Game Scripting is Hard
Entry posted by Josh ·
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As I finish up the FPS Weapons Pack, I am struck by just how much work it takes to build a game, beyond the engine programming. I wrote Leadwerks, and it still took me several days to script the behavior of these weapons. I also had the advantage of being able to add new entity classes, as I needed two new entity types to complete the task: LensFlares and Sprites.
I like the flexibility of Leadwerks to make any type of game, and I think having an abstract 3D command set to do anything is really powerful. However, I feel like we're still missing something, and it's not more graphical features.
The output of the community can be seen on the games page and in the Leadwerks Workshop. There are a lot more Leadwerks 3 games than Leadwerks 2 games, which is a good sign. In most cases, I think the bottleneck is on content. I don't simply mean 3D models. Those are fairly easy to obtain, although it is very hard to find a large collection of artwork with consistent art direction. The problem is there is a big gap between having a 3D model and having a scripted game-ready item you can drop into the map and start playing. Considering how much work it has taken me just to set up the first two DLCs, it's ridiculous to expect each individual to reproduce all that work themselves.
You can categorize most game technology into low, mid, and high-level features. Leadwerks 2 was only strong in the lowest level category. Leadwerks 3 adds very strong support for the mid-level category, thanks to the editor. Traditionally, everything beyond that has been left up to the user to implement.
This is something that needs to change. Low-level game technology is not very valuable anymore. I think the success of Leadwerks will be based on connecting games with players on Steam. To make that happen, we need more games. I want to make the development process a little more like modding a game, with more game-ready content ready to use. Anyone should be able to make a game without any programming at all. When you're ready to dig into Lua or C++, it's there, but you should be able to get up and running without it.
Fortunately, the community has responded positively to the first DLC and I think the FPS Weapons Pack will sell well. I've started production of our own game assets using just a few artists. Why are we producing our own stuff, rather than reselling existing work?
- There's a ton of content out there already, but most of it is very bad quality.
- Even the good quality stuff doesn't feel consistent because it comes from different sources.
- Interactive objects like characters and weapons still require a ton of work to make game-ready. Often times animations have all kinds of trouble and glitches.
- It takes a ton of work getting things ready for use. Why not just make it to spec from the start, instead of scrounging for content that often times is not suited for purpose?
- Since sales cover the cost of production, I'd rather just sell them myself and make a profit. (Two revenue streams are better than one because it gives you more options.)
Right now I have my environment artist, my character artist, and will likely rely on the same person for future weapon packs. All Leadwerks content will come from the same artists, so it will all look like it fits together. The first character pack is in production now.
So I think you can expect that I will start taking on more responsibility for gameplay stuff that has in the past been left up to the end user. I won't attempt to create every game under the sun, but I think Leadwerks should have more default gameplay stuff the user can modify to suit their own needs.
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