Intentionally using "worse machines" to develop a game?

Question

I am developing a game intended for desktop computers.

I am afraid of developing a game that will be too costly in aspects of performance, so I am wary of using a machine that might be better than the target devices.

However, I don't know yet what the target devices will look like when my game is finished in 5 years.

How do Indy developers choose a device for developing their game in order not to get carried away with its performance?

Just an example to make it more clear:

If a developer had access to a quantum computer, I guess they shouldn't use it. Else they would lose their ability to estimate the performance on the target devices.

Or is the "developer machine selection approach" not how it's done, and instead, there is simply a certain tri count limit for everything? (I remember that for RE4, there was simply a hard limit for tri count for meshes)

Answer 1

Intentionally doing everything on a weak PC when a stronger one is available to you is just masochism. Developers run lots of tools in parallel to the game which require resources, and also do various amounts of offline processing. Game engine editors, IDEs, compilers, graphic and modeling programs, audio processing etc. can take far more resources than the game itself. Even just 30 seconds of additional loading time each time you run the game can be a huge time waster when you do that a hundred times each day. So intentionally using suboptimal hardware is just hampering your work experience and productivity.

Nevertheless, continually testing the game on multiple configurations is part of the Quality Assurance (QA) process of every well-organized game project.

Larger studios can afford to have whole QA labs stacked with dozens of PCs in all imaginable configurations. They hire a couple highly paid QA engineers who create automated test suits, and an army of lowly paid QA testers to play the game manually. That QA department then tests the game over and over during development and reports any new performance or compatibility problems to the development team. When the developers can not reproduce the problems on their development machines, then they occasionally have to borrow one of those test machines to reproduce and fix the problem.

Smaller development teams or solo developer of course don't have the resources to afford such rigorous QA. Nevertheless, it can still be a good idea to have an older/weaker PC around to check from time to time if the game still runs on it. Even just having a single other PC available for testing can catch a lot of those "works on my machine" problems.

Also keep in mind that technology marches on while you are developing your game. When your game is planned for release in 5 years, then the high-end gaming PC you are sitting at right now will be an outdated model on release day. So developing your game for your current specs will give you a pretty wide audience in 5 years. That means if you are going to treat yourself with a new Intel Core i11-14900 with an RTX 5090 GPU in a couple years, don't eBay the old one right away.

Answer 2

What you're trying to do is called "premature optimization" and it's considered a great evil (1st google link https://stackify.com/premature-optimization-evil/)

In short, performance optimization should only be done:

• when it's factually measured to be a real problem (may never happen)
• by measuring performance with dedicated tools and improving only what harms it (usually a very localised part of your code and not the one you would have expected)

You're putting your project in danger at the moment. Instead, you should focus on a MVP and get market feedback as soon as possible (in ~3 month, not 5 years)

Also if your game really takes 5 years to be developed, the machines in 5 years will be much more powerful or maybe a different form factor or architecture.

Not your question but: "indie game 5 years of development" is a red flag. I'd recommend reading https://gamesfromwithin.com/sometimes-you-have-to-let-go Also remember that creating = 50% building 50% marketing.

Answer 3

As an indy developer, I use whatever I have available. In my case, the desktop machine is a couple years old, so I'm not much afraid I'll overwhelm my players.

There are two easy things you can do:

1. Use an engine that allows you easy access to quality settings so that players can change them to match their device.
2. Use a few different machines (friends, etc.) for testing - not for development, but from time to time run the game on those machines to check if it runs smoothly.

Don't overdo it, though and don't wreck your brain too much - see the other comment about premature optimisation.

Answer 4

The following answer talks in general terms. It is definitely possible to purposely make a game that uses 100% of available resources, but in general terms, you shouldn't worry about it.

Modern computers are ridiculously powerful. Unless your game is doing very specialized computations that you know will use all available resources, I think that as an indie developer you are very unlikely to even come close to the limits of modern computers.

The main bottleneck for game development pipelines today is content. Modern GPUs can draw millions upon millions of triangles per second. To get close to the hardware limitations, you need very high definition 3D models that are very expensive to create. We're talking about tens of millions of dollars of budget to make a game with consistently high quality art assets to naturally reach the limits of modern hardware.

On the other hand, a powerful computer lets you do many things at the same time: coding, debugging, graphics editing, audio editing, project management, and so on. Not using a powerful machine for game making is setting up yourself for a world of pain.