Greeting
I decided to create this thread because the last post talking about this dates back to 2017 and the question just here, is in my opinion interesting... Even if let's be honest, most of the time it comes from our own subjectivity. A 3D/2D artist will be much more likely to say that rendering or drawing is harder than the rest, and the same goes for the writer, the coder (or the musician, etc).
What I'm trying to find here is a "truth" about the division of labor in a team. This could allow the members of a team to find out why one individual takes much longer to finish his or her work than someone else in the team and so could clear up unnecessary and avoidable tension (excluding the lazy team mate, of course).
I think what really defines the complexity of a job is the time invested in it, as the saying goes, time is money. Then investment and the quality of the work influences all of this as well. In this way, teams working together could have a rough idea of what percentage of pay each should receive based on their work (although an equal pay division rules out a lot of problems, let's be honest).
Not being a coder or drawer, simply a writer, I can only discuss this topic from that point of view. From my own series plus working briefly on a game that kicks around this website, how much work I need to put in depends on a few factors:
Am I the director of the game too or am I creating someone else's vision?
Can the coders/artists create what I want to write?
Am I simply adding text to an image/scene?
Did I start writing since day 1 for the game or am I coming in as a replacement and/or to do a single scenario?
Is the genre one in my wheelhouse or am I branching out and testing the waters into unknown fetishes and kinks?
How does the writer's personality and work ethic match to the point above?
These are just from the top of my head. I know, for me, it is a lot harder and longer to write a scene/dialogue/story if I'm crafting someone else's vision midway through because the character's personalities and mannerisms are set and need to be matched. For example, I do not envy the writer who took over in Kingdom of Deception. Either they are forced to stick with the established lore set by writer 1, or redo things and create inconsistencies and discontent.
For a general VN using Ren'py and DAZ I would say its Rendering --------> Scene creating/writing --> programming. Most of the game creating proces will be spend on rendering the images. Posing and seting up the images isn't that time consuming if you know what you are doing. Same for general writing. Programming highly depends on what you want from your game, but for a general VN programming is most likely the smallest part.
But like i said thats for a general straight forward kinetic VN using pre-made DAZ assets. If you want custom assets scene creation would skyrocket. If you want multiple story paths/different conversation options writing would increase. If you want different story paths, or use (hidden) stats programming would increase. It highly depends on what kind of game you are making.
For like AAA games developed with actual gameplay mechanics and all custom assets its artwork -------> programming -------> writing. There was some documentary about i think it was Rockstar years ago where like 60% of the whole department where artist, 30% where programmers, and 10% was the rest (writers/marketing/managers/etc.)
Incorrect order:
Idea - is to come up with a good, not too banal idea
Gameplay (for games, not for VN) - boring grind can kill even perfect plot and visual
Plot - is to describe in a not too complicated language accessible to a wide audience, and not only to a chosen circle of linguists and philologists
and only after that team can continue (but for game there wil be Coding too - team need framework, instruments for make quests, events etc.)
Creating 3D scenes setup for batch render cue
(for 2D - creation of backgrounds and basic character sprites)
Rendering - can be outsorced, can be accelerated or boost by render farm - This is the only case when the saying "9 women do not give birth to a baby in a month" - DOES NOT work
(for 2D - additional character and CG sprites 60-80% of VN\game)
Drawing > scene creation/rendering > everything else.
Rendering is no work and you can do other stuff at the same time (like creating more scenes), but it's definitely one of the most time consuming part.
Talking about standard VN stuff. I simply assume that we're not talking about AAA games here.
As a someone who has been working on getting a game together and getting to grips with the finer points of daz i can say that the three big ones are writing, render setup and rendering. Of course this is specific to VN's in ren'py where coding is light, other game types will need much more coding and such, however since i'm not really equiped to speak about that with any sort of aurthority i'll stick to that old Ren'py/Daz model that i know fairly well.
Writing takes time to get good, then there is the edit and rewrite time, however the initial coming up with a decent story will vary a lot from dev to dev, i know i get a lot of shower and commute thoughts, an hour train commute a day means i get through a lot of books or audio books which are good for inspiration in my case, but when i'm not i'll be brewing a new idea, most of which will never see the light of day to be honest.
When using daz people will talk a lot about render time and how much this slows the process down and that's completely true, rendering can take a long time, however decent hardware and i don't mean paired RTX GPU's, can make this less of an issue and being clever with render resolution and postwork also mitigate this somewhat, also plenty of tricks are talked about like simplifying off screen elements with utilities and scripts, not a big fan of that personally but it's ok if the off screen elements are only casting shadows rather than reflecting light IMO.
On top of this if you aren't using the CPU to render it's not that hard to have a word processor open and be working on editing while the renders are chugging, render time is not wasted time if you're smart and use a batch render script/tool or are doing low resource work at the same time.
