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Making small games, which is fun in itself

abagames.github.io

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Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#11

Post by prakhar897 »

I've learnt that Game Designing and Game Development are two very different things. You need a creative mind to know what mechanics will be tight and grab the audience. Development on the other hand requires ruthless execution.

hence imo in the beginning, it's best to recreate existing games with atmost a small twist. This makes sure i'm learning one craft adeptly before moving to the next.

Here's a freeboard of a game I worked on recently: https://li-quoridor.vercel.app/ [Still a work in progress]

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#12

Post by felipemnoa »

prakhar897 wrote: post #11

I've learnt that Game Designing and Game Development are two very different things. You need a creative mind to know what mechanics will be tight and grab the audience. Development on the other hand requires ruthless execution. hence imo in the beginning, it's best to recreate existing games with atmost a small twist. This makes sure i'm learning one craft adeptly before moving to the next. Here's a freeboard of a ga…

>>Game Designing and Game Development are two very different things

Right on. Took me a while to realize this. Game Design is the blue printing process of a game. Game Development is the actual building of the game. And Game Design is way harder than what I expected.

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#13

Post by edfletcher_t137 »

This is a lovely book, thank you for putting it together! Immediate bookmark.

They really are fun. In fact making small games was my pandemic challenge: I decided that it was finally time to try these things. I ended up building a tool for cutting up and annotating tile maps first - https://tmt.computerpho.be/ - then used it to create a minimal browser city simluator, https://pc.computerpho.be/. These also served as experiments into building single-file "apps" for the browser, which was fun as well!

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#15

Post by memalign »

8organicbits wrote: post #7

The quick-to-build game model is quite fun. At the start of the pandemic I created a few games, probably about 30min each. My toddlers got to feel part of the process (which unicode emojis should I use?) and they played the games for much longer than I took to build them. These are by no means at the quality of the submission, but they were how my kids learned to use a mouse and keyboard. I definitely encourage other…

Your toddler game ideas are thought-provoking. Thank you for sharing!

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#16

Post by tarruda »

prakhar897 wrote: post #11

I've learnt that Game Designing and Game Development are two very different things. You need a creative mind to know what mechanics will be tight and grab the audience. Development on the other hand requires ruthless execution. hence imo in the beginning, it's best to recreate existing games with atmost a small twist. This makes sure i'm learning one craft adeptly before moving to the next. Here's a freeboard of a ga…

I want to begin game development as a hobby, but I'm unsure where to start. I did follow through https://learnopengl.com/ a few years ago, and while it was a very interesting experience, I imagine I would need to use an existing engine to be productive.

Do you recommend any books and tutorials aimed at experienced programmers with 0 knowledge of game development/design?

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#17

Post by klyrs »

8organicbits wrote: post #7

The quick-to-build game model is quite fun. At the start of the pandemic I created a few games, probably about 30min each. My toddlers got to feel part of the process (which unicode emojis should I use?) and they played the games for much longer than I took to build them. These are by no means at the quality of the submission, but they were how my kids learned to use a mouse and keyboard. I definitely encourage other…

Hahaha, life hack, if my youngster wants more screentime he can spend it playtesting :evil laughter:

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#18

Post by krapp »

tarruda wrote: post #16
prakhar897 wrote: post #11

I've learnt that Game Designing and Game Development are two very different things. You need a creative mind to know what mechanics will be tight and grab the audience. Development on the other hand requires ruthless execution. hence imo in the beginning, it's best to recreate existing games with atmost a small twist. This makes sure i'm learning one craft adeptly before moving to the next. Here's a freeboard of a ga…

I want to begin game development as a hobby, but I'm unsure where to start. I did follow through https://learnopengl.com/ a few years ago, and while it was a very interesting experience, I imagine I would need to use an existing engine to be productive. Do you recommend any books and tutorials aimed at experienced programmers with 0 knowledge of game development/design?

Just start with a framework like Godot. There are plenty of tutorials online.

If you really want to go low level with it, though, my personal sweet spot is C, Lua/LuaJIT and SDL2. Although practically speaking C++ is probably better.

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#19

Post by alectroem »

krapp wrote: post #18
tarruda wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to begin game development as a hobby, but I'm unsure where to start. I did follow through https://learnopengl.com/ a few years ago, and while it was a very interesting experience, I imagine I would need to use an existing engine to be productive. Do you recommend any books and tutorials aimed at experienced programmers with 0 knowledge of game development/design?

Just start with a framework like Godot. There are plenty of tutorials online. If you really want to go low level with it, though, my personal sweet spot is C, Lua/LuaJIT and SDL2. Although practically speaking C++ is probably better.

I would highly recommend starting with a fantasy console such as Pico-8 or TIC-80. They remove the temptation to start by building a game engine from scratch, and instead help you focus on actually creating games! Plus they have great communities, complete docs, and simple apis.

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#20

Post by jessecoleman »

Like others in the comments, I also used my pandemic free time to build a game. building a prototype took me a long weekend, but the long tail of adding state management, mobile responsiveness and animations etc has dwarfed the initial development time.

It quickly went from a fun playground for experimenting with mechanics to a long term project. It's been a great learning experience, and still a lot of fun to work on. But the pure creative joy of concepting and building has been supplanted with the tedium of maintenance and bug fixing.

My game for those interested: https://gramjam.app

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