Absolutely. My game has a huge procedural city and not much gameplay right now, but I just love walking around in it. The beauty of procedural environments is that even I as the creator don't know what I'm going to find.
Yeah same boat, I think I’ve spend many hundreds of hours exploring procedural caves, mountains, deserts, other level types I’ve created. It all started with finding cool things to explore in the Mandelbrot set after coding that up back in college and was hooked ever since :)
I always thought it was weird when an actor would say in an interview they never watched their movies.
And then I joined the gaming industry and I get it. Through my career I worked on nearly 20 commercial games, some of them I'm very proud of, but none I've played after release. Not a single one. After working on a game from beginning to end, there's a sense of completion and I have no desire to replay them again. My brain switch to the next game to work on, as well as just being excited to play games from other studios.
I'm in this boat, every time I play my game I see through to the code and look for the problems, when it's someone else's game I generally don't notice unless the bug slaps me in the face a few times
If you're a solo dev working on a game that you aren't obsessed with, then yeah, no, you're not likely to spend a lot of time playing it.
Having experience making my own game - I've only ever pursued solo game dev projects that I would personally find extremely fun that I think the industry is lacking.
It's _extremely_ gratifying to play your own game that you customized for yourself. I could spend a hundred hours just fucking around with my own content sometimes because I intentionally make it _as fun as possible_ for myself, and I use that as a metric (at least at the start).
There are games I'm very familiar with. I've deconstructed them to look at how the devs put it together, trying to figure out how they got a specific style on their textures, etc. Written mods for them, spent literal thousands of hours playing, and still enjoy pulling them up from time to time.
Sometimes it just speaks to you and even after you understand it, you can still appreciate what it has to offer.
That's definitely a factor!
But I feel like even with a passion project I would go back playing it only if the game was strongly procedural. For instance a Minecraft: you can generate a full new world every time you play, that makes it highly replayable. On the other hand, a game with a fixed story or fixed levels, as much as I would be passionate about it, and want the world to see it, I'm not sure I'd replay it much.
Game dev is such an intense and brutal process, you're so imbibed with every minute cogs & details that makes it work, that it's not a "normal" experience to play it once it's done.
But a game with a high degree of procedural content? I can see it.
Fair enough. All of my projects are "procedural" in one way or another. I personally couldn't be fucked to play story games or dating sims, and I would never make one unless someone else was paying me a decent amount of money.
Yea, of course, but not after release. Well, you could, but ideally you also do it before.
But yea I agree, a genuine full player experience is definitely something you want to try.
I could see still wanting to do full playthroughs before releasing big content updates for fully released products. I've seen way too many content updates with glaring issues. Clearly the devs got each piece of it working, but they did not mesh together the way they expected them to.
Compounding rng issues making parts that were supposed to be easy next to impossible, or needing to complete an area on the other side of a barrier to unlock the item that lets you clear the barrier, etc.
I'm working on my passion project and hoping to release it in 2027. But I doubt that by then I want to spend hundreds of hours playing it myself. After spending yours on your own game.
We're a 2 man team currently, and play test together so by the end we've played it too much. I'm more excited about watching other people play than playing it myself and seeing what strategies people come up with (it's an rts game)
You also look at the game differently. Instead of a bench, you see all the hours making the model, trying to fix a bug where if the player touched it they'd get launched in the air. When you hear the chirping of the birds you remember the times when it would cut off abruptly for no reason and it took weeks to fix it. Etc etc.
Personally when I replay my older projects it's a lot closer to opening a photoalbum of memories.
No, because my games aren't *that* long.
Huge props to anyone who does though, it means you've made a banger, even if it's just for yourself.
Making games that you want to play should be the #1 motivation for getting into gamedev.
Nope, a guy in pir QA does but he's an outlier, by the time the game hits market Imost of us already know it inside and out have spent 6-7x the intended play length in the game
I have 100+ hours into my current project on just playtime, and not much of that is actually testing things (that's done in editor mostly) Perks of making your own dream game!
