Determining Minimum System Requirements for a Game

[AJFLink]

Something that has always bugged me (even though I am not near the point to start to actually be concerned about this) is how you determine the hardware requirements for a computer to run a said game. Does this change depending how complex and how much coding and/or text is used in the game? Or is it static across regardless and the ability for a computer to optimally run the is strictly dependent on the Ren'Py engine itself? Sure, I can just say the computer that I use to make and test the game is the parameters for the minimum optimal running requirement. However, this is invalid considering that I could have a very high end computer. I tried looking this up and most answer that I have come across are very lazy and poorly thought out.

Keep in mind the game that I am developing utilizes imagemapping greatly as well as sequential display images that are merely 10 milliseconds in-between each other that loop endlessly until another screen is called to replace it and there are few static images used. There is also looping music, various python variables representing numbers or Boolean statements or "strings" (A/N Technically, the defining of char vs string is irrelevant in Python due to Python's flexible and fluid variable defining versus other languages such as C++, which is a nightmare, at least for me, to make a very simplistic game out of), multiple varying lengths of audio files for sound effects and music (ranging from as short as a little under 1 second to as long as a number of seconds over 40 minutes), and the utilization of randint to determine the way images are displayed sequential to provide an "animated" image. Despite all these things, there is never any lag or problems running on either of my computers (i.e. one being Windows 10 iCore3 Dell and the other being a MacBook Pro 2012 with the latest OS versions for both).

I know what you are thinking. The two computers that I have defined sound like low-end compared to other computers on the market and currently owned by individuals. However, the Dell can run Skyrim at low end graphics but high end distance rendering (and very high on good days). Both can run Team Fortress 2 on highest settings with rarely any lag.

I could just use the minimum requirements given for Doki Doki Literature Club (which was a Ren'Py game published on Steam with a lot of coding and scripting involved in the game itself); however, I want to see what other people think about this matter. You are probably bored out of your mind by the time you are reading this sentence.

[Geoff Moore]

You are probably bored out of your mind by the time you are reading this sentence.

Haha, sadly I'm not. This is a great question! I think most developers just copy minimum specs off a similar game's Steam page haha. However in this case, when you know exactly what the game's doing every step, maybe you could work it out. Sadly I can't, but this would be be worth asking on StackOverflow.