Five Things I Didn’t Know About Making Video Games (Until I Made One)

Anthony Burch thought he has some solid ideas about what it took to make a video game. Some imagination, a good team, and some passion. He slowly learned that, while actually developing a video game, that could not be further from the truth. He wrote about his experience for Kotaku and what he says will make you think twice about wanting to get into the industry (unless you already know these in-and-outs, which you kinda should before attempting to make a game).

From Kotaku:

 …I haven’t even mentioned design or code, or how memory concerns can suddenly remove an entire enemy type that your story relied on that you now have to rewrite, but you can’t rewrite too much because the localization (global translation) deadlines are so tight that the Japanese localization team can’t get their Claptrap actor in for very long because he’s actually a big celebrity over there and is doing lots of other work, and you need to hurry because the game needs to be on store shelves in six months, which is actually only three months as far as you’re concerned because the publisher needs three months to manufacture the discs, and and and and and…

So we may end up playing a polished end result and think we want to do something like that or help create something like that for a living, but you forget all the ugly and difficult steps it takes to get to the awesome final product (which doesn’t always end up as awesome as we’d like).

[Image and story Via Kotaku]