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Any game developers here? Share your projects and insights
I'm curious if we have any game devs on Tildes, either professional or amateur. If so, share your games, experiences, or advice for any aspiring developers.
I briefly dabbled with game development in the past, which amounted to a goofy helicopter combat game made from the Ogre framework. I've been trying to get it running again, and it's inspiring me to get back into hobbyist game development.
Software developer by day, voice actor by night, I get to see multiple sides of projects. That said, for the most part, I don't like to work on the software side of video games usually -- I enjoy doing the voice acting side much more.
Script-writing is hard, and that I'm often handed several iterations of a script (and sometimes drafted into helping edit said script) before I get to record it, and sometimes I see a few iterations after the main recording session. Sometimes, whole portions of the story are re-written while development is going on, and other times, developers just come back and say that something sounded great originally, but now they want a different feel. There's a monumental amount of work taking care of the technical side of things, but when I see people who balance tech AND creative work all for one project, it's awe-inspiring.
I recently voiced a fighting game, and it's been really fun to see what the developers can share with my studio.
I completely agree. It takes a truly talented and passionate individual to juggle all those aspects of a project at once.
How did you get into voice acting?
I sort of stumbled into it by accident. A friend wanted a voicemail recording done for funsies, then it just sort of took off from there. I got into voiceover for short movies, animations, videogames, Kickstarter videos... It's heckin' fun for me. The only thing I'm not fond of is doing commercials, and that's where the big money's at.
I have a completed screenplay that I tossed the idea around of submitting it to a game studio, but was told that they would probably just ignore it. I wouldn't mind getting involved in that part of development, but I would be hopeless at just about all the rest of it!
I had never even considered tabletop games as an entry point, but you make a really great point about graphics, sounds, etc. You can focus strictly on mechanics and narrative.
I’m currently working on a game engine. I’m a pretty big fan of Gamemaker, but it has it’s problems (very high price for hobbyists, students, indies, etc, proprietary, kinda weird scripting language, not the best library support, etc). I haven’t really found a good replacement for Gamemaker that’s: 2D first (Unity, Godot, Unreal, can be a bit more complex due to the fact that all games are technically 3D), a great IDE, good platform support (I’m starting with web support (and desktop and mobile through Electron and Cordova), and I plan on making better native support for other platforms later on), and lets you develop really quickly & easily, while still being powerful enough to make complex stuff.
I’m taking a lot of inspiration from the best features of other game engines, hopefully this project goes somewhere. The base is just a library that you can use separately from everything else. Then I plan on working on an IDE, and at some point native compilers for desktop and mobile.
Thanks, it’ll definitely be open-source, it’s just at such an early stage right now where I’d rather get good amount done before an open source release.
You might be interested in checking out Love2D, although it isn't so much an IDE as a game development library. But from what I've seen it has great platform support, is really intuitive, and is an overall good experience.
I’ve used Love2D before and I love it, and I’m definitely taking some inspiration from it.
I’m going for something a bit more high-level (like Gamemaker), whereas Love2D is a bit more low-level in that it doesn’t provide as much functionality out of the box. I do enjoy how fast you can get a project going with L2D though.
I spent a while a few years ago developing a voxel-based plane game. The basic premise was that you were in this vast, vast wilderness on an archeologic expedition / treasure hunt / quest / whatever and had to rely on air travel to get anywhere in a sensible amount of time. So you'd alternate between exploring ruins, repairing and upgrading your plane, and just plane surviving. I managed to get a demo of the flight aspect working, it was super janky but strangely enjoyable. I didn't go much further than that though, the engine architecture was a mess (I had absolutely no experience writing that kind of code and did not consult any resources while doing it) and it made further progress too difficult.
I also make mods for minecraft beta 1.7 (the last good version, imo) every once in a while. I know how all the code for that version works inside and out so if ever have a question about it for god knows what reason I'm you're guy :P
What’s wrong with the newer minecraft?
I started to lose track of Minecraft news shortly before horses showed up, I'm not sure where that is in the version numbering.
I can't speak to the newest versions of "java minecraft", but a lot of the dislike (at the time) of "new minecraft" is that the declared goal of Microsoft/Mojang at the time was to move everything over to the non-Java version of the program (native C++ or C# if I recall, based on the Pocket Edition codebase).
This was a big deal for the existing fans, since a huge part of the value of the game is/was based on mods that were only possible due to the extremely flexible/dynamic nature of the Java version. I have no idea where the issue stands at the moment though, or what the player split is between the Java/Native editions.
The other thing is, I think, just fans of the older versions having a "purist" attitude (I would consider myself in that camp) and preferring the simpler minimalist approach with mods adding exactly the level of complexity you want, vs the newer versions which started adding features left and right.
I remember when Minecraft was actually a scary game. You were dropped into this world, and you better start gathering wood and making tools so that you could have a shelter up (or just a hole in a rock wall going) before the inevitable fall of darkness. If you got stuck out in the open, you were very likely to die. There was also the ever-present fear of Herobrine showing up out of the darkness, despite the fact that he never actually existed in the game. I miss that. It's nothing like that now.
I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with it per se, it just has a very different feel to the game people who started playing in 2010 and early 2011 enjoyed.
What's nice about developing for b1.7.3 is you know you'll never need to update your mod to a newer version. I actually started work on an a1.2.6 mod years ago that would bridge the chat to a modern version of Minecraft. That way you could have some players in alpha Minecraft and others in full release all chatting with each other.
I'm a computer science student in my last year of study and I've been trying to put everything I've learned together into a game.
It's like final fantasy 1, but uses a card game for its combat system on your turn. Basically, it's final fantasy, but instead of having all your abilities available on a list, you draw a card with an ability and can play those abilities on your turn to do things.
