- Joined
- Jul 29, 2020
you a game developer? - and game development in general, i guess
- Thread starter DeadwastePrime
- Start date
UtadaWasabi2
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2020
powerleveling
Used to make one during my university year in mandatory one-day game jam for computer engineer freshmen. To cut it short making game needs too many skillsets that I am completely garbage at. It’s really hard when the only thing you can do is coding related shit.
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2017
I have no coding knowledge or anything.
I did once type up a design document for a hypothetical "Doom Clone" style FPS way back when, but that was mainly because I was bored.
I did once type up a design document for a hypothetical "Doom Clone" style FPS way back when, but that was mainly because I was bored.
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2018
I've made a game for the Commodore 64 with some friends as a kid.
To be specific, I've made all the pixel art.
It's garbage but I still have it on an audio cassette.
I've also provided some music for some very small projects which might or might not be on Steam but I don't know if that counts as game development.
It's mostly this:
Dev: "Can you make a 3 minute loop that will fit walking through a spooky forest at night?"
Me: "Yeah, I guess."
Sometimes, I get to see the actual game footage before making the music but most of the time, they just tell you what it will look like.
I do want to learn coding though because I've got some relatively simple game ideas which would sell well if they were actually created.
To be specific, I've made all the pixel art.
It's garbage but I still have it on an audio cassette.
I've also provided some music for some very small projects which might or might not be on Steam but I don't know if that counts as game development.
It's mostly this:
Dev: "Can you make a 3 minute loop that will fit walking through a spooky forest at night?"
Me: "Yeah, I guess."
Sometimes, I get to see the actual game footage before making the music but most of the time, they just tell you what it will look like.
I do want to learn coding though because I've got some relatively simple game ideas which would sell well if they were actually created.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
easy to test: premade engine vs building from scratch, go!
- Joined
- Sep 23, 2019
Premade, theres many to choose from, i recommend source, it seems that engine can do anything.
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2020
Unironic posting time.
Write a rougelike from scratch if you're just starting out, not a Binding of Isaac or some indie game calling itself a rougelike but a real one where everything is a letter. If you have no idea how to write a game and you have minimal programming knowledge it's a good challenge and you don't need to worry about art and music, and you can write it as a console app.
A simple rougelike can be coded in a week if you have no idea what you're doing and you can go completely autistic and slowly build it up to Dwarf Fortress levels over years.
Eurobeat My Meat
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 16, 2020
There is a bit of a stigma with building games from the ground up, including its engine, if you are inexperienced. But it's probably one of the best ways to learn programming, and even a bit of game design. Just keep it to yourself and don't set anyone's expectation up, and you will have a stress-free outlet to improve yourself over time.
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2020
Win98SE
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 7, 2019
Learn to program first. Learning game development and programming at the same time is a fucking disaster and you'll probably need to unlearn a bunch of bad habits later on. Game development is different than traditional application development in both code and project structure, so even talented programmers find a bit of a learning curve - total newbies don't stand a chance IMO and will just need to learn a lot of things the hard way. I tell everyone to learn C because it's often the first time they're exposed to memory management after coming from something like Python. I also think it's valuable to get outside the mindset of OOP and see if you can be more productive without it. If you don't stick with C it will still teach you tons of stuff about programming The Right Way (TM).
I've built games from the ground up, but there's little value in doing it unless whatever your idea is happens to fall outside what the traditional engines/frameworks offer. You should do it so you know what your options are, but nobody cares about bragging rights and you'll just have 1000 technical issues. If you want to talk business, then Unity, GameMaker, and the other development suites blew out the low end of the market, so now PR and marketing are huge parts of the job in addition to the already tough work of developing something worth playing. Unless your game is immediately doing something crazy that's obvious in the first few seconds of a trailer, it's an uphill climb and a huge money/time sink. Thousands of other developers are trying to do the same thing you're doing at any given time, so it's somewhat common to fall into the trap of building weird "share for share"-style relationships that end up in a vortex of developers just sharing each others games over and over with very few potential players paying attention. Just a circlejerk, basically.
