Membuat Game

Game programming tidak segampang yang diperkirakan. Adalah salah kalau proyek spt. ini diserahkan ke anak SMU. Mungkin untuk bagian-bagian tertentu bisa (misalnya, membuat gambar/sprites, dll. yang berhubungan dengan art). Codingnya sendiri tetap rumit. Meski banyak tool untuk ini, tetap harus di'customize'. Nggak bisa langsung comot. Apalagi untuk membuat game sekelas 'Microsoft's Age of Empire', Quake, dll.

Dalam proyek pembuatan game, paling tidak ada 2-3 lead programmer yang benar-benar mengerti hal-hal spt. ini. Sisanya bisa diserahkan ke animator & pembuat storyboard, graphic designer (anak disain & seni-rupa) atau bahkan maniak game (untuk memberikan ide-ide game baru) dsb. Saya yakin, soal seni grafis dan hal-hal yang berhubungan dengan arts, anak-anak Bandung banyak yang jagoan. Tinggal perlu orang bisnis yang mempunyai visi bisnis-berbasis-teknologi spt. ini.

Ini ada satu site bagus sekali yang membahas tentang game programming yanf dibuat salah seorang mahasiswa Computer Science di Stanford University:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html

Ada pembahasan tentang mana yang lebih baik untuk game programming (C atau C++). Disitu terlihat betapa 'rumit'nya game programming yah, begitulah untuk membuat game yang bagus (dan mencetak $$) harus spt. ini. Kalau tidak, mana mau Sony (PlayStation) atau Microsoft 'XBox' percaya pada si software house sbg. partnernya :-).

Ada yang perlu digarisbawahi di salah satu page tsb spt. di bawah ini:

The second, however, falls into just being unrealistic in expectations. Starcraft, Everquest and
Quake were all made by teams of professionals who had budgets usually million dollar plus. More importantly though, all of these games were made by people with a lot of experience at making games. They did not just decide to make games and turned out mega-hit games, they started out small and worked their way up. This is the point that anyone who is interested in getting into game development needs to understand and repeat, repeat, repeat until it becomes such a part of your mindset that you couldn?t possibly understand life without this self evident, universal truth.

Until you understand that all skills in game development are learned by experience, (meaning to start very small and working your way up) you will be absolutely doomed to never finish your projects. Even the infinitesimal number of teams that do manage to finish a non-trivial project before they have made any smaller ones have to learn incrementally, it just takes them many times longer than if they had started out with smaller projects.

Atau spt. ini:

Computer game developers work in an industry where 90% of the profit is made from 10% of the products. Or to put it another way, 90% of the products simply die in the marketplace.
Sometimes this is because the products themselves are dreck; There certainly is a lot of
poorly designed, poorly debugged, formulaic, or simply content free products out there. In other cases, good products wither on the vine because they are inadequately marketed, or because they can't get through all of the noise and fluff that's clogging up the distribution chain.

Ahli dalam bidang-bidang komputer grafik ini tidak semata untuk game. Ingat beberapa banyak film dengan bantuan komputer yang pop atau menjadi box-office? (mulai dari Jurassic Park, Jumanji, Titanic, Matrix, Gladiator sampai yang pure CGI spt. Toy Story, Antz, atau yang terbaru: Shrek). Memang untuk bidang ini, lebih banyak pemahaman s/w aplikasi dibanding yang ngejelimet spt. diatas.

(My post to BHTV mailing-list a while ago)