Epiglottal Axolotl

which programming languages do you like to use for game dev and why?

My actual games (that is, projects whose ultimate goal is to be downloadable from steam/itch/etc) are all written in C++ (using the SFML framework). This is mostly for optimization reasons (compiling to native code means it'll run fast and be small—my most complex one works out to about two megabytes without the audio assets) and distributability reasons (if it's a native executable, there's no other dependencies like there would be using some other games)

That said, that doesn't mean C++ is the only language I use for game development. Since I'm not using an engine, I often find myself having to make additional tooling, such as a level editor GUI or a dialogue script preprocessor. And those are written in whatever language I feel like using; my level editor GUI is in Java (I've forked it a couple times for different projects) and my dialogue script preprocessor is in Python).

I'm also working on an old-school browser "game" (it's static HTML served by a very complex backend) and that's all in Python, because Python was easy to integrate into the existing Apache server where I was planning to host everything. But that's not quite the same.

A friend of mine is streaming Morlequariat tonight, and then afterwards I'll be fixing any bugs they find on my own channel. Come take a look:

if you want to make a game engine, make a game engine

if you want to make a game, do not under any circumstances make a game engine

i started making my game engine five years ago and it's almost done

game's way behind schedule but the engine is going great

you should not be a 10x engineer or whatever, you should be focusing on the vision and ideas and emotions that make your project interesting and beautiful and touching. some of the greatest indie games of all time have absolutely nightmarish codebases because the creator was rightly focused on the player experience

if it shipped, it works

And really - unless you work in a big team and can afford a departure the from the actual work, you should consider whether you really need something to be done in the fastest/most elegant way possible.

Even if the solution is a bit of a hack, you can always come back to it later if that ever becomes an issue.

And indie games are often small enough that "come back to it later" becomes "keep this in mind for the sequel" if the game is well-received.

Once finely put into words by a friend, "While you're optimizing your Entity Component System, folks are shipping their third GameMaker game".

but consider: for some of us, optimizing the code is the fun part and actually shipping something is secondary [looks at pile of homemade software tools that i programmed in hopes that i would someday use them to make games]