Not to discourage anyone, I'd just say keep it as a hobby and have fun with it. When the pressure's off you can focus on prototyping a shitload of games and maybe one day you'll stumble upon something cool that you can polish up a bit and put out there. Too many people show off interesting stuff too early and then fail to deliver. Games also have the tendency to become impossible to work on once they hit 90% completion (see: Rockstar's games, any "crunch" story, etc.)
Read "Designing Games" by Tynan Sylvester. Lots of interesting talk about prototyping and how the brain handles problem solving re: game design and programming.
I've built games from the ground up, but there's little value in doing it unless whatever your idea is happens to fall outside what the traditional engines/frameworks offer. You should do it so you know what your options are, but nobody cares about bragging rights and you'll just have 1000 technical issues. If you want to talk business, then Unity, GameMaker, and the other development suites blew out the low end of the market, so now PR and marketing are huge parts of the job in addition to the already tough work of developing something worth playing. Unless your game is immediately doing something crazy that's obvious in the first few seconds of a trailer, it's an uphill climb and a huge money/time sink. Thousands of other developers are trying to do the same thing you're doing at any given time, so it's somewhat common to fall into the trap of building weird "share for share"-style relationships that end up in a vortex of developers just sharing each others games over and over with very few potential players paying attention. Just a circlejerk, basically.
Not to discourage anyone, I'd just say keep it as a hobby and have fun with it. When the pressure's off you can focus on prototyping a shitload of games and maybe one day you'll stumble upon something cool that you can polish up a bit and put out there. Too many people show off interesting stuff too early and then fail to deliver. Games also have the tendency to become impossible to work on once they hit 90% completion (see: Rockstar's games, any "crunch" story, etc.)
Read "Designing Games" by Tynan Sylvester. Lots of interesting talk about prototyping and how the brain handles problem solving re: game design and programming.
- Joined
- Jan 15, 2019
i've made games using another companies engine. I've never had to deal with things like physics or sound, mostly just level and character and balance design things.
one thing i've learned is players hate reading. They fucking hate it. I can put the most crucial information in bright red glowing text and they won't read it then complain.
i hate them so much.
one thing i've learned is players hate reading. They fucking hate it. I can put the most crucial information in bright red glowing text and they won't read it then complain.
i hate them so much.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
A good lesson might be to write, from scratch, a crappy raycaster in the style of Wolfenstein, then figure out how to make a simple level editor that can load and save files in the format you created, then how to handle animated sprites and play sounds then add some gameplay to the maps. It shouldn't take long and it touches on how many things and tools interact with each other in a simple way.
- Joined
- Mar 25, 2020
as someone who was in the industry itself, my advice to anyone here who actually wants to create their own video games...
Done is better than perfect.
don't get too choked up on small issues like should learn programming first, learn art first, or like setting up everything before you try to make games. Just do it. its ok to stumble and do it badly, but it is better than forever agonizing perfecting every detail you have in your mind about your game before you can actually start making it. It is a very very very very very dangerous mindset to have, and it is the usual downfall of most of the one-man dev team.
so, who cares even if your game is made in RPGmaker? its still a game. just learn what you did wrong from your previous game and correct it in your next game.
Done is better than perfect.
don't get too choked up on small issues like should learn programming first, learn art first, or like setting up everything before you try to make games. Just do it. its ok to stumble and do it badly, but it is better than forever agonizing perfecting every detail you have in your mind about your game before you can actually start making it. It is a very very very very very dangerous mindset to have, and it is the usual downfall of most of the one-man dev team.
so, who cares even if your game is made in RPGmaker? its still a game. just learn what you did wrong from your previous game and correct it in your next game.
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2017
Gamedev sucks and I hate it.
Biggest industry protip: make middleware or models if you want to do something game-ajacent, get paid and stay sane while not having to deal with gamer entitlement.
Everyone into deep systems programming should write their own shitty one at least once and/or write an emulator just as a learning experience. just don't do it expecting to make money off it or dump years into it. Really though, premade but don't feel afraid to pick it apart and rewrite systems you hate; building a better drop-in replacement for a janky system in the engine can make you a nice chunk of cash on the asset store for that engine.
