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[nkarafo]

Ok, lets say you are a game developer with a staff and budget to make whatever game you want. Which game you think would bring you the most headaches and sleepless nights? And which one you think would allow you to have the most relaxing job?

I think the easiest for me would be to make a cinematic game, especially the kind where you spend more time watching than playing (Telltale games, David Cage games, The Order, etc). Since you don't have to worry much about game mechanics, level design, controls, etc. As long as you have a few good artists and someone to write a story, you are set. And you don't even have to write a good story since the standards of story telling in games is still low compared to movies. Basically it's like making a movie and then trying to insert interactive parts into it.

The hardest for me would be something like a competitive strategy game, like Starcraft. Creating different factions with plenty of units each, with a different play style and strategies and still managing to maintain a balance between them, without making one more overpowered than the other sounds very hard. Just the math involved and the testing... Same thing goes to something like WoW where you have a bunch of races and classes, with plenty of skills and abilities that are used in real time and trying to balance all that while taking into account gear, procs, class comps, possible exploits and many, many more things. Which is probably why nobody has managed to create a perfect balance yet in these kinds of games.

And something like Witcher 3 sounds very hard. The size of the world alone and the all the stuff that happen in it or you can interact with. It does sound like a programming hell that involves a whole wikipedia worth in lines of code and months of intense testing over and over again.

So what do you think its the hardest/easiest game to create?

 

[QuickSilverD]

the easiest would be shovelware crap, and the hardest a good enjoyable game

 

[2+2=5]

A cinematic game imo is really hard because it's like a movie, you need acting, good camera angles etc.

Imo the most difficult is a MMORPG, while the simplest is probably a puzzle game like tetris or a 2d bullet hell, the biggest design challenge is the firework patterns.

 

[Iriscomeback]

MMO's can be pretty difficult, with all the balancing stuff.. Same goes for fighting games.

Once you have a good idea, i guess puzzlegames and twitch shooters are more easy.

But making games in general is pretty damn hard.

 

[velociraptor]

FPS games are easiest to make
RPG games are hardest to make

This post was endorsed by TalesOutOfMyAss(TM)

 

[The_Hitcher89]

Easiest of the AAA ones has to be iterative sports games with no competition, like the Madden games right?


Easiest overall must be games you can crap out with little regard for quality or profit due to miniscule budget, tiny indie or shovelware

 

[Sini]

I agree that RTS games are difficult to make, but not because of balance issues. It's the networking and determinism that's nightmare with those. :c

 

[KHlover]

Making a 2D platformer is one of the easiest things to make.

Making a good 2D platformer is one of the hardest things to make.

Spoiler

Tales from my ass, but looking at the scarcity of good 2D platformers and the mass of crap you find on all indie platforms there must be some truth to this

 

[DoublePayje]

Making a 2D platformer is one of the easiest things to make.

Making a good 2D platformer is one of the hardest things to make.

This

 

[Chariot]

the easiest would be shovelware crap, and the hardest a good enjoyable game

I don't know about that. Sometimes you got good enjoyable games that were quite easy for the dev and a lot really bad games, that are complex and took a lot of work. Simplicity and little work doesn't equal a bad game and vice versa.

Easiest in general would be linear, while difficult of course everything that is complex in a way. The Order is linear and cinematic and thus inherently less difficult to make tha, say, Witcher 3 with an Open World and branching decisions.

 

[nkarafo]

FPS games are easiest to make

Depends on the FPS. CoD surely sounds like an easy game to make. But something like the original Doom/Quake where you have to create those complex levels that are also well designed and fun to explore/solve, sounds much harder.

 

[Steiner84]

easiest are spot the difference games.

hardest, dunno, good games that are actually fun?

 

[Renekton]

And something like Witcher 3 sounds very hard. The size of the world alone and the all the stuff that happen in it or you can interact with. It does sound like a programming hell that involves a whole wikipedia worth in lines of code and months of intense testing over and over again.

Witcher 3 is not close to Skyrim's level of interactivity.

Else I would be able to stuff Yennefer's drawer full of rotting flesh.

 

[Stevey]

Id imagine making Dwarf Fortress is pretty hard due to the amount of detail about in it.
Easiest would probably be stuff like Candy Crush

 

[Imp the Dimp]

Balancing a MOBA with 100+ heroes seems like the hardest fucking task ever. Some of these games are +10 years in development. I don't think anything comes close to be honest.

