My son wants to learn how to make games but I have no game development experience.
What path did you take to start learning game development?
What path did you take to start learning game development?
- Try a bunch of free engines and platforms. Depending on your son's age, this might mean starting with something like Scratch. I've played around with it myself and it's fun. It at least gives you a feel for game logic and how a game loop should feel.
- GDevelop has come a long way. My son prefers it when he's just doodling around.
- My husband prefers GameMaker Studio 2. But it's a paid program and the export modules (mobile, console, html5) are extra expenses that can add up. Also, GML is a nightmare (just my opinion).
- I use Godot Engine. It's free, lightweight, GDScript is Python-like so pretty easy to get a handle on. It's perfect for 2D development. And the teaching community is very rich.
- There's really no "x is better than y" as far as game engines, IMO...all depends on what you're trying to do and how far you are in expertise/experience. And it also comes down to what engine feels right to you.
- Start with 2D, cannot stress this enough. Make as simple a game as possible when you're starting. This also means staying away from Unity and Unreal because both are simply too much engine for a beginner.
- At some point, you're gonna have to learn how to code for real. Don't have to be a wiz...just enough to be competent.
- Be a generalist, if possible. Depending on what you want to do and/or whether you have collaborators or not...you might also need to have basic art skills. I'm a graphic designer by trade so this wasn't an issue. But I had to learn Blender because I wanted to incorporate 3D art in my games. My husband learned how to make music. I also learned video editing so I could make good trailers. Etc, etc.
- Love games. All kinds of games. I think this should've been first.
- I hope that helps.
Are you working on a next game?
Congratulations on getting it finished and out there!
Maintaining this game but also starting on next ideas.
Thank you very much!
Back when I had enough spare time to do game jams, one critical thing I learned was, once you have some idea, make it simpler. Now make it even simpler. And then, make it simpler again. Repeat that about 20 times, possibly more. Now you have something that you can possibly build and actually release, and guess what, counterintuitively, it'll be fun as hell.
Coz what makes a game fun is not the thousands of wonderful ideas you may have bolted on together, it's just a couple of things you distilled for the love of it, chiseling away, down to the core of the game mechanics, into some magical essence.
It's been frightening alright but I learned so much, and not just about game dev: lots of takeaways that apply to day-to-day development, like finding the balance between quality and getting things done, keeping things ultra-simple, understanding the value in inlining or even repeating code, finding the minimal abstraction sweet spot...
It's OK to be afraid! Turns out it also teaches that you can just let it go, go for it and enjoy the wild ride.
But my son is learning programming (started when he was 6, he just turned 8 recently).
He started by goofing off with some robots programmed in visual languages. Then moved to goofing off even more in Scratch. When pandemic started we found a school that teaches programming online and they used Scratch to program Minecraft which got my son hooked up -- he likes Minecraft a lot and having it do stuff that wouldn't otherwise be possible was a huge motivation for him to learn. He is now attending a second semester in that school and they are using Kodu for some more advanced, 3d goofing off.
My son became big fan of Undertale recently and he approached me to learn to make some fan content based on Undertale. We did some research and found Undertale was made in Game Maker -- a game engine for 2d games. So this is what we just recently started learning. He is excited to finally start learning something that can be used to make professionally looking games and says that if it was good enough to make Undertale it is good enough for him:)
He also just got his own Minecraft server (ehm... Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM) and I am hoping that when he is bored with vanilla gameplay with his school friends he will want to start modding the game in some ways.
Additionally, I can write plugins for PaperMC which is the whole point of having the server in the first place (at least in our case).
Very cool that you can write plugins for your kid's server!
So I wrote a plugin where you can save your current location with a name and you get a small overlay that tells you where you are pointing -- ie. what is saved destination closest to where you are pointing and whether it is right or left of where you point and how far (1, 2 or 3 angle brackets ).
I am also working on couple other plugins.
Later, magazines would ship with floppies that had the free software on it.
EDIT: Still totally fascinated by this. I asked my husband because I remembered that he had a much-beloved Spectrum when he was a kid and sure enough, he had digitized Your Sinclair issues on his iPad and he showed me several examples of games in Basic and hex. Super cool.
https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the-trash-80-part-3/
Have been following it for years and would recommend reading it all the way through. Maybe even get an idea for the next project :)
However, debugging it helped to learn the language. :)
Dr. Dobbs Journal was probably the king of source code listings in magazine format.
Pre-Internet, there were some remarkable mass-distribution Unix magazines with significant source code for utilities: Unix Review and Unix World. Even today, the back issues would be useful.
I remember lusting over the AT&T 3B Unix machines advertised in those, but never could afford one. So I waited until VAX Unix in uni (the arts dept. had an unused one), then SCO and Linux.
CodeCombat
Construct 3
[1] https://www.dk.com/us/book/9781465477330-coding-games-in-scr...