Congratulations on working in your childhood dream and seeing it to completion!
Thank you very much, appreciate it!
Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
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Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#12This is a fun little game and worth the money. Easy to get into, easy to just play for a few seconds or a few minutes.
Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#13I love it! I'm finding it really hard to find the time, motivation, and focus to sit down and learn the prerequisites required to accomplish something truly challenging later in life (I'm in my late 40's too). Congratulations on shipping your first game! That is a tremendous accomplishment and you should be very proud!
Thank you, I appreciate it. Yeah, it really is hard. Time and motivation are rare currencies. There is just so much shit to do in "life-ing." I hope that you get to do the things that make you happy.
Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#14Looks great man, keep it up!
Thank you so much!
Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#15My 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?
Some really great resources for kids to learn to program games:
CodeCombat
Construct 3
Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#16My 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?
I am developer with over 20 years of experience. I have learned programming from books where computers were generally not available where I grew up.
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.
Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#17My 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?
Coding Games in scratch [1]
[1] https://www.dk.com/us/book/9781465477330-coding-games-in-scr...
Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#18Thank you for both the inspiration and distraction! As a fellow-traveler (similar age, similar situation), I completely empathize with the struggle needed to accomplish something like this.
Bought!
Also: great set of credits including the tutorials and such, and waves to fellow Canadians
Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#19great story and the game looks cool from the screen shots and videos in the app store. wonder if you have plans to introduce a free version with in-app purchases. bet you will get more users.
You know, we've considered it and we've been approached by a couple of publishers in the "hyper casual" space to go the route of free-but-with-IAPs. First the terms of industry-standard contracts are onerous. And second...well, I personally love casual games. And I never minded paying a reasonable amount for games I play. And then there are games like Two Dots that I really, really liked but the endless monetization…
Congrats on the release!
I can only say anecdotally from my own experience, but the games we had listed for a price got 1% or less of the downloads of the same game after we made it free. People complain about free with IAP, but the $ shows otherwise.
Re: Show HN: I'm 48 and finally learning how to be a game developer
#20My 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?
This may not be age appropriate depending on your kid, but the (free) CS50 course for games from Harvard [1] is outstanding and accessible to someone with a beginner level of experience. It's not as intro level as something like Scratch would be, but it's very practical hands on learning with tons of resources for anyone who wants to get "serious" about game programming.