 

[The_Hitcher89]

Balancing a MOBA with 100+ heroes seems like the hardest fucking task ever. Some of these games are +10 years in development. I don't think anything comes close to be honest.

Yeah, under the hood they'll never be finished as there will always be heroes who become a little bit OP in whatever meta, and need a small nerf

 

[2+2=5]

Making a 2D platformer is one of the easiest things to make.

Making a good 2D platformer is one of the hardest things to make.

Spoiler

Tales from my ass, but looking at the scarcity of good 2D platformers and the mass of crap you find on all indie platforms there must be some truth to this

More like:
-if you do something similar to mario then people will dismiss it as a bad clone
-if you do something different from mario people will dislike it because it's nothing like mario, the "bible" of platformers...

I miss the days when there where different kinds of platformer and they all had the same dignity

 

[Wyndstryker]

A good MMO is probably the hardest to make.

A crappy shovelware sidescroller of whatever is probably the easiest.

 

[Stevey]

More like:
-if you do something similar to mario then people will dismiss it as a bad clone
-if you do something different from mario people will dislike it because it's nothing like mario, the "bible" of platformers...

I miss the days when there where different kinds of platformer and they all had the same dignity

Uhh theres plenty of recent platformers that are nothing like Mario that were very well received

 

[KHlover]

More like:
-if you do something similar to mario then people will dismiss it as a bad clone
-if you do something different from mario people will dislike it because it's nothing like mario, the "bible" of platformers...

I miss the days when there where different kinds of platformer and they all had the same dignity

What? Did you miss DKCR/TF, LIMBO, Super Meat Boy, Braid, Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams, Sonic Generations, Rayman Origins/Legends (I'm sure i missed like ten other great 2d platformers from the last few years here)...

Very different platformers, each with their own twist - but they all were received very well.

 

[MrDoctor]

Probably MMO and text adventure, respectively

 

[Rhazer Fusion]

Hardest games to make are definitely good fighting games. That is one reason hardly anyone makes those nowadays.

RPG's and cinematic games can be challenging also.

FPS's are the easiest think. Easy? Not necessarily, but probably much easier than most other types of games. That is probably one reason there are so many. If they were so hard to make, I doubt we would see so many all of the time.

A side scrolling shoot em up or point and click game are probably easy also. Even easier than an FPS.

 

[danmaku]

Making games is never easy. Hardest task is probably balancing a competitive game, you'll never get it right on your first try. You need countless iterations.

edit: certain genres (like FPS) are more common than others because they sell more. It has nothing to do with FPS being "easy", especially with the crazy amount of work that goes into graphics, that stuff is super complex. When fighting games were popular, everyone was making them. Now only the most successful franchises are still alive.

 

[Poodlestrike]

I would say something cinematic with tons of content. Coming up with interesting things for the player to do, while providing an experience that requires solid VA work, writing, "cinematography" etc. The technical side is getting... I don't want to say "easier," because lord knows I can't do it, but more accessible every day thanks to stuff like UE4 and Unity.

As for easiest, I'd just to a by-genre sort on the Android app store and count 'em up. The most prolific are gonna be the easiest.

 

[2+2=5]

Uhh theres plenty of recent platformers that are nothing like Mario that were very well received

What? Did you miss DKCR/TF, LIMBO, Super Meat Boy, Braid, Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams, Sonic Generations, Rayman Origins/Legends (I'm sure i missed like ten other great 2d platformers from the last few years here)...

Very different platformers, each with their own twist - but they all were received very well.

Limbo and braid are not really platformers, Rayman origins and legends are not that far from mario(rayman 1 was very different), i don't know how sonic is but i give you Giana sisters.

Imo indies have a different public so they are judged differently, but medium-big games are always compared to mario.

 

[Finaika]

Indie games are the easiest.

AAA games are the hardest.

 

[Kaizu]

Text adventure is the easiest. I guess. The first Ace Attorney was made by 7 people iirc. Then again it might be the hardest to make it great because you need to engage players with just words and some static images.

Most difficult should be whatever Star Citizen's genre is. An mmo with procedural generated space sim that includes a FPS battle arena and single player campaign?

 

[mclem]

The easiest type of game to make is one with minimal player agency and low production values. Imagine a text adventure with extremely basic descriptions for objects and locations and very little in the way of implemented verbs.