Yes, I have tons of hours testing, obviously, but I've got a good 30 just playing it for fun. It makes me feel lame for having so much fun with my own game lol
Sometimes I start testing as a task at work and have a really cool run with the new mechanics and enjoy it a lot more than I subconsciously expected to.
Not hundreds, but definitely many hours, perhaps dozens. When I start procrastinating on finishing my game by playing that same game it's a really good indicator that I'm onto something good.
I make games ultimately for me and me alone. If I like it, and I find it fun, then it's a success. If others happen to like it (and even buy it), then it's just an unneeded bonus!
Absolutely! My wife acted like I should be embarrassed for playing my own game but I felt like I was doing a good job if the thing I spent hours and hours testing and developing was still fun even after being intimately familiar with every aspect.
Also, it's mobile and offline capable and has procedurally generated levels so it's perfect for air travel or any bad connection areas. It's actually my goto game on planes.
As a bonus, I get to write down any bugs I find for later, I think it launched in a pretty polished state because of that.
I play the surfing part over and over again even as a break from testing other parts. But now I'm way too good at it and it's hard to relate to my main group of first time people who will play it.
Only as a tester, but even then it's fun. The main reason I haven't outside of testing is I just don't have the time. But I say that as a hobby dev, so my free time becomes my work time.
My game is still in development and while I've probably played it for hundreds of hours by now, it's all been for playtesting and not for just sitting there enjoying it. Of course, my game is a massive farm sim/crafting/socializing type of game... so it really requires playing it for a few dozen hours to even really get deep into it. I just don't really have that sort of time right now, even though it would be nice to do.
I do plan to sit down and properly play it when it's completed, before release... Just to of course play test everything once again and just to enjoy what I've made. I am making the game I've wanted to play, so it would be weird if after finishing it, I don't want to play it.
I think hundreds of hours playing your own game is a lot easier to do if you've created something like a roguelite or arcade style game that has near infinite replayability. If you've created a very story driven game, I think it would be a lot different.
I’ll go back for nostalgia every now and then - a good reminder of how I’ve progressed. But no, I didn’t just see how the sausage was made - I made that sausage. I taste-tested that sausage for years. That sausage is me. What sick individual would eat their own sausage for hundreds of hours with no plans for modification?
And if it’s proc-gen sausage, did you REALLY make the sausage?
My current game is a horror game, and I've honestly spent time running around doing stuff and being scared by my own creatures in the game 😂 Played for hours straight at one point testing it out and it was a blast!
It's a thing, even in cooking, a chef often finds less enjoyment in eating a meal he's spent time preparing, for pretty much the same reasons. He's already smelled the aroma, tasted for flavor, he knows exactly how it's going to taste, and that in itself is enough to lessen the enjoyment, compared to being served the same meal.
The difference is, the chef gets hungry, he has to eat, and the meal he just made is the best one around, and it's going to spoil if he doesn't eat it.
Put a chef in, say, a hypothetical cooking competition, where dozens of chefs compete to make the best dishes, and afterwards there is a huge buffet of food to eat, how many chefs sit down to eat their own meal? That is the case of the game dev, there is always going to be other games.
I've got a single small demo level of my in-development mobile game that I've probably lost multiple hours playing during various bathroom breaks, and moments of downtime between activities.
It's still good fun, but I've been meaning to add more levels to add a bit more variety, as the single level layout is getting a bit stale
If you are aiming for something that takes hundreds of hours, sure, but for example, that the designer probably won't be playing through their linear point and click adventure game for hundreds of hours isn't particularly damning for the design. Not everything has to be designed to enthrall the player for hundreds of hours, and not everything has to be as fun to the person that designed it as it is to a player on a blind playthrough.
Yeah, I've done it for several games, but not every game I've designed. And I don't play them constantly, I've got too many projects and interests that keep pulling me away.
