So my friends want to make a AAA game...

[Tanakh]

Anyway, is this as ridiculous sounding to anyone else or am I overreacting and is it just me?

I don't know if you will read this or not, but.. well, a couple of things, if they have no budget then:

- For games i would recommend them to start with Python, not C++, and from then go to do something basic in pygame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygame)

- Panda is a professional and free game engine.

- Blender is 3d graph program also professional and free, but 3dsmax is the industry standard.

If they have a modest budget then Unity or Shiva are game engines worth looking at, even with zero budget they might work.

Tell them to get the Game Dev Magazine and do a minimum viable product on a reasonable time frame using blender and panda. And if they do that? Mate the sky is the limit.

Edit: Fuck, what is with all the pessimist attitude here? Making a good game is totally possible, if you are really focused and smart, a AAA game? well, no, but that can be your goal after a couple of indies.

Show them the Unreal Development Kit, it's a fantastic tool and makes it really easy to get started on mod development.

Ahh... no, no, no, have you read the terms of use of the UDK? Freaking draconian if you actually manage to make coin out of it.

 

[RollForInitiative]

Real dev here, laughing my ass off. Thanks. That made my morning. Let them be stupid; reality will do a better job of crushing them than you could ever hope to.

 

[Tanakh]

Real dev here, laughing my ass off. Thanks. That made my morning. Let them be stupid; reality will do a better job of crushing them than you could ever hope to.

-.-

Not to sound judgmental, but shouldn't you at least try to give the kids some advice then? They are 15 yo with a dream, and if they also have the balls and discipline to follow it through something amazing might happen.

 

[RoboGeek]

i think we got shown this video in the first week of uni course (relevance: im doing games technology)

[link]www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGar7KC6Wiw&feature=player_embedded[/link] :cant remember how to embed

they have no idea what there getting into, making an engine in c++ is pretty complicated last term we got put into groups to make a game. 1 guy decided to make they're own engine for their game, 5 months later they have a shit game with a barely working circle moving backwards, forwards, up and down.

Edit: if you really want to help them if you send me a PM and i can show you how to start just making fun little games and then go on to what resources and programs they would need to really need to start to gain experience to start learning what they need to succeed in the industry.

 

[LawlessSquirrel]

At that age, they'll probably outgrow it or give up on it after a while. Hopefully there won't be far-reaching issues for suffering grades in the meantime though.

They're not likely to stop just because you try to tell them that they're out of their league, but perhaps you can try to offer them a challenge. Give them a deadline to provide a prototype of the game, and if they can't manage that they should put it on hold and take the time to work up to a professional course first. It could serve as a motivator for them...or prove that they DO know what they're doing, but that seems unlikely.

On a less advisory note, AAA is a terrible thing to aim for without experience, and is quite simply a far-fetched dream without a sizeable studio and funding behind you. The indie side can do wonders nowadays though, especially with all the indie-available development kits popping up (thank you, Epic). I would argue AAA is a terrible thing to aim for overall, but that's just a personal opinion that most people disagree with me on.

Anyway, there's no harm in having big dreams, and indulging in creative pursuits is a healthy thing to do, even if the final result is clearly unobtainable. It's probably something to be encouraged on the small scale, but it shouldn't become a priority until there's a reasonable chance of success.

 

[JoJo]

Let them try, it's not like they are actually going to spend 5 years on it, soon they'll either get bored or realise how impossible the task is. Just go along with it and discuss things like level designs, enemies etc I find that sort of discussion fun even if I know I'm never going to make the piece of media. I often think of stories in my head, spend months tinkering designing a world, characters, a basic plot etc. I never actually write it as I'd get bored and it would almost certainly not get published, I just like to work on the idea.

 

[Jowe]

show them the source code for a 5-10 year old game, that may show them that they won't be able to do it.

 

[Blind0bserver]

Okay, first off...

Snip

Well it seems to me you've got two options, either explain to them how much of a couple of total dumbasses they are or wait by the sidelines and practice saying "I told you so" in your most condescending tone of voice.

... I'd go with the first one. Explain to them exactly what the situation is and how stupid and impractical they're being. After you do that, however...

