What kind of effort goes into creating a game

[Force Flow]

Quite an interesting read.

The hardest part of making a game has always been the engineering. In times past, game engineering was mainly about low-level optimization—writing code that would run quickly on the target computer, leveraging clever little tricks whenever possible. But in the past ten years, games have ballooned in complexity. Now the primary technical challenge is simply getting the code to work to produce an end result that bears some semblance to the desired functionality.

http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?...owpage&pid=114

[grasshopperbe]

That is indeed a very good article.
I do "level-building" and skinning as a "hobby" for some games like mohaa or jedi knight (mostly radiant created games) and just creating the geometry and textures for a relatively small level takes a looong time and a lot of thinking and trying . And that is just a very very small part of the totality of the game.

I think this can make one understand a bit better why there are so many upgrades and fixes for pc games.