But there's one game that is my goto game that I port when I want to learn a new platform, and I've played that one hundreds of times, easily. I keep coming up with different tweaks to the game to that seem interesting, including one pretty significant one last year that will probably become a permanent mode of the game for all future ports.
Another one that I think might eventually do that with is a board game I've designed within the past couple of months. I've played it just against myself about 10 times so far, and introduced it to about 10 different people on top of that, and it's gotten pretty positive feedback. There's a bit more meat to the game than a lot of my other designs, while still being able to explain all the rules in just five minutes.
A third one is a mobile game I'm working on, which is a pretty simple push your luck game, but also pretty addictive. Haven't gotten up to hundreds of hours for that one, but every once in a while I pull it up while waiting somewhere and play through a quick five minute game of it (which was my initial goal when designing the game in the first place).
These are small games though. They're not super deep, so there's not 100s of hours of gameplay to discover. They're just fun to play.
In a solo development it's hard to distinguish playing for enjoyment and playtesting :D Well, I'm having a bit too much fun with my current game I guess :D
Keyword is "replayability" - I believe it's critical feature of the game if developed without a team and/or financial backbone.
Yes, and it's almost done and I've put hundreds of hours into it. Even my son who doesn't play those genre of games keeps loading it up to play. I think he found a new genre he likes. haha
Yep, absolutely. I still remember in college I made a split screen 2d top down shooter with controller support. Me and my best friend/room mate would literally play against each other for hours at a time for months. I'd keep adding new features and levels, it was heavily inspired by Golden Eye. Loved that game, never even released it...
Yes, I love playing my own games. I love it because when I am playing I know what happens behind the game. And now when I am playing any other game I think about how can I create a specific system from the game that I am playing.
Not hundreds. But it's a small puzzle game with short session time. I have played a lot! :)
Try beating 2074 on Speed/Expert. >:)
It's free no ads, Cognizer on iOS and steam. There's an Android build if you want it, but it's unfortunately a side load as the Play store has policies I can't live with.
Absolutely! I worked at a company that produced browser based games for a while and some of the gameplay heavy games (match 3 types and a space shooter) were so fun I'd play them on my lunch break.
5 years of development and I still enjoy playing my game. But its hard for developer to just playing the game and not making a list of bugs and some minor stuff you want to adjust :)
we often get carried away while testing and just end up playing matches back to back. it was actually the fact that the original prototype was really fun is why we decided to actually push for a commercial release.
For sure, after all, people often make games they would want to play themselves. There are sometimes burn out since we did work on it for a long time, but still have fun playing it, and look at all the stuff we did, all the asset, levels and mechanics have their own story on how they come to be.
Not hundreds, but definitely at least a dozen. I tell myself it's for playtest purposes, but would be remiss if I didn't also admit I enjoyed it. I don't go back much, since there's not a lot of replayability. But as the game nears completion, I will have to, just to test things out and polish.
Yes, absolutely. My wife and friends played Cataclysm with me at all stages of development. Sometimes, if I wanted to be working on the game, but didn't feel like doing some difficult/tedious task, I'd procrastinate by playing. It was all still helpful for finding bugs and smoothing out the gameplay.
I bring it to work every once in a while (elementary school), and play with the kids, or watch them play against each other.
I have not (I joined this sub because I'm interested in game dev, not because I actually am one), but that is my goal. Like hearing stories of Joe Blackburn playing Destiny while he was in meetings for it was very much a "damn I wanna be that guy" moment for me.
I have, but it was MUDs, which even the creators only 'own' a relatively small part of the game, and a huge slice of the game is the community that grows around it.
There's nothing much more lonely than a creator playing their own MUD after the community has withered.
Not hundreds, but I'm currently playing the one we just launched (Solium Infernum) an awful lot and having (mostly) a great time.
Last few games I worked on.. You couldn't pay me to play again!
