Hi,

I'm curious if anyone in this group has achieved success in game development, whether that's carving out a career or earning any amount of income from it.

I'm currently working as a software developer, but my passion lies in game development. I'm all too aware that achieving any measure of success in this field is next to impossible. Hence, I'm reaching out here, hoping to gather insights and advice from those who have walked this path in the past, or those who are currently walking alongside/behind me.

One of my specific questions is about the types of games I should focus on creating. Specifically, I've heard differing opinions on whether it's more advantageous to develop a series of small games with advertisements for mobile platforms or to invest in larger, premium games for platforms like Steam. Can anyone share their insights or experiences regarding this dilemma? Is there a clear advantage to one approach over the other?

Currently I am using godot to make a larger scale game, but I am considering switching to defold and making smaller scale games with ads.

I saw some folks here discuss making games for the playdate. How much should one consider targeting niche platforms like this? Some of the users I saw discuss this seem to have had good success.

Some general questions: How did you break into game dev? What were you doing before? Do you see game dev as a viable career, only as a source of side income, or is it just a hobby?

Any guidance or experiences you can share would be greatly appreciated.

Gametje

Hi all been working on this project for a while in my spare time. I wanted to share it with this community to see what you all thought.

What is it?

It is a set of online games (currently only 2) which can be played in person with a central screen (like a TV) or remotely via video chat with screen sharing. Essentially there is a host screen and then each player has their own player screen (laptop or phone etc). It is playable in 8 languages at the moment (feel free to request any others!) It also has an integrated ChatGPT player which can be turned on/off in game settings if you prefer to play without it. There are some game mechanics to identify a ChatGPT answer which can yield some funny reactions if you choose a human's answer! It has Chromecast support and works well on Amazon Fire sticks. Visually, it is still a little rough around the edges as frontend design isn't my forte but the core concept is there. I have been play testing it with friends but have not shared it publicly yet.

Why is it called Gametje?

I have been living in the Netherlands for some years and my original motivation for starting this project was to create a game that supported languages other than English. I wanted to incorporate something Dutch into the name. tje is one of the diminutive endings in Dutch. It is usually meant to soften a word or make it "smaller". So Gametje -> a little game.

Where can I try it?

https://gametje.com/

You can either create an account (user/pass with email confirm) or try it out as a guest (navigate to either game, then choose continue as guest). Currently it is free to host a game. Happy to hear any feedback (both good and bad). Hopefully the host provider I am using to run the game will hold up.

Thanks!

Hi,

I've been mulling ideas about a game for a while now, I'd like to hack out a prototype, and my default would be Love2D. (As an aside: one of the things I like about Love2D was that you could make a basic 'game' in a couple of LoC, and it was 'efficient enough' for what you got. Perhaps the only gripe I had with it was that it didn't output compiled binaries (I mean, you could make it do that, but it seemed like a hack). I think Polycode seemed to be a semi-serious contender, but last I checked (a year or two ago) it's pretty much as dead as a doornail. Some of the other alternatives I remember seeing (Godot? Unity?) felt too much like Blender.

So I've been wondering, it's been a while since I've been keeping tabs on the 'gamedev community', so I don't know if there have been any more recent development in that space.

So I guess my question is: What are people using for game jams nowadays? Preach to me (and everyone else) about your favorite framework and language :)

Background

There's been some talk on ~ before, and it seems like there are quite a few people who are either interested in, learning, or working in game development, so I thought this could be a fun programming challenge.

This one is fairly open-ended: make a game in 1 hour. Any game, any engine, don't worry about art or sound or anything.

Doing is the best way to learn. Most people's first project is something overly ambitious, and when they find that it's more difficult than they thought, they can get discouraged, or even give up entirely. This is why the 1 hour limit is important: it forces you to finish something, even if it's small. When you're done, you can come out of it saying you made a game, and you learned from it.

Chances are the game might not be fun, look bad, be buggy, etc. But don't worry about that, everyone's game will have problems, and if you do create something really fun or innovative, congratulations, you have a prototype that you can expand on later!

"Rules"

Like I said before, these "rules" are pretty simple: make a game in (approximately) 1 hour. You can use any tools you want. If you use external assets (art, sound), it's probably best you use something you have the rights to (see resources). If you're completely new to game development/programming, your goal could even be to finish a tutorial.

If you're the kind of person who tends to get carried away with these things, you might want to post a comment saying you're starting, then another one once you've finished your game.

Please share your finished game, I'm sure everyone would love to try them! If your game is web-based, it can be hosted for free on Github Pages or Itch.io. If downloadable, it can be hosted for free on Google Drive, Mega, Dropbox, Itch.io, etc.

Resources

Engines

If you're a beginner, a good engine to start with is LÖVE. It's very simple, and uses Lua, which is very easy to learn.

If you're familiar with another language, you could use a library to make it in that language. Some examples:

C++: SFML, SDL, Allegro

Javascript: kontra, Phaser, pixi.js

Python: pygame

Rust: Piston, ggez, Amethyst

If you want something more complex, consider Godot, Unity, or Unreal.

You can also try something visual like Construct, Clickteam Fusion, or GDevelop

Art

For such a short time constraint, I'd suggest you use your own "programmer art": just use some basic shapes. Your primary focus should be gameplay.

If you think you have time to find something, try looking on OpenGameArt.

Sound

You can make simple sound effects very quickly with sfxr (or in this case, a web port of sfxr called jsfxr).