How many video games have you made?

#1 Depends what you mean with "games", "made" and "completed"... =)

I've worked as a freelance on 6 or 7 released commercial games, plus a handful of "demos", plus the things I'm working on at the moment. So basically it's a difficult question to give a too precise answer to.

#2 I helped work on a top-down puzzle game for GID once...
I was helping the Realm Wars project...
I've worked on some projects that never took flight at all...
My only real completions have been levels for Warcraft 2 and building sets for Sim City 3000, besides some other level and editing work on an assortment of games.

Honestly, I had more work done for my fighting game on Mario Paint for the SNES!

Go figure, eh?

#3 0 (zero).

Unless you count tying in a game from a book line-by-line...

In that case, 1 (one).... and 20 (aprox) years ago.


Hey, at least i'm honest... and I do plan on having something done before IGC this year too... talk about high hopes!

#4 Heh, in my opinion, games are never finished...even when you've swept out all the bugs, you can always expand on them. Plus, there's the community, always looking for modding.

However, I HAVE reached a certain point in my development of a browser-based game (Apocalypse Game Engine: http://sourceforge.net/projects/apocalypse) which I feel comfortable as calling it a game of my own...it's far from completetion, but I think it's getting pretty close. Time will tell.

#5 Are you talking COMMERCIAL games?

Then I've had nine.

Warhawk (Sony, 1995, Playstation)

Twisted Metal (Sony, 1995, Playstation - yes, I worked on two games at once)

Jet Moto (Sony, 1996, Playstation)

Outwars (Microsoft, 1998 or so, PC)

Snowmobile Racing (GT Interactive, 1999, PC)

Snowmobile Championship 2000 (GT Interactive, 1999, PC)

Animorphs: Shattered Reality(Infogrammes, 2000, Playstation)

ECW 2: Anarchy Rulz (Acclaim, 2000 or 2001, Dreamcast)

Void War (Rampant Games, 2004, PC)

The last one is my first independent game. It's also the first one I've been really proud of for a long time (I was proud of the Snowmobile games because we did them so freaking fast... 90 days from concept to completion. We pretty much worked around the clock on those.) Warhawk, Twisted Metal, and Jet Moto all went on to sell well over a million copies (and all went on to spawn sequels - there's apparently a Warhawk PS3 under development from some of my former coworkers).

Team sizes varied. Warhawk, Twisted Metal, and Jet Moto had teams of about a dozen people working on them full-time. Outwars was about the same (ostensibly we had more people, but there were... complications... so half the people were really only there part-time). The Snowmobile Racing games were done with teams of about four people. For ECW2, I was only working on the port, so it was about three programmers and QA working with existing content. Void War was mainly me working on it part-time (though towards the end it was closer to full-time). I did have lots of people help me out on it as they could, though.

All of these games used custom engines. Void War can be downloaded (and purchased, hint hint!) here at Garage Games. While I *could* have continued to use my own custom engine, for my next game I am using Torque. Once upon a time, it was true that it took about as much time to create your own engine as it was to learn and modify an existing engine to your purposes. I don't think that's true any longer. While it doesn't take a genius to get a cool DirectX / OpenGL 3D demo on the screen, there are a ton of DETAILS (not to mention bug fixing and optimization) that need to go into an engine. Some are fun, like collision detection and multitexture support or creating heightmapped terrain. But when you get down into the nuts and bolts of making them look good, fixing the inevitable bugs, animation (for me, at least) support, importers from various file formats so your modelers can be productive, states, instancing, blah blah blah... there's an awful lot of "butt in chair" work that needs to be done when I'd rather be making GAMES.

So... go Torque!

#6 Oh, I've also had one publicly-released proto-game (I guess it IS a full, playable game, but I'd hardly consider it finished) that I did for a "Game In A Week" - it's called Hackenslash, and you can download it (and the sourcecode) from my website.

So... ten? Kinda? Nine-and-a-half?

#7 @Jay
I remember playing Twisted Metal and Jet Moto with my friends in High School! That was back before I sealed myself away from the world to make games. I really liked Jet Moto. Very cool.

I've only shipped one game about 7 years ago I think. I only sold two copies. I've worked on a lot though (always my own boss). I think I'm on game idea number 7 or 8. Lost count several years ago. I'm think'in with T2D I've got a good change of shipping again. Well, back to work.

-Peter

#8 5 commercial and 2 indie titles shipped here.

#9 1 Commercial product (Outer-Rim Pod Digger) and lots of freeware games

#10 No games here.
Only development taken to completion is a handful of custom maps for UT2004.
And a whole lot of experiementing learning ....

#11 Same as Brian - No game here. Just a lot of levels of Rune, Deus Ex, Unreal, UT2003/4, NWN, Dungeon Siege, Morrowind, Enclave, I'm starting on a Chronicles of Riddick level, Doom3, Far Cry, Dead Mans Hand, Splinter Cell 2, and Thief Deadly Shadows.