It's been going pretty well. Development is slow because of working on summer classes, but I think it's going well. Going to keep the graphics simple because I'm not that great on the art front.
Story wise, I'm going for a more comedic tone. The main plot is the whole "character wakes up in a strange world" kind of story, but the main character is fully aware of how rediculous the whole concept is in real life and doesn't really go along with the strange world he's found himself in. It makes fun of the whole trope as well as traditional fantasy game plots and tropes.
Hopefully it'll go well. I'm really enjoying working on all of it.
I've been dabbling ever since high school. I've always been meaning to develop something that kept changing in my head, but the basic idea stays the same, see my last thread for more on that. I've tried c++ in the past, didn't like that. Haskell I found to be relatively unproductive because of the ecosystem and windows support. Current candidate is Rust, which I really like so far. Great tool support, great windows support so far (linux is never a question on a language level :D), some really cool librarys, and most importantly a language I like.
I'll always do my work as Open Source. If I ever work professionally on games, it's gonna be supported by something like patreon. But considering how much time I can actually find to "bootstrap" something that people would consider worth funding, that's a long shot.
Advice? Start small. Start with TicTacToe on the command line or something, work your way up. If you have to start on your own, killer, game-to-end-all-games, reduce it like a madman. Boil it down to the minimum idea worth playing. Then boil it down some more. Now you can start. And don't do an MMO.
I make games for the Web. With phone, keyboard, and controller support! Here's one called Cat Hop I made with my roommate last semester. And offline support coming soon!
https://me.nektro.net/apps/cathop/
Reminds me of Scrappy Cat, nice work! I'm on mobile right now and it works great. Is it vanilla html canvas or did you use a library?
Edit: Spelling
Vanilla canvas, with some libs I wrote myself
I worked in the games industry for a couple of years on a couple popular titles (250k+ users, 10k+ concurrent). It was an experience, that's for sure. I worked with some VERY smart people, which was the best part of the job. The worst part of the job was everything else. Long hours for low pay, poor planning, direction change without reason/notice, amateur project management, too many emotionally driven meetings, being treated like I was a college student, and on and on and on.
My advice to anyone wanting to make games: Get a non-games job to pay the bills and make games in your free time. Anecdotally, I got a 75% raise moving from games to a non-game dev job. Now, I make games in my free time where I get to control the whole process and have MUCH more fun doing it.
Happy to answer any questions other than what games I worked on :)
It's such a shame that every single person I have ever met in my career that has worked in game development have all had similar horror stories about the industry's stress, work/life balance, and compensation.
What kind of games do you make now? Do you do it strictly for fun or do you still earn some income from them?
It really is a shame. I've met some wonderfully smart and creative people that work in games only to watch them get beat down by the constant awfulness of the industry.
After leaving the games industry, I started getting involved in AR/VR dev making game-like applications which I'm currently doing for income. In my free time, I like to play around with simple game concepts in AR that usually include some sort of image processing (detection/recognition). I don't generally release anything publicly simply because I usually solve the problem I was looking to solve then move on to another. I tend to have fun solving the hard problems and get really bored with the minutia of polishing the application for release.
I work full time in the board game industry, both designing my own games and working in logistics and game development for Roxley Games. It’s amazing and I’m so lucky to have found a passion that allows me to create and play for a living.
I started designing board games about 4 years ago and currently have 3 games you can find on store shelves or at conventions:
Head of Mousehold from FoxMind Games
Masque of the Red Death from IDW Games
Poetry Slam from Mayday Games
My designer page is here: https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgamedesigner/97437/adam-wyse
I have several more games signed and on the way, and many more games at various stages of development. Highlights this year include: leading development on a redesign of an amazing but little known game from a very well known designer, and having companies come to me with an IP and asking if I could design the game for it. I can’t announce either project yet, but they’re both going to be amazing.
I could talk for hours about board game design, the tabletop industry, and breaking into it as a new designer!
I make some games in game jams. This is my favorite: https://flaqueeau.itch.io/bombo
There are a large number of python libraries that can be used for gamedev, and it really depends both on what exactly you're trying to do and ultimately which one you end up feeling most confident with. As a general piece of advice, I'd look seriously at using Pygame, and if you find that it has drawbacks that make you not want to use it start your search again with that more specific knowledge in mind.
You might consider looking at Twine, which is a HTML/JS based tool for creating interactive fiction. Being web-based it should be fairly straightforward to add whatever other media you want on top.
I would think so, yes.
You'd have to figure out the packaging, but I'm pretty sure there's already a handful of Twine games on there now.
If Twine doesn't provide native packaging itself, it should be pretty easy to set up an Electron style wrapper.
Maybe checkout Ren'Py. Its a python based visual novel engine. https://www.renpy.org/
Don't handicap yourself with only python or JS just because that's the only experience you have. There are plenty of other languages with better frameworks out there that are easy to pickup. Programming techniques tend to have a lot of overlap between languages, so hopping between then should be no big deal.
Decide if you want to work in a full featured game dev platform like Unity / GoDot, or if you prefer to work "in the code" using something like Sublime / VS Code. Assuming you don't go with with a genre specific engine like Ren'Py, Twine, or Adventure Game Studio, knowing your preferred environment can help you pick an engine or framework.
I purchased a VR headset recently, so most of my focus has been on VR development. Currently I'm working on a remake of Portal in VR. Here's a video of my progress so far: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFBrwwn2W-g. VR development is really fun because it lets you connect more with what you actually do. With regular game development when you add something, the screen changes. But in VR when you add something, it's like it's actually there.