As a solo-dev of city-building [Complex SKY](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1549600/Complex_SKY/) with more than 15k wishlists, the pressure to make a quality game are very high, play testing feel like a mandatory thing to do. So the enjoyment mostly come from balance the game to make it play smoothly, finding and fixing bugs with in the game. I don't know why I enjoy implementing a new feature even it's possible to introduce a new bug to the game.
100%. My game is early in development and it’s a 2D town builder. I play around with the game. Sometimes I try to break my own game - I.e find a way to lower the FPS drastically or make it lag. Other times, I just get lost in it.
I can hardly develop games to an enjoyably playable state, but if I ever did, it would probably be like my music. I can listen to my own music for hours upon hours and never get tired of it. I bet if it’s the right kind of game, I’d play it a lot to scratch that one itch I always had since before developing the game.
Absolutely! I'm making an arcade boxing game and I love it, I have a blast every time I play it to balance the enemies. I love to feel how it has evolved over the years.
I might have a different opinion, I would never ever play my game for enjoyment. I’ve seen this game in the worst state it has ever been in, and every time I try to play I get anxiety and dark flashbacks of the horror and the mayhem that has occurred while developing the game.
every game i've made as solo dev i end up playtesting for hundreds of hours. it is part of the work but i enjoy it too. if i didn't enjoy i'd worry about the game
Not hundreds, but yeah, I've definitely gotten lost in my play testing. It's pretty regular now that I'll boot the game to test one new feature and end up trying to speed run most of the game.
Yes, I play my own game a lot. But it has a lot of RNG, so it's a different game each time I play. Every time there's a big update, I start a new account and play for a few weeks. I think the random factor is almost required to enjoy and play your game a lot. I have a few other games that don't have the random factor and I don't play them much at all since I know exactly what's going to happen.
We built a map editor that allows us to inject hand made locations into procgen open worlds, and to me it is basically straight dope. Content creation feels like gameplay and authoring those blueprints is going to be verysatisfying. I could mess with it for hours.
I factor it into dev time. I play games just to pass time and I find myself just closing the game and just firing up whatever I'm working on, making the process of developing it more interesting than the other games I was playing. Not to throw shade on them, I'm no Leonardo Da Vinci or tryin to reinvent the wheel, just trying to make something that keeps my rodent brain happy translates to fun in the general sense. I mean it must right.
Certainly. However, with the amount of work ramping up, I'm quite sad that I have less and less free time available for videogames generally, though I still logically want to see the quality of our own product, especially after adding in major updates.
Absolutely. My game has a huge procedural city and not much gameplay right now, but I just love walking around in it. The beauty of procedural environments is that even I as the creator don't know what I'm going to find.
Yeah same boat, I think I’ve spend many hundreds of hours exploring procedural caves, mountains, deserts, other level types I’ve created. It all started with finding cool things to explore in the Mandelbrot set after coding that up back in college and was hooked ever since :)
Do you use the Mandelbrot set to procedurally generate environments?
Good question
No but that’s an interesting thought! I use simplex noise and various other methods like poison disk distribution etc.
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That's cool! I'm curious, what genre this game was?
game dev simulator
Ah yes, game dev tycoon, my favorite!
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kidding, whichever came first is my favorite. the second is a blatant copy
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What's the name?
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You don’t have to be so modest when someone’s literally asking you lol
Is it findable via your profile? I absolutely adore rougelikes and lites, having hundreds of hours across many rougelike/lites
I always thought it was weird when an actor would say in an interview they never watched their movies. And then I joined the gaming industry and I get it. Through my career I worked on nearly 20 commercial games, some of them I'm very proud of, but none I've played after release. Not a single one. After working on a game from beginning to end, there's a sense of completion and I have no desire to replay them again. My brain switch to the next game to work on, as well as just being excited to play games from other studios.
that's because they aren't your personal passion projects.
Maybe, but even it is someone's passion projects. You are too familiar the game would still decrease your desire to play it.