What does take a long time in daz especially for beginners is shot setup, dressing a set, lighting a set and posing characters takes a lot longer than you'd think, especially in the early stages where you need to set dress and light each room for the first time. Bad lighting = bad renders = a game people will pass on. Now add in any additional complex elements in shot setup like dforce and dformers, you'll soon find that the first few shots take longer to setup than to render, even on midrange systems.
so on the whole i'd say the part that is both quickest and slowest is writing, once an idea is there then it's not that bad, especially since you can word process on a potato or while renders are working, once you've got the initial setup done shot setup is not that bad but does take time, especially more intricate poses, posing single figures walking and talking is easy, three people locked in a threesome is actually pretty time consuming and tough. Once your into the swing of things renders are the time constraint since they are hardware dependant rather than developer dependant.
However i would say that in all cases practise is a huge deal, once you have a workflow and enough practise with writing and shot setup things will go much much smoother and as any F1 driver will tell you, smooth is fast.
Depends on the type of game you're making, and what tools you have available.
For example if you're starting literally from scratch with no engine and such then programming's gonna take a huge chunk of the time as it's very complex to build one.
Another example would be if you have a game with very simple mechanics but has huge amount of characters, levels, etc. then the art side will take that cake this time.
So to find your "truth" also means knowing how complex the game's requirements is for each department.
If we're talking about end-to-end game development then here's a better list of departments for the production-side (excluding the business-side):
Programming
Gameplay Programming
Tools Programming
UI Programming
Audio Programming
Art
2D/3D Art
Concept Art
Animators
UI/UX Art
Game Design
Storywriting
Level Design
Mechanics Design
Sound Design
Background Music
Sound Effects
Voice-Overs
This is in no way complete and has a lot more gaps, but this is just an introduction to help one determine a part of a game, where it belongs, and will it be a complex thing to do for the people who'll be involved.
I'm a gamedev myself (by profession) and done works with a team, and individually.
There's a lot more I can say about it but it'll lengthen this reply too much,
but if someone wants more details or has more questions then I'll be happy to talk more.
I'm making games with a lot of writing and coding. Coding is time-consuming but fun, I'm in flow and solve the problem until it's solved. Writing is the worst and I often procrastinate and struggle to find inspiration, it's hard to write a scene which would be both decent and make sense in the story, especially when you want to include different course/outcome based on stats/relationship/other variables.
I've been surprised how little time I've used to rendering instead of coding, which has taken by far the most time.
but of course it depends on your competence level and style (of writing). a competent writer can churn out 30K words a day, and I'm sure coding is similarly easy for someone who does it for work. but there are many ways to write, some finish one page to final draft before next, some rewrite large parts of the whole 20-30 times before it's finished. I'm a rewriter, I keep changing things every time I go through it. usually I do it while rendering, but I always run out of rendering far before finishing text.
drawing takes me about 5 hours a picture, so even though it's the thing I'm best at I don't do it. but again, some other styles and more competent people can churn out paintings at amazing speeds.
It seems to me that game design is an iterative process with regard to the major components. For example, you write code, test it, retest it, then move on to the next bunch of code to repeat this process. For rendering, maybe you have a list of scenes or storyboards to set up the physical environment, props, lighting, characters, poses, facial expressions, etc., you do test renders and make tweaks, then final renders, then you do the next scene on the list. For writing, you need to be following a plotline and know something about the characters you're writing (mostly) dialogue for. Write the dialogue for a scene, look at it with the completed renders, edit the writing to make it better, move on to the next scene. Conception-->Execution-->Refinement-->Integration of components-->Finished product. Or somesuch.
For individual devs, whatever is hardest for them to do is going to feel like the most time consuming.
I'm making games with a lot of writing and coding. Coding is time-consuming but fun, I'm in flow and solve the problem until it's solved. Writing is the worst and I often procrastinate and struggle to find inspiration, it's hard to write a scene which would be both decent and make sense in the story, especially when you want to include different course/outcome based on stats/relationship/other variables.
Maybe treat it like a coding problem "if this, then that", rather than computer decision making think what the person would do under those variables, if the scene makes sense for the character you can elaborate on it using what you know about the character or where you want them to go.
If putting together a sexy scene that would make sense in the story perhaps ask yourself a couple of questions, is the scene going to be impromptu or planned, is it a date night or a pair of horny teens getting what they can when they can, what are they thinking, are they thinking at all?. Planned (IMO) should be about anticipation and/or nerves ect., impromptu could be more illicit, are they going to be caught, is it behind someone's back, should they really be doing this, anything you can do to get in the characters head is a plus, even if they are disposable characters.
I hope this helped a little, in short think about the context then that should rule out or in a scene right from the start.