Oh yeah... and I did a Robin Hood mod for the Make Something Unreal Contest but never submitted it. And I have learned to use just about every level editor out there for just about every game that you can make a level in. My favorite is the Nolf 2 editor and the Half Life 2 editor but I never was that interested in making Nolf or HL levels. Mostly cause what am I gonna make to add to those games? I can just play them and have fun.

#12 3 or 4 hobbyist 2D games in homemade engines. They were mostly just learning projects and never shipped except to a few friends.

#13 No commercial games for me, just a handful of 2d side scrollers in SDL, 3d rubix cube, usual mods and a 3d character generation tool.

#14 None for me, just a lot of conceptual things that sit on my computer never to see the light of day.

#15 At a professional studio:I worked on 11 games, 9 of which shipped (the two that did not were ended when the studio was shut down)

As an Indie. ThinkTanks, and ThinkTanks xbox.. not sure if that counts as 1 or 2. These were both done with the TGE. 8 content packs (I count them because they shipped, and shipping any product takes work and time and helps with the learning process). At the moment, I am working on several products (games) that will eventually end up shipping in some form. The count at this point in time is 4 products in development (at various stages), with dRacer being the one that everyone knows about.

I also want to add that at BraveTree we had 3 games we worked on that may never see the light of day.. 2 were prototypes that, while decent, just did not seem 'right', and one was a co production with another company that never got finished (for various reasons).

#16 I believe I am on my 8th title now between my work here in the indie community and my work at my day job creating electonic gaming (for the real gaming industry).

The actual break down is 1 for the indie scene making your more "traditional" games such as Lore Invasion, though there are two current titles in production Realm Wars 2 and something from 21-6 which I cannot talk about too much. The other 7 games are puzzle/gambling games created for the gaming industry much along the lines of the top games you see coming out in Shockwave or RealArcade.

Its an intersting mixture but its also a lot of fun and variety that makes you think a lot about the type of games that you are doing and how to best address your target audience without overkilling things.

#17 L Foster, interesting, you don't consider Indie work to be in the "real" gaming industry?

My wife's son plays a large percentage of Indie titles along with the retail titles he plays on PS2/Xbox/PSP. I'd say about 90% of the games he plays on a PC are Indie titles -- the only recent PC game I've seen him playing is "Knights of the Old Republic 2", and he actually stopped about halfway through the game and hasn't picked it up since...


Anyway, my own experience:

I've worked on 3 PS2 Games at Surreal Software (using Surreal's in-house "Riot" engine -- I hear they're using Unreal's Engine now), two of which were published ("Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Suffering", both of which use the UI system I developed as my first "task" after getting hired there.). The unfortunate dumping of "Treason of Isengard" by Vivendi Universal cost me a job, and a showcase for much more of my code. In that game, the aforementioned UI system was used yet again, as well as much code I wrote for in game systems such as corpse management, special orc combat behaviors, siege engines, rain/fog effects, and much more.

Poop. :p

Since then, I've also worked on 3 games, solo, as class projects for a Game Development Certificate.

One of these can be downloaded from my site (witchspire.com) that I originally designed for the PalmOS, but ended up doing on the PC due to the 3-month design->completion time constraint of the course. Another that I'm working on (Using T2D as the engine) -- about 70% complete, and another that I'm working on (Using Java 1.5), about 80% complete (I've got a bit of drawing and sound work to do). A progression of other projects is planned following these.

Just cooling my jets a bit while my son prepares for Kindergarten. ;)

#18 @Eron Wow! Surreal Software, huh? Did you ever work on the Draken project? That was one of my favorite games of all time!

#19 No, Drakan 2 was released on PS2 just before I signed on. IMHO, that's Surreal's best title to date! Having Sony as the publisher helped, I'm sure. Too bad there won't be more titles in that universe, it was a pretty neat environment for RPG/Adventure titles. Rynn kicked ass as a heroine, and combined with the dragon menace known as Arokh, offered a cool bit of gameplay. I loved swooping down and frying the fleeing grawls.... :)

Vivendi was so-so as a publisher... Midway much better (There was quite a bit more money and time put behind "The Suffering" as opposed to "Fellowship" -- and it's certainly clear to see). I'm sure that Surreal's acquisition by Midway was a totally "good thing" for Surreal itself. These days, being a studio for a large publisher is a position of comfort, whereas before there was much (well founded, as it turned out) anxiety in the company.

#20 @Eron

No sorry I guess you mis interpreted me there. When I say "real gaming industry" I literally mean the gaming industry or as it is more commonly known by the general public when they say "gaming industry" gambling. Its actually quite common for computer gamers to mix up the two though.