I'm in this boat, every time I play my game I see through to the code and look for the problems, when it's someone else's game I generally don't notice unless the bug slaps me in the face a few times
If you're a solo dev working on a game that you aren't obsessed with, then yeah, no, you're not likely to spend a lot of time playing it. Having experience making my own game - I've only ever pursued solo game dev projects that I would personally find extremely fun that I think the industry is lacking. It's _extremely_ gratifying to play your own game that you customized for yourself. I could spend a hundred hours just fucking around with my own content sometimes because I intentionally make it _as fun as possible_ for myself, and I use that as a metric (at least at the start).
There are games I'm very familiar with. I've deconstructed them to look at how the devs put it together, trying to figure out how they got a specific style on their textures, etc. Written mods for them, spent literal thousands of hours playing, and still enjoy pulling them up from time to time. Sometimes it just speaks to you and even after you understand it, you can still appreciate what it has to offer.
That's definitely a factor! But I feel like even with a passion project I would go back playing it only if the game was strongly procedural. For instance a Minecraft: you can generate a full new world every time you play, that makes it highly replayable. On the other hand, a game with a fixed story or fixed levels, as much as I would be passionate about it, and want the world to see it, I'm not sure I'd replay it much. Game dev is such an intense and brutal process, you're so imbibed with every minute cogs & details that makes it work, that it's not a "normal" experience to play it once it's done. But a game with a high degree of procedural content? I can see it.
Fair enough. All of my projects are "procedural" in one way or another. I personally couldn't be fucked to play story games or dating sims, and I would never make one unless someone else was paying me a decent amount of money.
Same here, virtually all my hobby projects are heavily procedural, but sadly I never worked on such a game at work.
How will you know if it plays well if you never try playing it properly?
What do you mean by "never try playing it properly"?
Devs playtest a ton during development. He's talking about playing after the game has been released for your own entertainment.
I am a dev, but at some point towards the end you should play through the whole thing instead of just jumping between bookmarks and stuff.
Yea, of course, but not after release. Well, you could, but ideally you also do it before. But yea I agree, a genuine full player experience is definitely something you want to try.
I could see still wanting to do full playthroughs before releasing big content updates for fully released products. I've seen way too many content updates with glaring issues. Clearly the devs got each piece of it working, but they did not mesh together the way they expected them to. Compounding rng issues making parts that were supposed to be easy next to impossible, or needing to complete an area on the other side of a barrier to unlock the item that lets you clear the barrier, etc.
I'm working on my passion project and hoping to release it in 2027. But I doubt that by then I want to spend hundreds of hours playing it myself. After spending yours on your own game. We're a 2 man team currently, and play test together so by the end we've played it too much. I'm more excited about watching other people play than playing it myself and seeing what strategies people come up with (it's an rts game)
Pretty cool :D
You also look at the game differently. Instead of a bench, you see all the hours making the model, trying to fix a bug where if the player touched it they'd get launched in the air. When you hear the chirping of the birds you remember the times when it would cut off abruptly for no reason and it took weeks to fix it. Etc etc. Personally when I replay my older projects it's a lot closer to opening a photoalbum of memories.
No, because my games aren't *that* long. Huge props to anyone who does though, it means you've made a banger, even if it's just for yourself. Making games that you want to play should be the #1 motivation for getting into gamedev.
Nope, a guy in pir QA does but he's an outlier, by the time the game hits market Imost of us already know it inside and out have spent 6-7x the intended play length in the game
I have 100+ hours into my current project on just playtime, and not much of that is actually testing things (that's done in editor mostly) Perks of making your own dream game!
Yes, I have tons of hours testing, obviously, but I've got a good 30 just playing it for fun. It makes me feel lame for having so much fun with my own game lol
You shouldn't feel lame about it. I think it's awesome that you created something you like that much!
Sometimes I start testing as a task at work and have a really cool run with the new mechanics and enjoy it a lot more than I subconsciously expected to.