Biggest industry protip: make middleware or models if you want to do something game-ajacent, get paid and stay sane while not having to deal with gamer entitlement.
Everyone into deep systems programming should write their own shitty one at least once and/or write an emulator just as a learning experience. just don't do it expecting to make money off it or dump years into it. Really though, premade but don't feel afraid to pick it apart and rewrite systems you hate; building a better drop-in replacement for a janky system in the engine can make you a nice chunk of cash on the asset store for that engine.
Last edited:
Just wandering
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2020
Tried to do avery basic arcade platformer game on gamemaker without any knowledge on programing...
It do have a visual drag and drop coding system despite looking like a mess
Abandonned it quickly when the character got stuck on wall for unknow reason
It do have a visual drag and drop coding system despite looking like a mess
Abandonned it quickly when the character got stuck on wall for unknow reason
ArthuriusMartyrius
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2018
Heh, Game Maker. Really fun to screw around with but as someone with virtually zero artistic talent at the time, it was a pain trying to draw up sprites and animating all of that shit. The actual coding part wasn't too difficult but still fun.
I suppose if I were still seriously invested in game development, I'd try to go for the niche RTS/FPS hybrid genre. It's never really been seriously tackled and I had some neat ideas for a WW2-themed one back in the day which was basically Company of Heroes crossed with Day of Defeat. Kinda dropped it when trying to figure out all the various AI mechanics became too much of a grind.
Not to mention deciding between a more or less fixed top-down camera like Starcraft or more of a free bird's-eye-view camera of the Total War series.
Oh yeah and dreading trying to figure out how the fuck I would optimize the graphics on that shit.
So really kind of a lost cause from the beginning I guess.
I suppose if I were still seriously invested in game development, I'd try to go for the niche RTS/FPS hybrid genre. It's never really been seriously tackled and I had some neat ideas for a WW2-themed one back in the day which was basically Company of Heroes crossed with Day of Defeat. Kinda dropped it when trying to figure out all the various AI mechanics became too much of a grind.
Not to mention deciding between a more or less fixed top-down camera like Starcraft or more of a free bird's-eye-view camera of the Total War series.
Oh yeah and dreading trying to figure out how the fuck I would optimize the graphics on that shit.
So really kind of a lost cause from the beginning I guess.
Considered HARMful
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
Savage? Natural Selection? Nuclear Dawn? And probably a few more I don't remember now...
- Joined
- Feb 28, 2015
pretty sure no one gives a fuck but ludum dare is coming up soon so if you wanna participate in a game jam from the 2nd to the 4th or 5th, here's your chance
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2020
Off topic but am I the only one who read the title as "You? A game developer?!"
- Joined
- Feb 19, 2017
Like I said, I don't know coding, programming, or anything else. I'm just a worthless idea guy, but if you're one of those idea guy creative types who wants to make a game and you actually have the will to make it work but can't get the hang of coding or programming for whatever reason, keep it small and simple. Don't shoot for the moon and even if it's been done before, so has damn near everything else.
Type up a design document about what your game actually is going to be like.
For example, I mentioned that I typed up a document that outlined a hypothetical FPS that was a simple 90's style "Doom Clone". I did this out of boredom but I decided to do a "self-imposed challenge" to it to make it more fun, instead of just mindless daydreaming.
Keep it small and simple. If you actually have the ideas fleshed out and kept to realistic, small scale, and simple expectations, you're more likely to get the kind of people who actually know shit like coders and programmers to help you out. Try to raise funds for the project as well and see if it can be done with a preexisting engine or one of those game maker programs.
Type up a design document about what your game actually is going to be like.
For example, I mentioned that I typed up a document that outlined a hypothetical FPS that was a simple 90's style "Doom Clone". I did this out of boredom but I decided to do a "self-imposed challenge" to it to make it more fun, instead of just mindless daydreaming.
Keep it small and simple. If you actually have the ideas fleshed out and kept to realistic, small scale, and simple expectations, you're more likely to get the kind of people who actually know shit like coders and programmers to help you out. Try to raise funds for the project as well and see if it can be done with a preexisting engine or one of those game maker programs.