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Why I started (and stopped) making games

austinhenley.com

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Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#31

Post by Cthulhu_ »

prox wrote: post #3

Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?

I've had short stints but I overthink / over-engineer and lose interest very quickly, lol.

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.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#32

Post by robertlagrant »

phil917 wrote: post #27

I 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…

That is definitely not the world's worst plan. I've started building a tiny, rubbish Pong clone in PixiJS for my son to play with me, and it is pretty intoxicating.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#33

Post by ehakan »

herbst wrote: post #16
insomagent wrote: post #6

The 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…

Unity used to provide a UnityHub.AppImage (used for licensing and version management) that with enough duct tape worked on non-ubuntu distros. Now they maintain their apt repo to ship UnityHub and anything other than Ubuntu 20.04 is not viable for getting things done.

Unreal just provides the source code and you compile it yourself, and there are community solutions for different distros.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#34

Post by chuan_l »

Its the " unknown - unknowns " that'll get you every time. From somebody who has an interest in game design , development and worked on a few released titles. Those games just don't look to be any fun ? Its a mistake that a lot of independent developers make : trying to make games , that have the semblance of classic games. Part of this comes from the learning process as well - it takes a lot more to create 3d content , rig it , animate it so on.

Though my best advice is to look within yourself , and your own experience for the situations and narratives that resonate. Look at somebody like " Lucas Pope " who made " Papers Please " " Return of the Obra Dinn " after leaving a full time developer position at " Naughty Dog ". It seems Austin works with AI - assisted code , why not turn that into a game ?

The world is already full of people trying to emulate Tarantino and Miyamoto. Be your own thing , be the next thing and your situation - process is all part of that. Just need to change the mindset a bit and turn your limitations into a different kind of expression. Then there's a lot of hard work !

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#35

Post by Lariscus »

elefanten wrote: post #11
lastangryman wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try Godot. Open source and extremely lightweight compared to Unity and Unreal. It's pleasure to use, none of the baggage of the other engines. I'm a patron contributor. Fantastic for hobbyist tinkering and also viable for full blown commercial games. https://godotengine.org/

Can you share any references for finding the top quality or best known games made using Godot? I haven’t looked in a while.

Take a look at this showreel videos[1][2].

[1] Desktop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAS_pUTFA7o

[2] Mobile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF3QiQfQxeQ

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#36

Post by chuan_l »

insomagent wrote: post #6

The 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.

" Unity " and C# is a better way to bridge a prior understanding of programming with making games. You just need to get over it somehow. There's a lot of great games made with each engine, and all are slow to start up but you're not there for that. You're there for the 80% those engines do so you can spend more time on making the parts that are fun. If you don't start - you'll never make it.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#37

Post by courseofaction »

prox wrote: post #3

Anyone here that makes games for fun or on the side?

Worked in AAA, left to keep it a hobby. Great experience, but not the career for me.

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.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#38

Post by zirgs »

insomagent wrote: post #6

The 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.

Unreal requires a fast ssd these days, yeah.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#39

Post by chuan_l »

herbst wrote: post #16
insomagent wrote: post #6

The 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…

This brought some flashbacks : I worked with a Linux developer on a small binaural game prototype over 8 weeks. He spent those eight weeks comparing tools and beginning to hash something out in assembly which he didn't finish. We made a custom C# wrapper for the spatial sound in " Unity " instead.

Re: Why I started (and stopped) making games

#40

Post by kfrzcode »

herbst wrote: post #16
insomagent wrote: post #6

The 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 works fine on Linux. M1 silicon too.
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