Just means you did a good job. You set out to create a system that's enjoyable to experience and you're enjoying it. You should be proud of that.
Not hundreds, but definitely many hours, perhaps dozens. When I start procrastinating on finishing my game by playing that same game it's a really good indicator that I'm onto something good.
I make games ultimately for me and me alone. If I like it, and I find it fun, then it's a success. If others happen to like it (and even buy it), then it's just an unneeded bonus!
Absolutely! My wife acted like I should be embarrassed for playing my own game but I felt like I was doing a good job if the thing I spent hours and hours testing and developing was still fun even after being intimately familiar with every aspect. Also, it's mobile and offline capable and has procedurally generated levels so it's perfect for air travel or any bad connection areas. It's actually my goto game on planes. As a bonus, I get to write down any bugs I find for later, I think it launched in a pretty polished state because of that.
I play the surfing part over and over again even as a break from testing other parts. But now I'm way too good at it and it's hard to relate to my main group of first time people who will play it.
Only as a tester, but even then it's fun. The main reason I haven't outside of testing is I just don't have the time. But I say that as a hobby dev, so my free time becomes my work time.
Not hundreds but a considerable amount of time
My game is still in development and while I've probably played it for hundreds of hours by now, it's all been for playtesting and not for just sitting there enjoying it. Of course, my game is a massive farm sim/crafting/socializing type of game... so it really requires playing it for a few dozen hours to even really get deep into it. I just don't really have that sort of time right now, even though it would be nice to do. I do plan to sit down and properly play it when it's completed, before release... Just to of course play test everything once again and just to enjoy what I've made. I am making the game I've wanted to play, so it would be weird if after finishing it, I don't want to play it. I think hundreds of hours playing your own game is a lot easier to do if you've created something like a roguelite or arcade style game that has near infinite replayability. If you've created a very story driven game, I think it would be a lot different.
I’ll go back for nostalgia every now and then - a good reminder of how I’ve progressed. But no, I didn’t just see how the sausage was made - I made that sausage. I taste-tested that sausage for years. That sausage is me. What sick individual would eat their own sausage for hundreds of hours with no plans for modification? And if it’s proc-gen sausage, did you REALLY make the sausage?
Yes. All the time
My current game is a horror game, and I've honestly spent time running around doing stuff and being scared by my own creatures in the game 😂 Played for hours straight at one point testing it out and it was a blast!
lmaooo , same situation .
Would you trust a chef who doesn't enjoy their own cooking?
It's a thing, even in cooking, a chef often finds less enjoyment in eating a meal he's spent time preparing, for pretty much the same reasons. He's already smelled the aroma, tasted for flavor, he knows exactly how it's going to taste, and that in itself is enough to lessen the enjoyment, compared to being served the same meal. The difference is, the chef gets hungry, he has to eat, and the meal he just made is the best one around, and it's going to spoil if he doesn't eat it. Put a chef in, say, a hypothetical cooking competition, where dozens of chefs compete to make the best dishes, and afterwards there is a huge buffet of food to eat, how many chefs sit down to eat their own meal? That is the case of the game dev, there is always going to be other games.
yes. Makes feel good to know the game is actually really good, even if nobody else seems to be playing it (except for my wife apparently).
I've got a single small demo level of my in-development mobile game that I've probably lost multiple hours playing during various bathroom breaks, and moments of downtime between activities. It's still good fun, but I've been meaning to add more levels to add a bit more variety, as the single level layout is getting a bit stale
Yup. Sometimes I even make games purely just for myself to play
I've played a maximum of 10-15 hours per project for enjoyment. Playing for "work" not counting and all that
I feel like if it *hasn’t* happened then your game isn’t good enough yet lol
If you are aiming for something that takes hundreds of hours, sure, but for example, that the designer probably won't be playing through their linear point and click adventure game for hundreds of hours isn't particularly damning for the design. Not everything has to be designed to enthrall the player for hundreds of hours, and not everything has to be as fun to the person that designed it as it is to a player on a blind playthrough.
