Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?
I've tried to make games, but what I ended up was making game engines because that was more appealing to me. My penchant for huge overambitious projects is good sometimes, but not always.
Why I started (and stopped) making games
21–30 of 77 posts
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#22Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?
I do little game programming on the side. I don't program that much anymore on my day job so these little 1-2 kLOC projects with a quick feedback loop are quite enjoyable.
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!
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#23The reason I stopped making games... The tooling! It takes way too long to open Unreal Engine, or to do anything within its UI, and Unity gives me "bad vibes" (technical term) any time I open it. I know these days there are other engines, but I started my programming journey by learning game engines, and perhaps I should have learned programming properly before jumping into game programming.
The tooling is a rabbit hole. Unity gives me the creeps and unreal (afaik) still doesn't work on Linux. However: 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 ever…
Unreal does work on Linux, I'm currently using it on arch
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#24Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?
I was in AAA game dev for a bit over a decade and also made some browser and console games on the side. They're all here: https://liza.io/games/
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.
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#25When I was 13-14 there was a brief period where I was making levels for Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2. I had a “clan” encouraging me to make us our own level and it was simple enough that at 13 I could listen to some Disturbed on my headphone while learning how to use the tooling and follow tutorials to make stuff and get things up and running. It had a basic scripting language (cog files) that you’d use to make elevato…
I have such fond memories of that game, specifically the single player. It was the first time I ever felt truly engrossed by a game storyline. I even loved the FMVs which felt like the perfect blend of CG and live action back then - I later learned that the saber duels were the first captured on film since Return of the Jedi.
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.
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#26Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?
Yes – it's both the most fun and frustrating hobby. :) Nothing gets me in that focus zone like working on a level or cl
oding a new gameplay system. I think it's the thrill of tweaking, testing, tweaking, over and over again, which eventually produces a very satisfying product.
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
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#27I developed/published mobile games for awhile during and immediately after college. I think my games saw somewhere in the ballpark of 500,000 downloads and I made "OK" income from them for 1 - 2 years (roughly on par with a minimum wage job in the US).
I briefly considered going full-time into solo game dev. But once I got my first "real" job offer after college, I quickly let go of that idea.
Many years later, as a SaaS founder now, I have a strong itch to get back into game development. One of my dream goals is to some day exit my company and then comfortably/leisurely "retire" into a career as a solo game dev.
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#28Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?
I wrote a tiny invaders-style game last year: https://susam.net/invaders.html
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!
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#29Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?
I am/was, some how I ended up with my own programming language instead.
Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games
#30The reason I stopped making games... The tooling! It takes way too long to open Unreal Engine, or to do anything within its UI, and Unity gives me "bad vibes" (technical term) any time I open it. I know these days there are other engines, but I started my programming journey by learning game engines, and perhaps I should have learned programming properly before jumping into game programming.
try wickedengine!
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.