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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

#31

Post by 3737hdhd7372 »

felipemnoa wrote: post #12
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.

Yeah a lot of people think of game design as just being about brainstorming cool ideas

But in reality it’s actually a pretty technical job from what I’ve seen

Can involve a lot of staring at spreadsheets and dealing with stats

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#32

Post by croniev »

mteam88 wrote: post #21

In the first game pictured, timber test [0], you can spam cut repeatedly to get some pretty high scores. I love finding little strategies like this. This is only possible in games with a tiny feedback loop, which I think makes them fun to play on a whole new level. [0] https://abagames.github.io/crisp-game-lib-11-games/?timberte...

I played and enjoyed the game, getting the hang of it quickly. What confused me though was that the tapping sounds were not always that consistent with the cutting and mainly that from the beat it sometimes felt like a rhythm game that makes sense, but sometimes was just completely off. Or maybe thats just a skill issue.

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#33

Post by netghost »

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…

I had a similar experience! My son is 8 now, and he still occasionally asks me to load up the "game" where you choose an emoji and type a number and it show that many of them on the screen.

It's not "fun", but dad made it and he had a say in how it worked, which is huge for kids.

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#36

Post by PsylentKnight »

tarruda wrote: post #22
krapp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 will keep that in mind, thanks. My initial research suggest that Godot games are written in C#. Since you use C/SDL2, do you code directly your own OpenGL engine?

> My initial research suggest that Godot games are written in C#

There are a few supported languages (including a custom Python-like language called GDScript). C# is just just one of them.

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#37

Post by crq-yml »

meheleventyone wrote: post #29
derefr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hence imo in the beginning, it's best to recreate existing games with atmost a small twist ...if your goal is to do game development. If your goal is to do game design , though, then the place to start is making paper prototypes of your game mechanics. Almost anything turn-based can be prototyped on a tabletop with stuff you have lying around the house, and some rules about how you and your friends should move thin…

Having tried to get on board with and use paper prototypes for digital games I’d largely disagree with this. Unless the mechanics are complementary to a board game then you’re largely not going to learn anything useful working this way. I’ve found that even in the case of digital games that do have good parity you learn a lot more as soon as you ditch paper and start working in the native format. With the reflex case…

I concur.

Digital game design lends itself to working "UI down" instead of "data model up" because most of the feel of the game derives from the interface. This is even true if you look at something like Civilization. The first release of that game was primarily built off the feel of the city management - the stats of everything were given very basic tuning. It switched from real time to turn based relatively late in development.

So paper can be used, but mostly in a storyboard kind of way where you're presenting some interactions to testers without coding them up. You don't have to have a full game loop at that stage - the loop is just a hook to stay engaged with those interactions.

The reason why the spreadsheets are relevant now mostly comes down to games having more and more content that needs stat balancing. This was immediately true of Wizardry and derived RPGs, but it's never been necessary for simple arcade games, and it's obviously wrong if your aim is something like a Sokoban puzzle.

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#38

Post by josh-sematic »

jessecoleman wrote: post #20

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 o…

Fun premise! I will note that the dictionary is not as complete as I might hope—it didn’t recognize “tasers,” and there was one other word it rejected that I thought it would get (forgot what it was though). Still, a fun game!

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#39

Post by hesdeadjim »

felipemnoa wrote: post #12
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.

So hard. As a programmer it’s so much easier to get deep in the tech and push off the ambiguous, frustrating, yet rewarding craft of designing content.

I built half the content of a VR game I released a long while back with a friend, and the only thing that got me through it was listening to talks by John Cleese on the topic of creativity. My process could be summed up as: beat my head against a wall, make something okay-ish, get frustrated, try again and again, sleep on it, and eventually repeating that enough times results in awesome stuff.

But I have a hard time calling it “fun” even with the luxury of 7 years of hindsight.

Re: Making small games, which is fun in itself

#40

Post by panzagl »

crq-yml wrote: post #37
meheleventyone wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having tried to get on board with and use paper prototypes for digital games I’d largely disagree with this. Unless the mechanics are complementary to a board game then you’re largely not going to learn anything useful working this way. I’ve found that even in the case of digital games that do have good parity you learn a lot more as soon as you ditch paper and start working in the native format. With the reflex case…

I concur. Digital game design lends itself to working "UI down" instead of "data model up" because most of the feel of the game derives from the interface. This is even true if you look at something like Civilization . The first release of that game was primarily built off the feel of the city management - the stats of everything were given very basic tuning. It switched from real time to turn based relatively late i…

The first release of Civilization was a board game.
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