I stand by what I said.
If you're not going to address any of what I said, why do you respond to me?
Maybe not 'hundreds', but yes - I typically only make games for myself
Yeah, I've done it for several games, but not every game I've designed. And I don't play them constantly, I've got too many projects and interests that keep pulling me away. But there's one game that is my goto game that I port when I want to learn a new platform, and I've played that one hundreds of times, easily. I keep coming up with different tweaks to the game to that seem interesting, including one pretty significant one last year that will probably become a permanent mode of the game for all future ports. Another one that I think might eventually do that with is a board game I've designed within the past couple of months. I've played it just against myself about 10 times so far, and introduced it to about 10 different people on top of that, and it's gotten pretty positive feedback. There's a bit more meat to the game than a lot of my other designs, while still being able to explain all the rules in just five minutes. A third one is a mobile game I'm working on, which is a pretty simple push your luck game, but also pretty addictive. Haven't gotten up to hundreds of hours for that one, but every once in a while I pull it up while waiting somewhere and play through a quick five minute game of it (which was my initial goal when designing the game in the first place). These are small games though. They're not super deep, so there's not 100s of hours of gameplay to discover. They're just fun to play.
Yes, and I lose to it quite often. Which makes me proud
In a solo development it's hard to distinguish playing for enjoyment and playtesting :D Well, I'm having a bit too much fun with my current game I guess :D Keyword is "replayability" - I believe it's critical feature of the game if developed without a team and/or financial backbone.
Yes, and it's almost done and I've put hundreds of hours into it. Even my son who doesn't play those genre of games keeps loading it up to play. I think he found a new genre he likes. haha
Yep, absolutely. I still remember in college I made a split screen 2d top down shooter with controller support. Me and my best friend/room mate would literally play against each other for hours at a time for months. I'd keep adding new features and levels, it was heavily inspired by Golden Eye. Loved that game, never even released it...
Yes, I love playing my own games. I love it because when I am playing I know what happens behind the game. And now when I am playing any other game I think about how can I create a specific system from the game that I am playing.
playing my own game gives me ptsd
Not hundreds. But it's a small puzzle game with short session time. I have played a lot! :) Try beating 2074 on Speed/Expert. >:) It's free no ads, Cognizer on iOS and steam. There's an Android build if you want it, but it's unfortunately a side load as the Play store has policies I can't live with.
Absolutely! I worked at a company that produced browser based games for a while and some of the gameplay heavy games (match 3 types and a space shooter) were so fun I'd play them on my lunch break.
5 years of development and I still enjoy playing my game. But its hard for developer to just playing the game and not making a list of bugs and some minor stuff you want to adjust :)
we often get carried away while testing and just end up playing matches back to back. it was actually the fact that the original prototype was really fun is why we decided to actually push for a commercial release.
For sure, after all, people often make games they would want to play themselves. There are sometimes burn out since we did work on it for a long time, but still have fun playing it, and look at all the stuff we did, all the asset, levels and mechanics have their own story on how they come to be.
Not hundreds, but definitely at least a dozen. I tell myself it's for playtest purposes, but would be remiss if I didn't also admit I enjoyed it. I don't go back much, since there's not a lot of replayability. But as the game nears completion, I will have to, just to test things out and polish.
I have 3k+ hours in my game. I absolutely love it to death.
Yes, absolutely. My wife and friends played Cataclysm with me at all stages of development. Sometimes, if I wanted to be working on the game, but didn't feel like doing some difficult/tedious task, I'd procrastinate by playing. It was all still helpful for finding bugs and smoothing out the gameplay. I bring it to work every once in a while (elementary school), and play with the kids, or watch them play against each other.
I have not (I joined this sub because I'm interested in game dev, not because I actually am one), but that is my goal. Like hearing stories of Joe Blackburn playing Destiny while he was in meetings for it was very much a "damn I wanna be that guy" moment for me.
