Anonymous User asked: hey hthr, you're the coolest developer online who I know hangs around here so I thought you'd be the best to ask: how could I, a programmer by trade, with no artistic skills and no budget, go about starting to make games as a hobby? ideally I'd like to make them 3d though I assume that's probably an added level of complexity I honestly don't know
rules of game development
- "no artistic skills" isn't real. you have an aesthetic sense and the necessary tools to act upon it. ignore the flinch and find your own good-enough
- "no budget" is very real tho. godot is free and good-enough in most cases (though i refuse to use it because i'm cantankerous and think nodes are bad); unity is free in the same sense that objects from a cursed shop are free; monogame/fna are free as long as you're willing to pay six months of your time up-front.
- for non-engine work, my toolset is audacity (free), bfxr (free), glimpse (free but defunct), aseprite (20 bucks and worth it), visual studio (free), notepad (free). if you wanna do 3d modeling i hear blender is Fine
- 3d isn't necessarily harder, it's just a different skillset. the big caveat with 3d is that you have much less control over what the player sees and where they go. level design is an exercise in signposting. learn how to graybox; play with cubes a ton.
- start small. no, smaller. no, even smaller than that. your first game should be no more than 30 seconds; your second, no more than three minutes; your third, no more than fifteen. finishing a project is ten times as important as starting one, and scale is completely unrelated to quality. my best piece of pure design work is a project that takes less than four minutes to play.
- read A Burglar's Guide to the City by geoff manaugh. then The City & the City by china mieville. then Going Postal by terry pratchett
- a game only exists in the player's head. the systems you create do not matter; only the ways in which they are interpreted by the player. any sufficiently complex backend system is indistinguishable from a random number generator
- games which only exist in conversation with other games are boring. steal from every aspect of your life, every tiny fascinating thing, and use that as fuel to create something wholly new. you're still allowed to make a mario clone for practice tho
- good luck!
all the best art is made by people who have interests far beyond just that thing. Go get a weird hobby. Read some books. Find something you love that has nothing to do with games and get really fuckin weird about it. When you come back and make a game, some of that comes with you.
