putting together of the game, the coding, would be the hardest part of the process.  While coding is an extremely hard thing to do we now live in an age where there are a number of programs to help you along with this process. For example, I'm making something in RPG Maker and I know next to nothing about coding.  Despite that, I've been able to use the tools provided to at least get SOMETHING working.  A little man walking around an island that gets into random battles doesn't sound like much but when you're starting from the bottom it's a pretty big deal.  I have another friend who is trying to make a point and click adventure game in an engine called AGS and as far as I know he taught himself all the coding side of that by just fucking around with the program and asking on forums for help.  Of course, you're quite limited when you use these kind of tools but when you're just starting out they are a good way to put your big toe into the ocean of game dev, so to speak.

But no, the reason why game development is so hard is just the sheer range of skills you need to be able to pull it off.  There's a reason that very few games are developed just by one guy.  You need to be able to do the coding, compose music, write stories if your game needs it, make artwork and have a good game play idea to make all that shit stick together.  That's A LOT to ask of a single person.  I feel like I have good ideas and if I'm making an RPG or adventure game I'd be pretty good at writing a story but I know NOTHING about composing music and I can't draw for shit.  This is a big roadblock for your average person.

However there are great examples of absolute beasts making great games entirely by themselves.  The one that springs to my mind straight away is Touhou, made by one drunk man who goes by the name of ZUN.

Awesome games, great soundtracks, incredibly challenging and fun to play and yet that artwork is....shall we say mediocre at best.  No one can be perfect though, the amount of skill the guy has in all of those fields surpasses mine by a great deal, I'm truly in awe over how these games even exist.

Still, if you do have an idea for a game and you are slowly working away at it, don't let it die.  If you can't draw, go learn.  If you don't know shit about music? go google some tutorials.  We live in an age where all this information is readily available and if you're willing to put in the hours then anyone could probably pull it off.  Just don't get frustrated when it isn't the walk in the park you were probably hoping it was.

"Games Are Art"? Piss Off!

There seems to be this big ongoing debate between gamers that games are art or whatever and before I explain my reasoning behind wanting this debate to just fuck off forever, let me at least acknowledge that they have a point.

Gaming as a medium is quite artistic, you can't really debate that.  You have 4 different mediums coming together in the form of writing, music, artwork and then interactivity on top of all that.  Slamming all that together to make a game is no easy task so to say games aren't artistic at all would be a bit silly.

But should games be considered art?  Well fucking no because art is fucking terrible.  I'm aware that made me sound like some kind of uncultured swine but hear me out.

One thing you may have thought when you first opened this page is "why did he put a blue (it looks purple thanks to blogger, whatever) rectangle at the top of this post?"  Well that's no ordinary blue rectangle, that's fucking ART!  I'm not even joking, that this is a piece by a bloke called Yves Klein and is titled "Blue". 

I took a page from his book and made my very own piece of artwork

I call this one Red, I'll be sure to get it hung the Tate Modern Art Gallery soon, I'll be expecting millions in my back account within the next few months.

Sarcasm aside, art is a load of toss surrounded by complete tossers.  I'm aware not all art is like this, there are some very skilled people out there doing very skilled work, but they are buried under the droves of tossers making crap and somehow getting large amounts of recognition for it.

So no, games shouldn't be considered art because art is a load of fucking bollocks.  I saw a video of a woman at some kind of art event rubbing shit all over herself in front of a large group of tossers and she was APPLAUDED FOR IT!  Games do not belong in the same category as this so called fucking "art".  If I ever find that video again I'll update this post.

The games that people want to call art, like Ico, Silent Hill 2, Dark Souls and all that stuff aren't trying to be art, they are trying to be games.  However, they use their given medium extremely well and as a result produce something that could be seen as artistic, I get that.

But do you want to know what happens when you TRY to make art within the medium of video games?

Yeah, this pile of stupid bullshit happens.  Badly written stupid bullshit made to pander to a certain section of brain dead pricks who think they are being either "progressive" or "deep". 

What's funny about Gone Home is that 100% of the people I've encountered who said Gone Home was a good game are tossers......so maybe it does have a place in the world of art.

Make GAMES, not ART!  When you make a GOOD fucking game, the artistry that went into making that game will shine through.   If you try to make art instead of games, you end up with shit like Gone Home and Dinner Date........so yeah, Art can go fuck itself.

The Stanley Parable and Racism

This is kind of a hard issue to talk about because I've not actually played the game in question yet, it was one of those things I was going to get round to when I move into my new place, but now I don't know if I even want to play it at all.