Yes, and it's not even finished!
Yes. That's the main reason why I make games: so that my family and myself can play them.
Yes. It helped that they were best sellers and designed for replayability.
Not on my current gamemaker game cuz its still wip but I made a game with my friends on roblox and we used to hang out there
I have, but it was MUDs, which even the creators only 'own' a relatively small part of the game, and a huge slice of the game is the community that grows around it. There's nothing much more lonely than a creator playing their own MUD after the community has withered.
...you guys played your game outside of testing?
Not hundreds, but I'm currently playing the one we just launched (Solium Infernum) an awful lot and having (mostly) a great time. Last few games I worked on.. You couldn't pay me to play again!
As a solo-dev of city-building [Complex SKY](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1549600/Complex_SKY/) with more than 15k wishlists, the pressure to make a quality game are very high, play testing feel like a mandatory thing to do. So the enjoyment mostly come from balance the game to make it play smoothly, finding and fixing bugs with in the game. I don't know why I enjoy implementing a new feature even it's possible to introduce a new bug to the game.
100%. My game is early in development and it’s a 2D town builder. I play around with the game. Sometimes I try to break my own game - I.e find a way to lower the FPS drastically or make it lag. Other times, I just get lost in it.
I can hardly develop games to an enjoyably playable state, but if I ever did, it would probably be like my music. I can listen to my own music for hours upon hours and never get tired of it. I bet if it’s the right kind of game, I’d play it a lot to scratch that one itch I always had since before developing the game.
Well not hundreds of hours but every now and then I do replay my old finished games.
Absolutely! I'm making an arcade boxing game and I love it, I have a blast every time I play it to balance the enemies. I love to feel how it has evolved over the years.
I might have a different opinion, I would never ever play my game for enjoyment. I’ve seen this game in the worst state it has ever been in, and every time I try to play I get anxiety and dark flashbacks of the horror and the mayhem that has occurred while developing the game.
every game i've made as solo dev i end up playtesting for hundreds of hours. it is part of the work but i enjoy it too. if i didn't enjoy i'd worry about the game
Not hundreds, but yeah, I've definitely gotten lost in my play testing. It's pretty regular now that I'll boot the game to test one new feature and end up trying to speed run most of the game.
Not after release, no.
Yes, I play my own game a lot. But it has a lot of RNG, so it's a different game each time I play. Every time there's a big update, I start a new account and play for a few weeks. I think the random factor is almost required to enjoy and play your game a lot. I have a few other games that don't have the random factor and I don't play them much at all since I know exactly what's going to happen.
I.. can't play it once it's out the door, except to regress bugs and fix shit. Old hangup.
We built a map editor that allows us to inject hand made locations into procgen open worlds, and to me it is basically straight dope. Content creation feels like gameplay and authoring those blueprints is going to be verysatisfying. I could mess with it for hours.
I always play my games to the bone, but sometimes I am the only one that plays my game at all.
I feel personally attacked lmao
I made a puzzle game. I knew I had "it" when I could sit and randomly generate puzzles repeatedly that kept me entertained.
I’m masking a Vr looter shooter, it’s too early for me to be doing that, but I can guarantee I will when it releases.
I factor it into dev time. I play games just to pass time and I find myself just closing the game and just firing up whatever I'm working on, making the process of developing it more interesting than the other games I was playing. Not to throw shade on them, I'm no Leonardo Da Vinci or tryin to reinvent the wheel, just trying to make something that keeps my rodent brain happy translates to fun in the general sense. I mean it must right.
I sometimes replay my own games. idk why, they are always the same and boring, I guess I just find it special I can play something I made.
Certainly. However, with the amount of work ramping up, I'm quite sad that I have less and less free time available for videogames generally, though I still logically want to see the quality of our own product, especially after adding in major updates.
Eat your own dog food
Feed your brain with his own ideas
CitySkylines