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gamedev (snolf romhack) 🍉 music 🍉 interactive fiction 🍉 pyjama elemental 🍉 nonbinary pan 🍉 💜 @leafcodes

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🍉 Melon 🍉@drmelon11/16/2023, 9:06 AM

liffy 💜@lifning

cullen @cullen11/15/2023, 7:28 PM

A good year to consider learning how computers work

Don't get me wrong, I love tools. I use Game Maker and don't really see a reason not too. This year has me full of anxiety about what happens to your wealth of work, your portfolio, when the subscription service of a software dies.

Corps have tricked us (digital artists, et al) that we are incapable of learning how to use other software--or no software--despite the fact that we learned theirs in the first place. It's too much effort to learn a programming language! Not a good use of your time if your end goal is to make games! So use our software, it's for beginners.

Use the software for 10 years, and you aren't a beginner anymore, but you still feel like one. You have been making games for a decade, but you feel you can't learn a programming language, despite the fact that it is more elementary than learning the software. Like someone who can write a poem but couldn't tell you what a stanza is.

You are not a beginner, but you are trained to think of yourself as one, because beginners are who the software is made for, and the software needs to be paid for.

I implore those who use a game engine to try to make a game in C. Just over the weekend, don't waste your time or whatever. Get a tiny library like RayLib and understand just how easy it is to make games without software. It is mindblowingly simple. You are not trapped, you are not bound to which engine you chose arbitrarily years ago, and you are not a beginner. At the very least, it will help you understand the software you are familiar with better.

#gamedev

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in reply to @cullen's post:

@Janet11/16/2023, 8:52 AM

truth.

though instead of C i would suggest something that brings a pair of batteries... like love2d, tic80, pico8 or something else that doesnt require you to learn memory management.

sure, eventually you will want to do more complex things quicker, on your own, but i think for starters some complexities can and should be avoided.

🍉 Melon 🍉@drmelon11/16/2023, 9:07 AM

people can do it! and it's empowering to wrest control of the computer; it gives you insights and ideas about solving problems even when you go back to out-of-box software engines!

Coda @Codarobo11/16/2023, 9:59 AM

I actually came from the other direction of this; I’m a software dev by trade so the “writing logic in code” part has always been pretty straightforward in itself to me; but every attempt I made at a game for awhile would die in the “i need to figure out every design consideration of a game engine by myself” phase. Being okay with using an existing tool was actually a challenge emotionally (“oh no! Using an engine means it’s not really something you made! Gasp!”) but it helped me focus more on art and game design and let me take a break from coding literally everything…

….then all the Unity shit happened, and now I’m pretty glad that I am fluent enough in Code as a general concept that I was able to start picking up godot again, or work in lua frameworks, without much issue. I would be very unhappy if all of my skills were propriety Unity knowledge right now (and not just some of them). And, truthfully, I abandoned a fairly advanced prototype I had been making in GMS right after they announced the subscription. 🙃

Anyway, really hoping Godot can grow into being some kind of industry standard for people who need to not use Unity/unreal/gms for Capitalism reasons because i like having an IDE!

@SolarLune11/21/2023, 5:14 PM

This is very timely. Tools are very nice, and I love gamedev, so I love gamedev tools as well.

However, at the same time, getting good at any task - art, music, game development, whatever - takes time and persistence. This is the learning process, and even the best artists are constantly learning.

That's the cost of doing; it's not "easier" if you "don't need to learn how to code", or if you use a game engine, because it's not hard to learn how to code. You can't make games easier to make - you can only push the difficulty elsewhere.

You're still spending the same amount of time learning how to make a character walljump in a platformer, or learning exactly why doing UI still sucks in 2023. You're still learning. The longer you make games, the more you learn, regardless of what exactly it is that you learn to do. The hard thing about making games isn't coding, it's the same as any other artistic endeavour - it's learning.

If you learn to code (and you CAN learn), you're making yourself more available to use open-source and freely available software. If you do this, you'll understand and own more of your project, and have it be future-proofed and insured against unwanted third-party modification or alteration.

It's not 1997 anymore - there's quite a few excellent open-source or code-only tools out there to make games - Godot, Defold, Raylib, ct.js, DOME engine, Flax engine, Luxe Engine, pyglet, pygame, Love2D, Ebitengine, Haxeflixel, Heaps, Monogame, LibGDX.

Pick one and go for it.