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Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

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Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#21

Post by cameronbrown »

I've been working on a game in my free time recently[0], and I can't stress enough how important it is to identify a "critical path" for developing. Games are such a visual and auditory medium that you can make a really polished and interesting experience that falls flat on it's face when it comes to depth or game mechanics.

Get to the very core of what you want your players to feel, their mindset, etc... and then build on top of it.

Part of doing this well is playtesting (note that this is not QA or usability testing, and especially not focus testing). Think of game designs as hypotheses and playtests as experiments. You can learn an absolute ton about your game just from doing this every week or two. I've found that using Steam's Remote Play Together feature made this quite feasible during WFH.

[0] Link in bio if anybody is interested.

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#22

Post by avereveard »

if you are an engineer strapped for time, don't disregard using html + canvas + a canvas game library to build your thing.

html input layer and javascript glue is a order magnitude more efficient than building a guy in a game engine, so unless you specifically want to push into 3d excellence and require full access to gpu performances and features, it can save a lot of tedious work.

I've tried both unity, godot and the previous approach coupled with phaser, and prototyping stuff goes ho so much faster.

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#23

Post by rtpg »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #15

Hey, this is just the sort of thing I'm interested in. I'm an experienced programmer who has no idea what I'm doing with Unity. Unity's tutorials are surprisingly great, but they tend to start with "okay, so a 'variable' is..." and I have to skip forward a bit and just want to know "okay, but say I already know how to program, what's the right way to program with Unity?" I've found very little on that topic, and unfo…

I've messed around with stuff and honestly? Unreal + Blueprints is a much nicer set of tools for experienced programmers I think.

It's visual programming, but it's easy to explore around, there's nice debugging interfaces, and the type inference stuff makes it so that you are presented with a lot of the engine details in a nicely digestible manner.

Unity it's like "OK make a bunch of C# classes and coroutines!" and it gets real messy real quick if you don't know what tools are available to you.

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#24

Post by moritonal »

reedf1 wrote: post #12

The "architecting systems" vs "developing a game" point really hit home. When I've attempted to make a game myself I've ended up developing - a night-sky pixel-art generator based off of night-sky data from SIMBAD. This was seriously overengineered and had an excessive amount of undergrad astrophysics involved. I spent weeks on this and in the end the core gameplay was not even developed!

Sounds amazing, restructure your view of it as a "Toy/Tool" rather than as a "Game" and release it :)

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#25

Post by stepbeek »

avereveard wrote: post #22

if you are an engineer strapped for time, don't disregard using html + canvas + a canvas game library to build your thing. html input layer and javascript glue is a order magnitude more efficient than building a guy in a game engine, so unless you specifically want to push into 3d excellence and require full access to gpu performances and features, it can save a lot of tedious work. I've tried both unity, godot and t…

Did you use a libary or anything like that? Or the API's directly? I love the idea of being able to do more with tools I'm comfortable with :D

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#26

Post by dusted »

angryredblock wrote: post #4

I don’t think it’s bad advice but having shipped multiple (really bad) games, I think it misses the two biggest/best pieces of advice I’ve gotten: 1. GDDs are probably a distraction if you’re a solo dev - prototyping and grayboxing a lot and looking for the fun mechanics without any art/music/story to get in the way or distract is essential 2. If you’re truly just starting (and don’t already have a sense of fun), abs…

I totally agree with you, find something you've liked and reimplement that, and you will soon find yourself tweaking and adding.. That's how SDL-Ball (DX-Ball) and Wizznic! (Puzznic!) came to be :)

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#27

Post by layoric »

insraq wrote: post #18

I've written some learnings after shipped my first game: https://ruoyusun.com/2018/06/15/guide-for-non-game-dev.html As a professional software dev, I've noticed that while both game dev and software dev are "writing code", they are done in a very different way. As a software dev, the value proposition is more or less clear before you start writing code. As a game dev, you can only start to see your value proposition…

I’ve written UIs for various platforms/targets including “UI frameworks” for a games engine and wow you’re not wrong. Made me beg to build web UIs again.

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#28

Post by yetihehe »

woko wrote: post #14
angryredblock wrote: post #4

I don’t think it’s bad advice but having shipped multiple (really bad) games, I think it misses the two biggest/best pieces of advice I’ve gotten: 1. GDDs are probably a distraction if you’re a solo dev - prototyping and grayboxing a lot and looking for the fun mechanics without any art/music/story to get in the way or distract is essential 2. If you’re truly just starting (and don’t already have a sense of fun), abs…

Regarding your second point, there is this talk by Petri Purho (Noita) about making a bland game feel fun to the user: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg As for your first point, I would suggest aspiring devs to try to prepare themselves to take part in "game jams". The constraints (including a time constraint) help focus on important parts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_jam

I would like to add one more, The art of screen shake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#29

Post by splatcollision »

animal531 wrote: post #19
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #15

Hey, this is just the sort of thing I'm interested in. I'm an experienced programmer who has no idea what I'm doing with Unity. Unity's tutorials are surprisingly great, but they tend to start with "okay, so a 'variable' is..." and I have to skip forward a bit and just want to know "okay, but say I already know how to program, what's the right way to program with Unity?" I've found very little on that topic, and unfo…

I find the best way to learn is by just building. You quickly run into questions, which can then be resolved one by one. But having said that, here's some tips. There's no single "right" way, but depending on your game idea you'll run into your own challenges and issues. Learn what GameObject's and Components are and how they work. In Unity you have MonoBehaviour derived classes, but then you might also want some of…

I am literally replying to this so I can find it later. Thanks for the architectural advice!

Re: Making Games on Your Own as an Engineer

#30

Post by TheHideout »

angryredblock wrote: post #4

I don’t think it’s bad advice but having shipped multiple (really bad) games, I think it misses the two biggest/best pieces of advice I’ve gotten: 1. GDDs are probably a distraction if you’re a solo dev - prototyping and grayboxing a lot and looking for the fun mechanics without any art/music/story to get in the way or distract is essential 2. If you’re truly just starting (and don’t already have a sense of fun), abs…

I've released over half a dozen games as a solo developer and 100% agree with this as well. Using off the shelf assets [0] to quickly MVF (Minimum Viable Fun) an idea really helps get up to cruising altitude.

[0] https://opengameart.org/

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