So the story is a remake of an old mod called The Stanley Parable gets released on Steam and people are happy.  Then people start playing and enjoying the Stanley Parable and it seems they are having fun with their interactive storytelling experience.  Then some moron on twitter says that a certain scene in the game is racist and this prompts the developer to back peddle on himself and change his work.

Right, first of all let's talk about the scene.  Apparently it's a scene about choice or something and there is an image of a man lighting a cigarette for a little boy, or pouring him in petrol and lighting him on fire.  From what I've been told regarding the scene the gag is satire of old values from like the 50s and may or or may not have something to do with how first world meddling in third world affairs isn't actually doing all that much good.

Anyway, the point is that race actually had nothing to do with the scene, but morons on twitter got all upset about it because it features a white man in a suit and a small black child being set on fire.  Race doesn't factor into this part of the game AT ALL, yet people are whining about it offending them.  These are people looking for issues where there are none and desperately grasping at straws to try and kick up a fuss.  I bet that if the kid in the above picture was white, there would be no issue here, which kind of brings up the idea that the people who complained are actually the racists because they aren't complaining about a black kid being set on fire, they are complaining about a black kid being featured in the game.....think about that.

So anyway, the developer of The Stanley Parable said he isn't particularly "married to the gag" and is willing to change it.  THIS, is a fucking problem, right here.  People have been saying that it's sort of commendable of the developer because he's changing it after people have complained about it and this shows flexibility and receptiveness or whatever, but no, that's a load of bollocks and anyone with half a brain knows it.

The Stanley Parable is one of those games that's being thrown around as an art game.  Go fire up your steam client and read some of the review quotes on the store page, it may cause you to roll your eyes a little bit.  But here is the thing, art is one of those things that is supposed to inspire debate and not all art is supposed to make you happy.  If something is truly art, then sometimes it's going to make you feel uncomfortable or maybe even offended, but that's what makes it a good piece of art.  The fact that it drew those emotions out of you and made you talk about it is good, that's what art is supposed to fucking do.

But no, the developer of this game proved right here that The Stanley Parable is not art in the slightest.  It doesn't matter how fond of the gag or not he is, the fact is that he made that scene for a reason and he made it that way for a reason and now he's changing it because people are offended by it.  He doesn't care about his own artistic vision, he just wants to sell as many copies as possible.  So if The Stanley Parable is supposed to be one of those games you could consider art, but the integrity of the art is shattered because of this, then why the fuck would I buy it?

It's BARELY a game and now after this it doesn't even qualify as a piece of art.  So my only remaining impression of The Stanley Parable now is that it's sort of like Portal but with absolutely 0 game play.

I think The Stanley Parable will be getting moved to quite a low position on my wish list, and it'll take a pretty big sale to get me to buy it.

Video Games As Art

This is a question I see a lot, so I'm going to have a small talk about it!

When I was with my buddy a few days ago, we were discussing what games could be considered "art" and why.  It was an interesting discussion but we were finding it extremely difficult to come up with things outside of the obvious titles. 

This isn't because there aren't any others, there are plenty of others, but it's because it's hard to pin down the rules behind why or why not you can regard a game a piece of art.  What makes this even harder is that the rules that govern my opinion on why a game is art will almost certainly be different on why you, the person reading this right now, would consider a game to be art or not.

What adds another layer of difficulty to the whole problem is that, in my opinion, games can be considered art in more than one way.  The music, the visuals, the story, the voice acting, writing, execution of game play elements, all of these things on their own could be considered art.  So just because a game has shit game play doesn't mean that there isn't some degree of artistry in the visuals or music, or even the story telling, but do these factors stop the whole game from being considered art or not? That's really only for you to decide.

Just to give a little example which I hope to expand on in the future, Nier is a game I'd consider to be rather artistic in the sense that the music and story were fucking fantastic.  That said, Nier is a game with repetitive game play and pretty crappy graphics.  Despite that I felt genuinely invested in the characters, plot and lore of that world, and was almost sad to see it end.  It yanked an emotional response from the lump of coal in my chest I call a heart, and that, to me, makes it something you could consider art.

I could probably write a fucking book on video games as an art form, but instead I'm going to butt heads with my friend and potentially make a video series about what games we consider to be art and why.   Keep an eye out for it but it'll probably take a long time to get that sort of project off the ground, but hopefully we'll make something enjoyable to watch.