Why I started (and stopped) making games

https://godotengine.org/

Unity had unreal are both excellent million $$ packages you can use for free(ish) that come with integrated editors and asset pipelines, massive plugin/package ecosystems and even one click playable templates.

What more do you want?

It takes too long to open the editor? Cry me a river! What do you want, a lean editor / hit code reloading / functional code only / truely free? Look at bevy or Godot.

I mean come on, this is the golden age of indie development for games, where literally anyone can make a game in like a days effort following a YouTube tutorial.

The tooling is bad. Pppohhfhfhfhfhttt.

This is like some saying they don’t use the internet because the speeds are too slow when they don’t have a free optic fibre literally from the provider to their door step.

Löve is super fun, lua is cool but at some point it gets tiring to get more advanced things working. For 'simple' things you can't go wrong.

Haxe is amazing (I learned flash after it was dead o.O) several different frameworks to choose from, many plugins kinda dead but still big community. Compiled to everything you need, some Frameworks even have console targets.

However this coming from someone who hasn't released a real game yet.

i change the engine regularly and it compiles in 30 seconds. good linux support, nice api, and it’s fast.

the engine is compiled as a part of game source. this feels like the right way. it’s all one thing.

I learned a ton from Battle.net.

Such a shame that it was passed up for porting to other platforms. Would love to play it on my Switch like I can the followup.

The cog language (more or less C syntax) was far more powerful than the base game really made use of. I think the grappling hook mods really got me started though, the engine wasn't super modern but few games really sold the vertigo of wide open cliffs and pits like this one did. I like tinkering with it far more than I did playing it. Cog seemed almost bolted on and the base cogs really only were sort of complicated for weapon handling and scripted level events. But I remember making laser trip mines (and the ability to shoot the mines with a blaster), a crude rope for the grappling hook, reloading weapons, etc. By the time I moved on I was implementing A* pathfinding for a replacement AI written in cog. I'd switched to Mysteries of the Sith just to get access to more cog verbs.

We're very similar, it was my introduction to game editing - I was never a fan of DOOM, Quake or Unreal/Tournament. But, I played around so much with JKEdit, and even continued with Jedi Outcast. It was by far the most fun I had with modding a game until Morrowind came out years later.

I really wish that modern games were as accessible, at least at a surface level - modding has fallen to the sidelines in recent years - I can't even think of the last game that came with an editor outside of a Bethesda game.

>Chasing novelty for the sake of novelty is silly. Gameplay mechanics often don't work out the way you plan in your mind. I find that bottom-up design is much more effective.

But I guess that's the thing about game design. There is no one true blue answer, and it ultimately comes down to how you approach problems in general. I'm guessing some are just really good at deeply analyzing a game and polishing up their own variation of that game, while others are better off learning concepts and then drawing their own experiences together rather than following a tight template.

(Note: this ofc can vary even in the same person, from genre to genre. I'm sure some fighting game experts can design their own fighting game down to the number of frames per attack per character. but also can't figure out a basic game loop for an FPS.)

Nothing complicated, really. Wolf3d-style, puzzles, etc. Because these are mostly made to have some computer-related fun together with my daughter, they don't really need that boring kind of polish a real game requires. So it's pure fun.

After making a few stupid 3d game prototypes I've come to a conclusion that pure libSDL tinkering gets old really fast so I wanted an engine, and Quake 1 suits my purpose perfectly: scriptable through a simple language (QuakeC), a bunch of level editors available(Trenchbroom is a dream), as well as a small and welcoming community. And this is probably the last broadly used 3d engine that a semi-decent programmer can understand at all levels.

I even made an Emacs mode for QuakeC editing. This is part of the fun!

None of my side projects were very good, but I loved working on them. My personal favorites were Promiscuous Flea, Alien Tree, and Adopt-a-Human.

I work in professional spaces as an engine/graphics programmer for some 7 years now. But I've also been doing stuff on the side. Nothing serious tho, so no links to show you.

Thing is, the kind of game I want requires some competent art and at this point I think it's better for me to learn that. So while (very very slowly) planning my game and learning knowledge professional, I want to do some classes in art for a few years, and hopefully by that time I can start to make a game that will truly wow people. The kind that makes you say "wow, this was made by 1 person?". That's my goal. Don't care if it takes 2 months or 10 years, but I feel like I already lost so much time.

(note: I'm not opposed to help. Far from it. But I have nothing to offer and all my friends aren't really doing that kinda thing. I imagine the art I use may not even be final art. Just enough to show I'm serious and maybe attract an artist who actually knows what they are doing).

If one works alone on a game, they may find that they keep solving technical problems, without actually producing a game, but rather, producing an engine. If one works in a team, and nobody takes a creative lead, the same thing happens - technical advancements in the game, but no content.

In the right conditions (either a balanced team, or a single dev who enjoys both aspects), game development is fantastic - from the engineering perspective, game development is a very challenging (in an interesting way) field. But I think it's not easy to find the right context.

HN threads about it:

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30334667

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34464865

It was, in fact, a childhood dream of mine to write a game like this. However, the little GW-BASIC programming I knew and the very limited access to computers I had during my childhood was insufficient to write anything more sophisticated than simple text-based adventure programs. This game is written using plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It uses HTML5 Canvas for graphics and Web Audio for sound. Although 25 years too late, writing this little game fulfilled that childhood dream of mine!

I'm very excited for AI enabling people with cool ideas to achieve them much faster - game dev is far too technically labor intensive for a lot of creative types, it'll be fun to see how AI-enabled tooling allows more creators to realize their visions.

At a stretch, I'm hoping it'll produce the same explosion of individuated expression as widespread literacy did with the novel.

  -I value the tiny shred of anonymity I have here so I can continue to express stupid opinions without being too self conscious about it.

  -Honestly they just aren't very good, at least not in any traditional sense. I find that I am not passionate enough about most of my ideas to expend the time that seems necessary to flesh them out into a coherent and worthwhile experience.

A good platform that forces you to think small is pico-8, it's got all the tooling built in but it's on a very small screen and you're limited to something like 8K tokens of source code. But some of the games they've built in it are great, like Celeste.

I've tried a platformer (from a tutorial) and a Zelda-like game, but got stuck at some point so I should make something even smaller / simpler. Maybe that tunnel game mentioned in the OP, I used to love games like that. Oh, and the first game I made from a tutorial was like the 'helicopter game', single button, randomly generated levels, that kinda thing. Can be cobbled together in a matter of hours.

My dreams of opening a wife and husband studio are dead dead dead after seeing all the failed hopes and dreams of indie developers on reddit, discord, etc.

I'm currently working on a Godot project (highly recommend the engine for hobbyists).

The last project I released is a free total conversion survival horror mod for Half-life 2 – https://fourthstoa.itch.io/the-apocalypse-of-eden

I usually make these small games because I find easier to scope and plan and finish. Some I attempted with bigger scope remain unfinished.

It's a great way to learn a lot, and it has definitely helped me with how I approach problem solving and software design in my day job.

The game rules are actual math, and the puzzles turned out to be fun for kids as well as mathematicians (from my friend circle)!

I do agree with this sentence on the article <<The meta stuff takes as much effort, if not more, than the core game. I mean the menus, instructions, release materials, API integrations for advertisements and high scoreboards, and so on.>> as the menu you can see in my game (which is very unpolished) took as much as the game itself.

That's why the game engines of today are really awesome.