I've been surprised how little time I've used to rendering instead of coding, which has taken by far the most time.
but of course it depends on your competence level and style (of writing). a competent writer can churn out 30K words a day, and I'm sure coding is similarly easy for someone who does it for work. but there are many ways to write, some finish one page to final draft before next, some rewrite large parts of the whole 20-30 times before it's finished. I'm a rewriter, I keep changing things every time I go through it. usually I do it while rendering, but I always run out of rendering far before finishing text.
drawing takes me about 5 hours a picture, so even though it's the thing I'm best at I don't do it. but again, some other styles and more competent people can churn out paintings at amazing speeds.
Just saying but to write 30K of decent writing a day would need a more than merely competent writer, most published authors don't beat 5K a day, even the good ones, many less than that.
I personally make a shed load of notes before starting a full write to get a hard plan of event order and things like that, non dialogue mostly, on a productive day i can crank 10K of notes without getting bored or having to stop to work out what i'm doing next, dialogue is another matter, 3K of dialogue feels a lot harder than the 10K of notes and is always the slow part for me, i'm a wordy prose loving Englishman and that doesn't work for American 19 year old characters, they aren't going to say "propensity" or "superfluous" very often, probably because they don't need to, they use a different vernacular and just speak differently. Which is part of my problem, i overthink dialogue a lot, prose, stage direction, descriptions, easy as fuck by comparison for me, which sort of sucks for VN's i guess since most of that is covered by the images.
It's obvious to say that what takes longest to start with it what we're least familiar with, i'm not familiar with writing dialogue, i often write reports for work which have quite exact descriptions in and that has helped me with prose in a way and is great for stage direction notes since those can be written as a series of processes to a certain degree.
As someone who is writing, coding, and drawing artwork for a game, I would hands down say that the artwork takes up 80-90% of the time. Mind you that's for 2DCG art, I couldn't speak for rendering or anything like that.
Thank you for your answers, it's all very interesting.
It's time for me to take this poll. I know rendering takes time... So, to be honest I was training myself to do renderings with DAZ, I didn't find it complex, once you start to "master" the tool a little bit everything becomes easily manageable, especially since most of the characters, poses and scenery are already prefabricated (changing details doesn't take too long). All the artist has to do is create a scene, and that takes a lot of the difficulty out of the process, so the most tedious thing in the process is the rendering because it takes time, not really because it's a hard task, I mean just look at how many people make rendering with DAZ. Very few people can get good and clean rendering, but that doesn't hide the fact that if everyone can do it, then it's not that hard. Yep, I know that what I say annoy a lot of people However the number of renderings can become really time consuming if there is a lot to do especially with a PC patato like mine. That's probably why a lot of Ren'py games are linear games with little or no choice, so they become VN and exhausts their options pretty quickly. So the project run out of steam over time, just like Milf City, for example.
The drawing is something else, like DuniX said but since both processes bring a visual rendering I stacked them together.
I was a "drawer" myself in the past, before time made me lose all my skills. So I can say that it takes a lot of time, especially if the artist is still in the learning process (like more than 3/4 of the people creating this kind of game), especially since most of the time the drawers don't like their drawings, they we'll spend their time perfecting them (where with DAZ we already have sprites created and where we have to model over them). We can call it the impostor syndrome, which is something that afflicts many artists, as a writer I can say. Drawing therefore takes time, especially since it is generally assumed that the people drawing the backgrounds and the characters aren't the same. So having cohesion between these two members of the same team is complex. However, if the artist is already confident in his skills and is able to get a result he likes without having to rework it, the process takes much less time. Certainly, like any artist he or she will want to change something, but this is less common.
Now I'm going to talk about my, so little appreciated and so little emphasized creative process. The writing. I think it's important to make it clear that it's not as simple as it sounds. When someone writes, they don't just roll their fingers across the keyboard following a story they have in mind. Again, I'm talking about teamwork, not a developer who does the coding, rendering, and writing himself, even if being alone has many disadvantages, it also has advantages. A developer who already has the whole story in his mind doesn't need to explain it, write it or script it for someone, the ideas are there and he can directly apply them. Whereas a writer on a team has far less creative freedom. Most of the time the writer will find himself working on a project with a basic storyline forcing him to follow a guideline that has already been laid out and even if the writer has ideas, he will often have to keep them to himself because he is not really the one who has a say in the creation of the game. Of course he can make decisions, but most of the time it's the artist or the coder who manages it all.
In a team, the writer has to create the elements of the game, and not only the story, the objects that unlock things, short interaction with the environment, try to guide the player without him realizing it, create realistic characters, write the dialogues of these characters while following their temperament (and their past, for those who go far in their creative process). As a writer, I have to write a script before it is retrieved by the coder, and it's a long process :
Yes, it sounds simple, but it limits a lot, and it gets more complicated when you have to start implementing gameplay as well as drawings and different variations and it's even worse when you have to start branching. All this to make it understandable to the coder.
