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So call me crazy but I think that games currently take waaay too much time to make. The last two projects I have worked on each took multiple months to make, and I find this absolutely insane because it’s 2012 damn it! Isn’t there something we can do to speed this process up? My personal dream (Getting personal already?) is to run a website where every Sunday I gather some friends together, drink beer until we are completely plastered, and design a game. Then we would have a week to make whatever monstrosity we had thought up the night before (….Dear god! Isn’t that how Takeshi's Challenge (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7HEPDf0ouk) was made?). Oh and put the whole thing up on youtube of course (His mom will be so proud). One of the most important things to have when embarking on this task would be great tools that allow for super fast content creation, and iteration. I’m going to lay out the two(ish) ideas I currently plan on implementing but would love to hear other idea’s to on how to speed up the development process. I know a lot of you have participated in game jams over the years, so if anyone should be experts at making games super fast, it’s you guys (I hope he doesn’t think flattery is going to help?).

The first idea I had was a content pipeline, which instantly updates the games content when any of the games external assets have been changed. Basically what the system does is check to see if any of the games art, or music files have been modified while the game is running. If anything has been modified the changes are immediately loaded into the game. All this content would be hosted on drop box, so any changes on the artists, or audio engineers computer would instantly show up in game for everyone else working on the project ( that’s kinda nifty). This is especially useful for artists and composers, so they can see their content changes in game without having to restart it.

The second idea I will be implementing, is a level editor that allows for both “live preview”, and editing together over a network. “live preview” is the tool that allows you to instantly jump from the level edit mode to in game testing with the press of a button, all without leaving the game editor (I’m positive that’s not what that’s called, but I’m gonna let it slide). This tool was made popular my by the level editor in Crysis. Personally I think it’s one of the best tools you can give your level designers, since they will no longer have to wait for the levels to reload or recompile to see their changes in game. The second and more important part of this editor, is the ability to edit together over a network. This mean that anyone on the project can access the same levels at the same time, and make changes which will update to everyone’s games instantly (He says instantly a lot. He is either super impatient, or lacks a thesaurus). This is feature was used in great lengths in the making of Awesomenauts (http://joostdevblog.blogspot.nl/2012/11/introducing-editors-of-ronitech.html), as well as the continued creation of Pixel Sand (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/564944684/pixel-sand?ref=live) (What the fudge is this Pixel Sand (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/564944684/pixel-sand?ref=live) nonsense?). In both cases this feature allows for super fast iteration and a more natural work flow. Personally I would like to not only implement this feature, but also make in run on phones and tablets too (Why? So you can edit levels on the toilet?). We should be able to break free of the chains of our desk, and be able to work on the game while sitting by the pool, or out at a park, or on your 10 minute break at work (Oh. I guess that makes more sense).

So my question today is what else can we do to make game development faster, better, and more natural? I’m not posting this thread just to say looky looky at my cool ideas (you’re not?), I really genuinely would love to hear some ideas of how we can improve game development for everyone. Do you hate waiting for textures to bake? Let’s come up with a solution. Are you super proud of a unique tool you made for the creation of your last game? Get your brag on. Maybe you have a crazy idea about an editor where you move objects using a webcam and a banana (I gatta write that down), let’s hear about it. We are all here because we love making games (We are? I thought we were here for the chicks?). So let’s come up with some ideas to make the process of making games better.

Does not compute.

I like the focus on tools, I agree, that's the best way to speed up the development process.

I think the polish phase is the bit that's begging to be sped up.  Game jams seem to produce reasonably fun games in a few days, but then it takes months for those games to be polished.  I'm not sure how to speed this up, but if we could find a way, it would be a huge benefit.

I'm very curious about the Awesomenauts AI Editor.  If there was some way to use that in my games, I'd love to give it a shot.

Tools aside, I wish game developers were better at sharing their ideas and technology.  Whenever I hit a tech problem, I'm eventually helped by other devs online, but I know we could do a much better job at this.

I have high hopes for this thread.   Keep the ideas coming!

Speed up? I don't think anyone is deliberately trying to slow it down. Economy of scale, which is used to speed up a lot of things, doesn't work well at all for games. I mean, sure Spiderweb Software does it, but the drop in quality shows.

But one of the beauties of object oriented programming is that you can reuse large segments of things.

Doesn't most of that editor describe Unity?

Well, the AI stuff isn't integrated into Unity, but there are free plug-ins that do it, so yeah, Unity covers all that.

These are terrible ideas sorry.  The last thing you want when you're trying to debug or balance something is to have to also deal with additional unkown variables you have no control over because everyone else is effecting your game environment.  This could make fixing certain issues nearly impossible without demanding everyone else stops working.  Plus if someone was to make a change that broke the game, then the instant update thing would brake everyone's game and everyone would be prevented from working till its fixed.

Good idea. Bad selling point.

thats like a pleasantly sized short term project what the hell are you going on about

Your quote of my quote makes it look like my quote is quoting me. Quote.

I think I see what went wrong here. I think my poor written English skills sent the wrong message in the original post. When I made that post I wasn’t trying to say “Here are my awesome Idea’s, pat me on the head”. I was attempting to start a dialogue, discussing new and creative tool that could improve developer quality of life when working on a game. Why wait until GDC to discuss new tools and ideas, when we can do it right here in an open fashion.

People also seem to not like this quote,

The emphasis was supposed to be on the

What I meant here is that we are in the future. We have computers in our pockets, rescue workers in exosuites (http://www.gizmag.com/japanese-first-responders-robotic-exoskeleton/24555/), and cars that run on electricity (not as exciting as flying cars, but it will have to do). Shouldn’t the very nature of how we create games should be changing too. Maybe in a few years we will all be developing games with a combination of voice commands, motion controls, and thought control. Ok, maybe not that extreme, but this is the time when crazy tools like that are going to start popping up.

I apologies that my bad phrasing, and poor tool idea’s have gotten this thread derailed from the start, but I hope we can try again. I’ll start.

Malky brought up the point that the polish phase of game development could use some improvement. My biggest problem in this area, has been finding testers, so here is my solution. What if someone made a website were developers could submit a game in beta stage, with the understanding that whenever another user finds a unique bug in their game and submits a bug report, they get a small amount of money (like $0.50 a bug for example). You could set a cash limit, either per day or total, so you don’t lose too much money. It would cost the developer more money this way, but would significantly improve the number of bug reports, and there quality.

Well, it is 2012. You've got better sprite editors, better IDEs, better text editors, GitHub, Stack Overflow, communities like this, instant phone messaging, Scrivener, and so on…

The problem is, how do you put them together? It takes a lot of work to make a more efficient tool. Now if it was all about better tools, that's fine. We can just keep upgrading our tools. But the better the tool, the narrower the scope.

If people wanted to make something very quickly from existing engines, they'd just mod it.

What's worse is that it's really hard to get indies to follow your way, even if you could sell the idea to them. Even if they were going the same way, they'd make their own interpretation of how things should be done. It takes quite a lot of leadership effort to get them on the same page and more to keep them there.

We need a "pixel prospector" type of app, everything aggregate the same place gear for game developement, it would work like miiverse for dev :whome: