Objectively, what is the most work and time-consuming aspect of game creation?

[Powerbabe]

It's always Artwork. No matter how small or complex your project is, the artwork will always take most of your time and whoever tells you otherwise is full of shit.

Now, if we talk about 2D vs 3D Art, it gets complicated. People who tell you that 2D is more difficult then 3D or vice versa should safely be ignored, because both art styles have their own curve of complexity and take a lot of time to master. They are two different art styles and should be treated accordingly. Period.

Now, when it comes to Daz3D, the software that's used to create many adult VNs here, many will say that the developers have it much better then others, because of how "easy" it is to use with so many assets ready and available for you from the get go. To a certain degree it's true, still most developers fail to deliver. But why is that?

The answer is simple, Daz3D also has its own curve of complexity with many tools that require a lot time to master, but most developers are too lazy, don't have time or don't want to invest any time tackling any complex topics. That's why even when it comes to software as "granted" as Daz3D the result for many years is still the same, Mediocrity.

 

[Finsit]

It's always Artwork. No matter how small or complex your project is, the artwork will always take most of your time and whoever tells you otherwise is full of shit.

I guess it is one way of insulting writers ...

 

[Deleted member 444674]

As others have said, it's definitely rendering for me. Well, not so much rendering and moreso scene creation. I write, code and render my scenes and I'm a novice in all 3 so they all sort of take some time, but I believe the amount of work it takes to make a scene look competent is underestimated. Not to say it comes close to sculpting and animating and rendering 3d models and environments from scratch like AAA games, but Daz rendering has it's obstacles for sure.

Not all scenes can be created equal. That's what I learned while creating scenes. Some scenes are heavier on your rig, some scenes require more light, some poses may not work, you may run into a tedious bug out of nowhere, your program may fall back to your CPU, clothes give you the middle finger during posing/simulation that no amount of smoothing can fix (Looking at you dForce) there are plenty of things that can go wrong in scene creation that don't even necessarily deal with the scene itself.

I must run at least 30 tests before I truly feel comfortable enough to begin a scene and even then, I'm often hit with the unexpected roadblocks. For example, I've been testing a scene's render time vs quality for a few days and got good overall results that only need a little post work. The iterations would gradually increase, the gap between iterations would increase and in 10 minutes I'd end the render at a little over 650 iterations, which gave me good enough quality thanks to the denoiser. When I actually came around to rendering the scene for the game now, after 10 minutes I'd only stop at 150 iterations, literally going one iteration at a time and Daz ignores the denoiser tool. So now the render is as grainy as can be. Tedious, toxic shit like that just make the process longer cause now you gotta find out what's causing that BS and why it triggered now, and if you're like me and you don't find the issue, you resort to changing the environment, the clothes, the hair, whatever it may be just to find a workaround. Then you test again. It can be a teeth-grinding cycle of bullshit.

It's not the hardest program in the world, but it will test your patience sometimes and I'm not a patient man.

Next, I'd say writing for me requires the second most time and work because I'm someone that runs into a lot of creative blocks during the writing process. I'd say these blocks are equally as annoying as all the issues with Daz because as a dev you want to maintain a consistent flow of updates, but this block is real. For me, it's not exactly a narrative block. I know the points where my characters will go. The problem is how do I fill in the gap between A and B. What do I have them say and how does it carry forward within that chapter on a scene by scene basis? And is it long enough to be considered a sizeable update that people will enjoy?

These 2 things are what tend to whip my ass most of the time. Coding it relatively easy cause I try to make sure I don't go beyond what is needed for a story based VN. I'd imagine a sandbox type would take more time.

 

[woody554]

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'd imagine the best ones produce relatively little a day.

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but some people just hammer out a novel in 2-3 days. it doesn't mean anything about how good writers they are (though they tend to be published genre writers). but it does mean fast writers will use very little of their allocated time writing on a porn VN. compared to slow, meticulous writers.

I mean lets face it, we're not gonna see any literary triumphs about blackmailing your mob-boss mom to jerk you off here. and that's not to put anyone down, but we're just not gonna ever see it.

 

[Volta]

I'd imagine the best ones produce relatively little a day.

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but some people just hammer out a novel in 2-3 days. it doesn't mean anything about how good writers they are (though they tend to be published genre writers). but it does mean fast writers will use very little of their allocated time writing on a porn VN. compared to slow, meticulous writers.

I mean lets face it, we're not gonna see any literary triumphs about blackmailing your mob-boss mom to jerk you off here. and that's not to put anyone down, but we're just not gonna ever see it.

Don't get me wrong i'm not expecting the next Pratchett, Bronte or Conan Doyle to be writing adult VN's but don't sell people short, they can still knock a good story together, it's not like you need a masters in English language to write a decent bit of porn. Neither do you need to be able to churn 30K a day, i agree that quality and quantity aren't related, in fact i'd say a writer who can do that and write a novel in a few days is amazingly productive and the result is likely to be singularly uninteresting in most cases.

I do understand what you mean about a quick writer being able to put together the required volume of words for a VN update in no time flat, probably a day if not less, however that would only be for the very small minority of writers, people aren't like that without a good amount of practise and i'd consider that pushing the boundaries of credulity for a VN writer, frankly if they can push 30K of decent writing in a day they'd be earning money as a writer and moonlighting as a dev, i can only think of one dev like that and it's a couple working together and they weren't to the best of my knowledge even close to 30K a day.

There is also an argument that this would be a massive boon for a text oriented game rather than a VN, i know if you were writing something like monster girl dreams which is a text based RPG with sprites in which the text covers the sex elements, then yeah a good, if derivative writer could be a massive boon and would speed development along way more than a skilled renderer could speed up a VN.

I guess you could say an ultra productive writer is like having a flawless top tier PC to work on, amazing to have, only useful to a point and highly unlikely for an indie dev.

 

[AmazonessKing]

So yeah in short, dealing with the players, and keeping yourself up and your game up to date.

I agree. A lot harder when you have social anxiety and can't really handle people really well.

 

[DeadPotato]

For me personally (I work in a team as project leader and main programmer), the most work and most time consuming aspect of the process is Planning and Scheduling. Or you can call it Team Management.

I'll explain why that is...

The game we're working on right now is a Visual Novel, all the assets are hand drawn (digitally of course). For asset creation, it takes a certain amount of time for X asset to be done (or at the state that can be considered DONE). For writing, it takes X amount of time for the script and dialogue to be done. I'm the programmer in the team, so I have to be implementing it all (it's honestly not that much work). I'm the project leader, so I have to give direction, check up on what's going on and be up to date with everything.

I don't consider any of the above tasks as time consuming, a lot of work? Yes but time consuming? No. It does take a long time, but that's just the nature of it. The workload is expected when it comes to game development.

What is time consuming is working out the optimal workflow for the team (and me). To make sure that nothing is lagging behind and the production is going smoothly. Making sure that nobody is idle and doing nothing. Making sure that nobody has too short of a deadline. Stuff like that.

 

[Shinoera]

I guess it is one way of insulting writers ...

Oh, you know, most writers are used to it. Most of the time writing is considered simple, easy to learn and being the fastest process in a project.
Most of the time people who say this, have either never written anything (with the intention of being read), or have never written for different formats (books, short stories, poetry, games, movies, etc). So it is then very simple to say that writing is easy, even if for example the writing of a script, a book and a poem are diametrically opposed in their structures and in the way of approaching the project. People tend to put all the different writings on the same level, whereas they will be the first to put the renderings, character drawings and background drawings on different levels, explaining that art is hard. Let us not forget that writing is also an art, and that it is the only art that no school can train. Writing has to be learned on its own, where all the other arts can be learned in school (or through tutorials on the internet, and let's be clear, tutorials for writers on Youtube are of no use because writing is something completely subjective).

I'm not trying to say that drawing/rendering and coding is easier than the rest, but I'm just saying that writing isn't as simple as most people think, especially in a team. When you're alone it's much easier to be satisfied with your work (and you don't need to write a script, etc.).

a competent writer can churn out 30K words a day

Don't know if you realise how much work this is. You're talking BS here x)
30k words is about 50 pages of a novel. A competent writer isn't a war machine, he's or she's a human being; at the very least he could only write so much if he would copy an already handwritten text or with an already thinked/written script from A to Z, but to write 30k words in one day in the middle of a creative process is a dream that even Stephen King never managed to achieve. In his youth he wrote about 5k words a day which is already huge, believe me.

I voted "other".

That was an interesting point of view î_î
So finally what takes you the most time is organizing things and doing the things that other people, right?
I don't know if it's the ideal team to be honest Having said that, I think a lot of people work overtime for this kind of project, to cite my example, I sometimes work until 4 a.m on the scripts I work on, because like you I'm never really satisfied of what I do.
Anyway dealing with feedback is something that the coder and writer usually have to do, they are supposed to work in pairs. Your situation is special.

 

[Cottoncloud]

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.

Depends how many PC's you have... for me Daz 3D is locked during rendering so I can't really work on something while render process is on, but for sure I can spend time coding or writing.

 

[Zippity]

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).

We could also correlate these two polls: Just here. Click my friend.

Of course, I have my opinion, but I wanted to have yours first î_î

There are so many factors that come into play that would determine someones answer to that question...

Does the developer work alone, or as part of a team?
What is the developers role in that team?
What is the level of skill for that developer with regard to the various roles?
What is the complexity level of the project being developed?
Is the focus of the project on the visuals, the story text, the game play mechanics?
Is there going to be a balance of visuals and story, or will one outweigh the other?
What is the style of the visuals?
Are the visuals hand drawn, made using 2D/3D modeling software, a mix?
Are the visuals made from scratch, modified pre-existing visuals, stock pre-made visuals, a mix?
Is the project being designed around a story or just around erotic content?
Is the story being told with meaning and depth, or just to quickly fill in the gaps between a bunch of erotic visuals?
Is a translator needed, and if so, how skilled is he/she at both translating and interpreting the original text into proper English (or other languages) that makes sense while keeping true to the intended meaning of the original text?
Is the project being properly play tested by an outside source other then by the public at large? (play testing includes ensuring the text reads correctly and makes sense, looking for plot holes, and verifying story continuity when choices effect outcome - not just looking for game bugs and visual errors)
What engine is being used for the Visual Novel/Game?
How complex will the coding need to be?
How complex are the planned game play mechanics?
How good is the equipment being used?

The list goes on and on...

The poll is trying to oversimplify the process into narrow corridors... When development difficulty varies from project to project and developer to developer... What if a developer never includes visuals, and sticks to primarily making text-based games? Visuals would never even factor into the difficulty of projects like that, so obviously for those developers the story text will be the most time consuming aspect...

That being said, I'm pretty sure that for the majority of Visual Novels and/or Games out there right now, the visuals themselves are the most time consuming... Probably with coding being next on that list, depending on the Engine being used... Some engines are far more complicated then others... The story can be time consuming, but it involves far more on the creative mind and story telling prowess, and less on the time consuming mechanical aspects of VN/Game design... Once again, depending on the engine, game play complexity, and if visuals are even a thing in the game...

Oh, you know, most writers are used to it. Most of the time writing is considered simple, easy to learn and being the fastest process in a project.
Most of the time people who say this, have either never written anything (with the intention of being read), or have never written for different formats (books, short stories, poetry, games, movies, etc). So it is then very simple to say that writing is easy, even if for example the writing of a script, a book and a poem are diametrically opposed in their structures and in the way of approaching the project. People tend to put all the different writings on the same level, whereas they will be the first to put the renderings, character drawings and background drawings on different levels, explaining that art is hard. Let us not forget that writing is also an art, and that it is the only art that no school can train. Writing has to be learned on its own, where all the other arts can be learned in school (or through tutorials on the internet, and let's be clear, tutorials for writers on Youtube are of no use because writing is something completely subjective).

I'm not trying to say that drawing/rendering and coding is easier than the rest, but I'm just saying that writing isn't as simple as most people think, especially in a team. When you're alone it's much easier to be satisfied with your work (and you don't need to write a script, etc.).


Don't know if you realise how much work this is. You're talking BS here x)
30k words is about 50 pages of a novel. A competent writer isn't a war machine, he's or she's a human being; at the very least he could only write so much if he would copy an already handwritten text or with an already thinked/written script from A to Z, but to write 30k words in one day in the middle of a creative process is a dream that even Stephen King never managed to achieve. In his youth he wrote about 5k words a day which is already huge, believe me.


That was an interesting point of view î_î
So finally what takes you the most time is organizing things and doing the things that other people, right?
I don't know if it's the ideal team to be honest Having said that, I think a lot of people work overtime for this kind of project, to cite my example, I sometimes work until 4 a.m on the scripts I work on, because like you I'm never really satisfied of what I do.
Anyway dealing with feedback is something that the coder and writer usually have to do, they are supposed to work in pairs. Your situation is special.

Writing and/or Authoring a story depends on how complex the writing needs to be for a given medium... It will also depend on the skill and experience of the writer/s... Writing can be a daunting process, putting your ideas down on paper, trying to interweave various ideas so that they both make sense and get the intended meaning across to the readers... Then there is the process of reading your own work, and possibly re-writing some of it perhaps... Then what about story complexity if various different story paths need to be included, because choices are offered to a reader/player that influence later story content... Trying to again interweave the varying story lines together in a way that makes sense and ensures the integrity of the story... Making sure plot holes don't pop up, and that story continuity is maintained...

So I completely agree, length of time devoted to writing is not always just cut and dry... Sure, there are plenty of VN/Games out there with meaningless story drivel, that was probably not difficult to make... But it is usually either lacking any depth, involves poor story telling, lacks originality/creativity, and/or was only meant as a side line to the erotic content anyways... Writing skill and intention are always major factors...


Zip

 

[DaClown]

Poll results here are fascinating. Statistically across general game development the artists and writers constitute a strict minority of the total development time such that they are generally not part of the day to day operational crew but contractors that are sought out during specific narrow slices of the total game development schedule.

Most of the video game development time is not even in coding or software engineering. Most of it has to do with organization, planning, accounting, data entry, record keeping and preparation, surveying, testing, prototyping, and bug smashing (in no particular order).

 

[fidless]

This poll just doesn't work.
Codding requirements can range from x1-x100+ times. If it's a VN, there's not much of coding going on, just setting up scenes, add text, UI some gallery, etc. If it's a sidescroller, not much of writing going on most of the time, etc. etc. Kind of useless poll.
This poll results just show basic linear VN time consumption. Though it's surprising how little time people spend on "writing", but I guess crafting novel level writing for the porn game is not a requirement.

 

[DaClown]

This poll just doesn't work.
Codding requirements can range from x1-x100+ times. If it's a VN, there's not much of coding going on, just setting up scenes, add text, UI some gallery, etc. If it's a sidescroller, not much of writing going on most of the time, etc. etc. Kind of useless poll.
This poll results just show basic linear VN time consumption. Though it's surprising how little time people spend on "writing".

I think it is less that the poll doesn't work and more that the poll tells us something superspecific about the players and devs that participate voluntarily on these forums.

Given what I have seen of the many other polls so far many of the people on here are Renpy VN developers, so for them, the coding is generally not all that important and given that most of them are improvising their works rather than tending towards any kind of a corporate structure beyond maybe a partnership the main time demands are the art production.

Tells us something interesting about VN development processes.

 

[mrkhing]

I think this really depends on what kind of game you're developing. Maybe the poll should be more specific? If it's a text-based game then writing would obviously take way more time than anything else. If it's a VN with professional artwork or custom 3d assets and animations then the visuals would be extremely time consuming, way more than anything else. And if it's a game with complex gameplay elements then I guess you would spend most of your time programming and bugfixing.

 

[sillyrobot]

Whichever aspect you aren't skilled at but want to be outcome to be good or better.

 

[recreation]

This poll works for where it's posted, in a forum with the majority of games being VN, so most dev's here will automatically make their vote for that specific case, I've even mentioned that in my earlier post here.
And if you keep that in mind, the result is absolutely understandable and correct. Writing takes a lot of time for a VN (at least for a decent/good story) and coding should never be underestimated, but creating art for a VN will always take more time than anything else.

 

[DaClown]

[...]Writing takes a lot of time for a VN (at least for a decent/good story) and coding should never be underestimated, but creating art for a VN will always take more time than anything else.

For small scale linear or simple branching VNs, yes. The complexity of the VN is low enough that the art is the biggest thing.

This however is not true of all possible VNs even if they are the current rare exception. There's a similar sort of mentality in all this as existed in the mid to late 90s when Adventure games and Click and Point games were on the rise (before they absolutely collapsed and have never quite recovered since). Once the VN achieves a certain complexity then the management and planning of the VN can easily outstrip the art assets especially if the art assets are in the majority procedural rather than hand drawn.

There's similar history and stories and studies about the history of animation in industries represented by Disney, Dreamworks, and the likes; there's reasons that most contemporary movie studios no longer use hand drawn animation as the primary product of their business models and why most AAA and indie game development these days involves procedural character and asset generation. You can see that evolution happening in this community with the widespread adoption of tools like DAZ.

Corruption of Champions is a glorified VN with a very convoluted recursive narrative graph rather than a linear or tree narrative. The majority of its dev time was initially on producing the writing, but over the years, the complexity of character relations and conditions with the environmental conditions got so complex that almost all the time was spent planning and testing the coding in of the newly written scenes and characters. And huge amounts of time became optimizing and bug smashing the results.

 

[recreation]

For small scale linear or simple branching VNs, yes. The complexity of the VN is low enough that the art is the biggest thing.

This however is not true of all possible VNs even if they are the current rare exception. There's a similar sort of mentality in all this as existed in the mid to late 90s when Adventure games and Click and Point games were on the rise (before they absolutely collapsed and have never quite recovered since). Once the VN achieves a certain complexity then the management and planning of the VN can easily outstrip the art assets especially if the art assets are in the majority procedural rather than hand drawn.

There's similar history and stories and studies about the history of animation in industries represented by Disney, Dreamworks, and the likes; there's reasons that most contemporary movie studios no longer use hand drawn animation as the primary product of their business models and why most AAA and indie game development these days involves procedural character and asset generation. You can see that evolution happening in this community with the widespread adoption of tools like DAZ.

Corruption of Champions is a glorified VN with a very convoluted recursive narrative graph rather than a linear or tree narrative. The majority of its dev time was initially on producing the writing, but over the years, the complexity of character relations and conditions with the environmental conditions got so complex that almost all the time was spent planning and testing the coding in of the newly written scenes and characters. And huge amounts of time became optimizing and bug smashing the results.

There is no "mentality" here, what you're describing are not VNs, Corruption of Champions is not a VN, and that's the point here. A VN "Visual Novel" lives from it's visuals, it's images, a good VN has a lot of different images for each scene and doesn't mass-reuse old images, a lot of thought and work has to go into each image: How does the character look, react, which emotion, what kind of movement does he/she/it make, which light, environment, etc, and that only one image of several for only one scene. A real VN also generally don't use procedual stuff.
Of course there these so called VNs that use one static image for several scenes where characters never move, emotions don't show, always the same two or three rooms, etc., but that are just really bad examples imo.
But then again, what you're describing are not Visual Novels. CoC for example is a text-based (adult) adventure if anything.

 

[DaClown]

There is no "mentality" here, what you're describing are not VNs, Corruption of Champions is not a VN, and that's the point here. A VN "Visual Novel" lives from it's visuals, it's images, a good VN has a lot of different images for each scene and doesn't mass-reuse old images, a lot of thought and work has to go into each image: How does the character look, react, which emotion, what kind of movement does he/she/it make, which light, environment, etc, and that only one image of several for only one scene. A real VN also generally don't use procedual stuff.
Of course there these so called VNs that use one static image for several scenes where characters never move, emotions don't show, always the same two or three rooms, etc., but that are just really bad examples imo.
But then again, what you're describing are not Visual Novels. CoC for example is a text-based (adult) adventure if anything.

I think we have a fundamental disagreement on what the "visual" part of "visual novel" necessarily refers to. For me, if a novel has elements to dynamically visualize the situation--whatever that maybe--then it is a visual novel. CoC does actually have character visualizations even though it was developed later in the game development process, but for me, a VN does not have to visualize *characters* to qualify. I would not describe CoC as a Text-Only game or an non-visual interactive novel even if that is how it started its development cycle.

There are other examples than CoC that we could use based on agreement that "visual novel" actually precisely means "character visualization novel". Parasite Infection being one possible example. I would argue that most of the Black Isle Studio games such as Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape:Torment all qualify as glorified visual novels; they are implemented on top of a spacial-temporal visualization engine for strategic and tactical combat, but their primary play is character-character dialogue and proper role playing which consists of fantasy-novel forms, standards, and tropes. I expect that "No, that isn't a VN." is going to reduce down to an additional implicit constraint or requirement: the page is the stage of all scenes, and the primary mechanic must then be turning the page hence "novel".

From a design perspective, the difference between a game and a visual novel is not a real difference in the programming or the formal model. Most visual novels are trivial games in a formal sense. They don't have to be, but they tend to be due to how easy it is to make a linear pictorial sequence of events and characters compared to making a fully dynamic and interactive open world of characters and events.

The mentality to which I refer is the notion that just because for some currently popular or common community of development it is *the way* means that it will *always be this way*. Which invariably turns out to be false over a long enough timeline.

I would hope we can agree that defining VNs in terms of being composed of strictly static, hand-drawn or manually drawn images with no machine generation, rigging, animation, or scripting is far too narrow of a definition even if it is the prevalent norm among the amateurs, hobbyists, and cottage industry of VNs as they are now and have been historically.

 

[Domiek]

At the very beginning of creating a game it's probably Asset Creation/World Building/Planning/Coding/Renders/Setting up the scene/Writing

After 0.1 where most of the groundwork is completed and you're continuing the story it's probably Render/Setting up the scene/Writing

If the dev managed to upgrade their system and have multiple cards that drastically reduce render times, it's probably Setting up the scene/Render/Writing


These are generalizations of course with the average Daz3D VN in mind. It will depend on the dev/team at the end of the day. There are some games that definitely put a lot more time into writing and it shows.