The two things that make a game difficult to develop are player agency - the more options you give the player at any given point, the more you need to support and edge cases of interactions you might need to cope with - and production values, the actual realisation of that vision. Even for the text adventure example, there's still a world of difference between an implementation of Hunt The Wumpus:

BATS NEARBY!
YOU ARE IN ROOM 2
TUNNELS LEAD TO 1 3 10

SHOOT OR MOVE?M
WHERE TO?10

And Hunter, In Darkness, which is the idea of Hunt The Wumpus but reimagined as a high-quality text adventure with excellent prose:

Limestone, streaked and banded, rippled and bulged and twisted like
the flesh of some living thing. You've seen many caves before, but the
beauty never wearies.

The Wumpus screams.



There is a roar, and something huge lurches up the path. The dark eyes
of the Wumpus peer out of a chittering swarm. There is understanding
somewhere in there, what you have done to it and why -- and rage.

It lunges at you, heedless now of what the bats might do; it only
wants to reach you with its claws.


*** You have died ***

Actually, yeah, I don't think there's a great deal of development challenge in an implementation of Hunt The Wumpus, and it's not inherently a bad game, just cheerily simple.

In terms of a game that's still a viable commercial prospect today, I'd say that the easiest to develop might well be a hidden object game. You're still going to need a lot of quality 2D artwork, but there's no animation of significance, it's literally just a case of "If the right object is clicked, award a score and make the object vanish". Plus, of course, when you've got the engine locked down, you can make a myriad of sequels with only needing fresh artwork.


In terms of toughest to implement, large-scale networking is probably the toughest problem in gaming as it stands, so MMOs are the first area you should look. On top of that, MMOs are inherently limited in terms of reaction time to things, but there's still some fast-paced ones out there. So an MMO, massive levels of ambition, and real-time gameplay... basically, the hardest game to implement is Star Citizen.

Text adventure is the easiest. I guess. The first Ace Attorney was made by 7 people irrc. Then again it might be the hardest to make it great because you need to engage players with just words and some static images.

Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant. A bad text adventure is a doddle to write. But if you're making a good one, do bear in mind that you're going to have to generate pages and pages of quality prose, and that's nontrivial. And you want smart responses to everything a player might attempt, which means you need testing to catch all the instances of those you miss, and good writing to explain why those aren't adequate solutions...

 

[PsionBolt]

For easiest, the right answers are boring answers -- stuff like Pong or Tic Tac Toe. The kind of stuff every modern game dev makes as practice on their first or second day of learning to code. The kind of stuff you saw fifty-line programs for in BASIC textbooks written in 1970.

As for the hardest, I'm not sure. Assuming we're going for a top-quality game and not just one that's needlessly and meaninglessly complex, I imagine it'd be something in a competitive genre with a particularly difficult design to balance. Like a fighting game, a TCG, or an MMO.
Balance is one of the few things that become more difficult with size, and can therefore scale to infinity. An enormous sandbox game, for example, doesn't get any harder to make the bigger you make it, it just takes more work of the same difficulty. But balance relies on the interaction of each component part, so it scales non-linearly with size.

To approach the problem from another angle, writing is quite difficult, and its difficulty also scales with size because of pacing and development. So again assuming we're aiming for a top-quality game, a particularly narrative-focused, significantly long adventure game or RPG is also quite difficult to pull off.

 

[Abounder]

Hardest - Open-world MMORPG. It's technically, financially, and creatively the most difficult

Easiest - Mobile minigames, or anything that is just a readily available template

 

[Stevey]

Limbo and braid are not really platformers, Rayman origins and legends are not that far from mario(rayman 1 was very different), i don't know how sonic is but i give you Giana sisters.

Imo indies have a different public so they are judged differently, but medium-big games are always compared to mario.

I don't know anyone who compares platformers to Mario anymore.

 

[Pyramid head]

A cinematic game imo is really hard because it's like a movie, you need acting, good camera angles etc.

Ehhh. You need good actors and high production values and whatnot, but that isn't really difficult from a developer perspective per se, more expensive. Also, the more 'cinematic' a game is the more linear it tends to be, and less player choice usually means less problems for the developers to solve.

 

[NoblesseOblige]

Good games are the hardest to make. Bad games are the easiest.

 

[JordanN]

All of them.

Indie games are the easiest.

AAA games are the hardest.

Indies are probably harder because money is tight, you have no reputation to stand out (unless you're a famous dev), and there's no guarantee everyone working on a game is committed to finishing it.

AAA has a lot more pressure to deliver on a product.

 

[IdreamofHIME]

Vita FIFA's are the easiest, you just edit the player names and change the box cover every year.

