Well, pretty much everyone in here is working on making a game of some sort, and most likely it is their own personal project. I know a couple people on these boards have actually worked for game companies, but the majority of us are making our own projects using SDL, OpenGL, DirectX, Allegro, 13h, etc., etc. etc.
I have noticed a common thread, however, between all of our little projects.
Except in the case of a text-based game or a simple game like pong or one of those little 2d flying games a couple people here have posted, it seems most of us here are stuck at the game engine portion of the development process. We are always constantly working on doing stuff with graphics, or implementing audio into our "game". That is all part of the game engine part of the development process.
The game itself actually starts when you create characters for the actual game, when you start to hammer out the storyline, and create the levels for that specific game. It seems as though creating the game engine is the largest part of the project and if that could be finished then making the actual game itself would almost be a breeze.
I know I myself have been working at making my own game projects for years now, and every time I learn tons of new things, but in the process of learning those new things I find thousands of mistakes I have made in how I have structured my code and end up restarting on a new project, learning new things, then trashing that one when I realized I have done some stuff wrong, and the cycle continues.
It seems that many others here cannot get past the engine stage either. Many times we excel at one part of the engine, but then we start working on other parts and quickly get discouraged.
Maybe it would be smart to download a basic game engine and create a game using it so maybe once we could get the satisfaction of having a finished product on our hands instead of a lot of incomplete game engines lying around?
Just a thought.