[ul][li]They need to learn some kind of scripting and coding language if they don't know anything about that already. C++ is ideal, but to start of learning it isn't going to be easy.[/li]
[li]Unless they're either A) rich or B) childhood prodigies they aren't going to be able to make their own game engine at age fifteen. Their best bet to start is to mod an existing engine. Personally I'd recommend Source, because...[/li]
[li]... Noesis Interactive [http://www.noesisinteractive.com/] is a small company of ex game designers who release a lot of academic tutorials on game design, especially on level creation in the Source engine and 3D Modeling using XSi|Softimage. Last time I checked (which as admittedly a long time ago) you could find a free copy of XSi in the Source SDK.[/li]
[li]On that same note, get them to take a look at the Valve Developer Community [http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Main_Page] to get an idea of how the engine works and the technical aspect of it all.[/li]
[/ul]

Now that they have things to play around with and can get an idea of how the technical side of it all actually works, well... just see what happens. Having dreams is never a bad thing much less following them, but I'm not going to have delusions of, say, becoming a multi-platinum recording artist if I have zero musical talent. Same thing applies here. If they don't start cultivating the skills and experience they aren't going to have a snowball's chance in hell.

Best of luck to them both.

~V

 

[Ruwrak]

*snirks*

Good luck with that.
Sorry, that was mean-ish.


*ahem* Anyway. I had an education on gamedevelopment. The 7 of us (above average intelligent people) had 6 months to make something. And I can tell you from personal experience.


't be hard to pull of a C game. Let alone a Trip A game. Probably they played to many games and thought "I can do that too!"

 

[Weaver]

Ask them to first write tetris and get that working.
Tetris is a great starting point IMO, it teaches you game logic, timers, events and input handling.

Really though, they need to comprehend striving for a AAA game is honestly just impossible. It's like a a guy walking into a store and buying a handheld camcorder claiming he's going to make a Hollywood blockbuster like Transformers. Though with neither of them knowing how to program I'm not even sure they have a camcorder.

 

[Alon Shechter]

Let the poor lads dream.
Hopefully they'll grow out of this phase and life will carry on.

 

[Cridhe]

snip

I hate to say it, but this is how brilliant people are born. Everything between the real birth and this point is just fluff. So you are simply being anal. You seem jealous that you have no real dreams of your own and are perfectly content to live the same life as billions of ants before you, you mindless drone you.

There is also a big chance that one or more of your friends will simply fail. But one of them may be the next Todd Howard. So I think you need to suspend judgment.

Let the poor lads dream.
Hopefully they'll grow out of this phase and life will carry on.

Listen to yourself...

Or they could do something useful, because they're right and it's never going to happen.

 

[Tireseas_v1legacy]

Knock it down to "inde" and it may have a shot. Remember, Minecraft has sold millions of downloads by just offering a very basic game.

 

[Weaver]

For a relevant example, look no further than E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Y.E.:_Divine_Cybermancy]. For me this was the best game I played so far this year, and although it uses the Source engine, it was developed by a 12 man group of people of which the majority are still in their teens.

The best game I played this year.

But a 12 man group using the source engine is not a 2 man group with no experience who want to make their own engine that will somehow rival AAA titles with engine licensing fees of $750,000 USD.

I'm not saying they shouldn't try or that they shouldn't learn things. However, they need to get their heads out of the clouds and back to reality and develop their skillsets. You know all those math classes they're ignoring? Those aren't "lol I'll never use this" in game programming, especially in 3D or even 2D engines. If you don't understand linear algebra and matrix operations you're engine will either get nowhere, or will be so slow it would be rendered unusable.

They should try, they should learn but if they're serious about this learning roughly 4 years of computer science theory is going to get them a lot closer to their dream than drawing monsters in a notebook will.

 

[CHIMP MAGNET]

I thought you meant the triple A brakedown service. Anyway they'll give up in a week just wait it out. Then you get to say told ya so!

 

[Mister Swift]

I'm with Sixcess here. 15 year olds often dream big. There is no harm in it. And in the end, they might get a lot of positive out of it. In the process of working on this AAA game, they will learn a lot. This game will probably not make it to light, but that is the first step.

Let's say goals can be pun on a scale of 1 to 10. If you Aim at 10 and only achieve 5...you've done a lot more than than the person who only aimed at the sure thing of 1.

This may be true, but the OP said their friends had started to fail classes.
This sounds like borderline obsession, and that's not good.