And most of the time (I'm talking about my experience), I have to write without having a visual, so I do everything in my head, which is quite complicated, especially when what I'm doing is a game that's very much based on visuals, so what I write has to be as "visual" as possible.
Most of the time the writer is also the one who manages the advertising aspect (with the coder) which adds a bit more work. So, yes, in a team writing is a really hard task.*
Now, for coders I don't have enough experience to talk about this, I'm a beginner in python and javascript, so I don't know too much about it. But I know that, depending on the game, coding it can be more complicated, especially if the language used is not python (so something other than Ren'py, cause .python is for many people the easiest computer language to learn). I think that the work of a coder varies depending on the project, but usually he's the one who tidies everything up to make a presentable game and he usually takes care of the team's cohesion. This is why he usually works together with the writer, as this makes it easier for him to organize his work.
In truth I would be more in favour of dividing the work fairly, i.e. 33.3% of the work each in a team of 3 (which is generally the standard), this avoids problems in the team, because what is fair suits everyone most of the time. But if you're looking for honesty in revenue shares, it's different between games.
A VN will be more likely to be divided like this: 40% Art / 40% Writing / 20% coding (I'm talking about basic VNs without interaction with the environment, art taking a lot of space, and writing as well... because : Visual Novel).
In a slightly more complicated VN with interaction, but remaining linear : 35% Art / 32.5% Writing / 32.5% Coding.
In a game, not a VN : 40% Art / 30% Writing / 30% Coding.
Depending on the quality of each of the processes, the percentages may increase or change. In truth, it is preferable that those who pay give money according to the amount of work and investment of the members in the project, this would allow for a mini-competition within the team and thus move the project forward faster while thanking the biggest worker in the team.
So, yeah, that my opinion
Personally, rendering, specially when you work in a toaster. I can see drawing and rendering being the most time consuming and tedious process of any game. Coding is easy peasy if you know what you are doing, and even if you are learning is kinda fun to do. Writing can be tedious if you hit a blockage, but you can always try writing different things, which ends up being funny too. But drawing is just... It's hard, it can go wrong, you need LOTS of practice to be even decent, and with rendering you need a good PC, at the very least, and even then, it takes time.
Generally, I would say coding is the least amount of time required. There are a lot of tools and guides out there help non-coders get something going. Obviously this depends on the scope of the project as well.
Rendering 2d still shots is not that time consuming if you construct your scenes well, focus on what is important, and don't try to overload the engine with unnecessary things that can be done in post. Daz plus skill in PhotoShop or GIMP will be much faster and produce much more memorable content.
You piss time away by trying to ram it through the engine. It's about finesse, and not power, IMO. Raw power will let you ram the engine harder, but it won't necessarily create better visuals.
(IMO, this is why too many Daz games look like Daz. It's raw renders, without much passion for the image outside the rendering process, as if there's a sanctity in the render. To me, you should bleed for the image you extract from the raw render like a diamond out of a hunk of stone.)
Scene bloat in Daz Iray is a real problem, like scope creep for a project. Really, a lot of Daz shots should be dialed back and re-thought. That's why they eat time, like a project that has undergone dramatic scope creep. You get time eaten by flippy flop rather than what matters.
I'm working with an artist/writer and I try to handle everything he cannot due to his lack of time.
And not to diminish his work or anything but I can easily say that I spend multiple time more time then him working around the game.
And the reason is simply because I can.
One of the most intensive task I gave myself is the support.
When we push an update with more than content, like some gameplay change or some refactoring of the code unless I'm sleeping I assure a sub-hour support for bugs.
And even when I'm sleeping more often than not my codey sense tingle, I wake up and still manage to stay sub hour.
Anyway when I had a good network I was even able to push bugfixes sub-hour to be handle by the auto-update our game include.
That kind of thing takes time.
Sure you might argue that it is not real time "consumption", but I can tell you that around 4-5 days after the releasing a new major update I'm exhausted.
On regular time I'm still always checking for any feedback and take hours to write lengthy reply to sometime the most basic feedback. That serves my thought process at the same time as it makes me think about the game and putting word on vague idea turn them usable.
One part of the job one must not forget exists is the technological watch.
To be a good game designer you need to know a lot of games and keep yourself up to date.
Look elsewhere for good idea as well as how things moves.
So I would also consider the vast amount of time spent on playing other game of course not only as work but still.
But when I play a game totally outside the fetish I like then I consider it work.
Depending of the fetish your game includes it might not cross often the planes of other fetish so it is possible to miss out on cool idea that can help you in your game.
And I'm not talking about ripping other of, I'm talking about interesting stuff you encounter that shine a new light on some concept that you thought were set in stone for example.
So yeah in short, dealing with the players, and keeping yourself up and your game up to date.