 

[Mupod]

MMORPG seems like the no-brainer 'most difficult' answer. Especially if it's got PVP as a major focus, it's a one-way ticket to being hated by your community because balancing such a thing is utterly impossible.

I've always felt survival horror in the vein of older RE games is something incredibly difficult to do properly. The iterative design and planning required to balance health/ammo such that the game is complete-able by the average person, but the player never feels powerful or in control, is a daunting feat. And on top of that you need to know how to make an atmospheric, scary game - something very few can pull off in the first place.

On the other hand you can just drop someone in a square box with Slenderman jump scares and people will call that 'survival horror' for some reason.

 

[Bandit1]

I would think that a large open-world game set during the modern day would be among the most difficult to make. Something like GTA V, which was in development for five years I believe, and required an enormous amont of resources. There are a lot of physics required for on-foot, shooting, driving, flying, boats and the ocean itself. Driving through traffic, cars stop at red lights and put on signals, there could be twenty different cars on screen at once, with twenty different people inside them, with twenty unique voices, etc. It's staggering to me.

 

[tonyh24613]

MMOgames with PVP IMO, even though I don't play them.

Also Smash.

 

[TheRealJakoozie]

For this topic to work, I think you have to assume that the game is going to be good. Only then can you actually discuss which genres are harder. The easiest game to make will of course be a crappy pacman-rip off that doesn't really work or something.

And what do you mean with "hardest to make"? Hardest for you? Most expensive? Witcher 3 seems high on that list, the sheer size of the world combined with a lot of loot, a deep crafting system and most importantly, a lot of decisions that interact with and affect each other.

But yeah, MMORPGs seem difficult. The easiest might be music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

 

[xzeldax3]

Vita FIFA's are the easiest, you just edit the player names and change the box cover every year.

The harsh truth

 

[Rhazer Fusion]

Making games is never easy. Hardest task is probably balancing a competitive game, you'll never get it right on your first try. You need countless iterations.

edit: certain genres (like FPS) are more common than others because they sell more. It has nothing to do with FPS being "easy", especially with the crazy amount of work that goes into graphics, that stuff is super complex. When fighting games were popular, everyone was making them. Now only the most successful franchises are still alive.

That is factual, but I think the same applies to FPS's. Only the popular ones really sell. COD, Battlefield, Destiny, Counter Strike and a few other exceptions. Most of them do not sell near the magnitude of a Destiny or COD which perplexes me as to why so many come out on a regular basis.

Honestly, developing games in general despite the genre is very difficult, but I do think some type of games are truly more difficult than others. Your average developer cannot develop a fighting game as in depth and polished as Tekken or Street Fighter or action game as complex as Ninja Gaiden or DMC for example and that imo is one of the reasons why games of that degree rarely come out. Even Itagaki stated that he wouldn't want to make another fighting game because it would be like going to school all over again which lead me to believe that it is a near insurmountable task starting from scratch.

 

[pants]

easiest ? visual novels i guess.

 

[Interfectum]

The more variables in a game the harder it is to make.

Easiest type of game to program (not design) is something like a match 3 game. Static ruleset, not much variability, no physics, no real controls, etc.

Hardest would be games that have a ton of complexity from a lot of angles (netcode, controls, level design, leveling systems, etc).

 

[Fbh]

Hardest are good open world games, IMO.
Between the fact that there are a ton of variables and the fact that you need to create a world that's fun to explore with meaningful activities for the player (a.k.a not the "checklist" design by Ubisoft), it just seems hard to get right. At least personally I don't like Open World games very much despite liking the core concept behind them

Easiest are probably sport games, at least the annualized ones
Take the game from last year, update teams, slightly upgrade some features, mabye add 1-2 new features, design a new meny and you are done. It's not like there is no work to be done, but it doesn't seem to be as much as making a sequel for other types of games



That is, talking about big games. Of course making something like a very basic virtual Tic Tac Toe or something is easier than any big title

 

[Plasma]

I think the easiest for me would be to make a cinematic game, especially the kind where you spend more time watching than playing (Telltale games, David Cage games, The Order, etc). Since you don't have to worry much about game mechanics, level design, controls, etc. As long as you have a few good artists and someone to write a story, you are set. And you don't even have to write a good story since the standards of story telling in games is still low compared to movies. Basically it's like making a movie and then trying to insert interactive parts into it.

Heh the next time you play a Telltale game you might want to have a look at the credits list it isn't anywhere near as simple as you're making it out to be.