I want to make a game. A video game. A really cool video game. I’ve got an idea and it’s going to be the best thing ever.
A video game needs an engine, so I need to choose one. Or build one? Commercial engines are big and scary, indie engines might limit my options, making my own engine is hard—I should investigate all of these options to make an informed choice. But wait, I can’t make a decision like that without having a solid idea of the features and mechanics I want to implement. I need a comprehensive design doc with all of that laid out. Now should I have baked or dynamic lighting...
13-year-old omegastick didn’t get much done.
I want to make a game. A video game. A really cool video game. I’ve got an idea and it’s going to be the best thing ever.
But I tried that before and never got around to actually building it.
Okay, there’s an easy fix for that, let’s open Vim and get to typing. Drawing some sprites to the screen: not so hard. Mouse and keyboard input. Audio. Oof, UI, there goes three weeks. All right, at least we’re ready for the core mechanics now. Oh, my graphics implementation is naive and performance is ass. No problem, I know how to optimize that, I’ve just got to untangle the spaghetti around GameEntityFactory. Wait, there’s a memory leak?
I want to make a game. To limit the choices, I will go with Java, because that is the language I have most experience with; if something can’t be done there, tough luck, the game simply won’t have that feature.
Well, my “experience with Java” is mostly coding back ends, so there are a few details relevant to writing games that I am not familiar with, such as how to process pictures, how to animate them without flickering, how to play sound. But these are details that can be explored one at a time. To give myself extra motivation, I can simultaneously write a blog as I am researching; the blog will also serve as notes to my future self, and who knows, maybe luck will shine on me and I make some extra income on Substack.
Five years later… uhm, I am probably 30% there? (Depends on the kind of game.) And before I finish, this will become completely obsolete, because the only reasonable way to write a game will be to tell the AI “here are the specs, make me the game”.
But some of the demos made for the blog technically are games (1, 2, 3, 4 - sorry no binaries provided), so maybe mission kinda accomplished, but not in the way it was intended.
The point I am stuck at now is basically: I could try to make an actual game (with title screen and credits and music and sound effect and most importantly an installler), or figure out how to do something a little more complicated, and I always choose the latter. Well, that plus having little free time. Soon I’m 50.
I would love to get involved in a lesswrong gamedev blog ring. High opportunity for it to be very weird, probably not much Unity even if it would do us good.
I want to make a game. A video game. A really cool video game. I’ve got an idea and it’s going to be the best thing ever.
A video game needs an engine, so I need to choose one. Or build one? Commercial engines are big and scary, indie engines might limit my options, making my own engine is hard—I should investigate all of these options to make an informed choice. But wait, I can’t make a decision like that without having a solid idea of the features and mechanics I want to implement. I need a comprehensive design doc with all of that laid out. Now should I have baked or dynamic lighting...
13-year-old omegastick didn’t get much done.
I want to make a game. A video game. A really cool video game. I’ve got an idea and it’s going to be the best thing ever.
But I tried that before and never got around to actually building it.
Okay, there’s an easy fix for that, let’s open Vim and get to typing. Drawing some sprites to the screen: not so hard. Mouse and keyboard input. Audio. Oof, UI, there goes three weeks. All right, at least we’re ready for the core mechanics now. Oh, my graphics implementation is naive and performance is ass. No problem, I know how to optimize that, I’ve just got to untangle the spaghetti around GameEntityFactory. Wait, there’s a memory leak?
20-year-old omegastick didn’t get much done.
I want to make a game. To limit the choices, I will go with Java, because that is the language I have most experience with; if something can’t be done there, tough luck, the game simply won’t have that feature.
Well, my “experience with Java” is mostly coding back ends, so there are a few details relevant to writing games that I am not familiar with, such as how to process pictures, how to animate them without flickering, how to play sound. But these are details that can be explored one at a time. To give myself extra motivation, I can simultaneously write a blog as I am researching; the blog will also serve as notes to my future self, and who knows, maybe luck will shine on me and I make some extra income on Substack.
Five years later… uhm, I am probably 30% there? (Depends on the kind of game.) And before I finish, this will become completely obsolete, because the only reasonable way to write a game will be to tell the AI “here are the specs, make me the game”.
But some of the demos made for the blog technically are games (1, 2, 3, 4 - sorry no binaries provided), so maybe mission kinda accomplished, but not in the way it was intended.
The point I am stuck at now is basically: I could try to make an actual game (with title screen and credits and music and sound effect and most importantly an installler), or figure out how to do something a little more complicated, and I always choose the latter. Well, that plus having little free time. Soon I’m 50.
I would love to get involved in a lesswrong gamedev blog ring. High opportunity for it to be very weird, probably not much Unity even if it would do us good.