Game dev?

Original Creations
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Chatting to @Brentano elsewhere; thinking about making gamessss! Thought people here might be interested. We could be A Collective. :P I have experience with making tiny things for friends, but not really distributing or anything commercial. We could make a private section of the forum for gamedev discussion, if people prefer less visibility. I figured it’d be slightly easier to have any group discussions on here than on dreamwidth, though dreamwidth is also possible.

Everything beyond “let’s make a game sometime!” very much up in the air; figured we’d get better ideas by discussing!

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I actually picked a silly time to post this since I’m working on a longfic (well, long by my standards), but then everyone’s very busy at the moment, so why not invent yet another project to procrastinate with! =D

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idk if I never saw this or briefly saw and forgot about it. If you’re still interested, I’d love to try!

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I’m still keen! Might motivate me to be more serious about learning android dev. Still no idea of what we’d make, but eh, details, details… :slight_smile:

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I know nothing about Android dev and will go take a look! I think the only thing I had in mind was to keep the first attempt simple so I wouldn’t flake halfway through. :rofl: I assumed there would be a story and characters, though now that I think about it, that’s not really necessary either? I think I’d prefer story, but am open to pretty much anything!

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Agreed! I like to do small projects that are more like prototypes so that something gets finished, so I was thinking we should try various different things and see what works! And just assume there’ll be months-long-gaps where nothing gets done. XD I think we’d have a really good blend of skills but the flakiness is shared. :stuck_out_tongue:

My gamedev experience (minimal as it is) is mostly with arcade-style things, though I think genre doesn’t have to have tooooo much bearing on whether you have a story and characters; I’ve played breakout style games with oddly complex mythology where the gameplay is just “bat and ball”. :slight_smile: My fave game genres can be summarised as “dodge things” and “hit things”. Easy to put a few dialogue bubbles in between rounds! (I’d liiiike to do super cool rpg stuff with gorgeous graphics and spooky forests, but I suspect we won’t have the resources. XD but tbf been a while since I looked at what game engines are offering, and we can always try small snippets of an imagined bigger project just for the fun of it. I would quite like to get to grips with unreal engine.) I did some v simple visual novel things ages back, but I prefer the arcade stuff. A good visual novel could be fun, down the line, though! I do like Long Live the Queen. :slight_smile:

Android just happens to be what I’m learning atm; I’m not particularly attached, and I don’t know it that well yet, I just know how to get a file onto a phone and have some confidence that it’ll run the same way wherever it is, which is more than I can say for some technologies. Stuff for the desktop is annoying because you have to adjust it depending on which desktop and work out how tf your audience would install it. I like the idea of learning browser stuff because it’s more universal, but I’m not into the languages I’ve tried in that area. The android IDE is quite bulky, so tbh I’d rather something I could just do in text files on the ancient laptop I use for writing, but I haven’t thought of a good option, and I do have a decent desktop available. If there’s a tech you’d prefer to work in lmk (or anything you wanna veto, lol).

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My current thoughts are that we should make Blitter Boy but with a story line. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diF0qOWxQ0A Can’t remember if Blitter Boy already has one actually but I’m sure we could make a better one.

Also I have never worked in Android but it would be cool to be able to play it on a phone. I have also heard that Godot is a friendly open source engine for beginners.

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Maybe we should get a list of Games We Like (or Types Of Game We Like), and then we can attempt to rip them off learn how they work as the mood strikes us? I’m thinking we’ll probably want to upload misc pieces as we go and then others can download and add to them at will, so eg: one person uploads skeletal code for a bat and ball game because they felt like doing that that day; three weeks later someone else might wanna download, embellish and reupload it, someone else can upload some button designs, that’ll then get used across a few projects for convenience, and we’ll get a kind of brainstorm/prompt setup until we have enough pieces we have a clearer idea of what direction we’d want to do a project in. (Or we pick a joke and run with it, am sure “look at your plan, look back at me” can be converted into a crappy flash-style game of some sort xD I am down for Eleanor Brown Kart Racing, just saying. :') ). The canyon supports small uploads and could support slightly bigger ones if needed. I know there are other platforms out there for dedicated hosting of this or that, royalty free assets etc; I haven’t bothered to make accounts but I figure we can cross those bridges as we get to 'em!

Edit: afaict BB’s story was just “ghosts have kidnapped babies, get the babies back”, and was implied at best, but I remember really loving how smooth the gameplay was. I usually don’t know the actual names of genres of arcade games and think of them just by the Net Yaroze titles so my contributions to a “Games 2 Rip Off” list may need translating. :stuck_out_tongue:

Know nothing whatsoever about Godot; will look.

Edit #2:

Re: tech, once we’ve got some idea where we wanna run things, I think something to do early is to pick a language, since we probably don’t wanna be working in a different one each. :stuck_out_tongue: I suspect I’m going to end up working in something I’m less familiar with (because I usually use interpreted ones, which are slower), so if you guys look at the engines and see a lang that you know well, I’d suggest we go with that. Otherwise, after a quick glance at the default/best-supported languages for a few engines, I’m going to note slight preference for C++ over C# because I think it’ll keep our options open. All that said, we may not need to pick a language immediately, because a lot of simple arcadey game stuff is more about algorithms, and we can just learn that in whatever lang is easiest. Eg: if you’re coding space invaders from scratch, you want to make a grid, move a visible objects around it and have them collide. Language doesn’t matter much if you’re just trying to learn the logic. Though ime, graphics libraries are so irritating to get working that you might as well start as you mean to go on. So maybe I’m going in a circle on this. :stuck_out_tongue: I mostly just don’t want anyone feeling like they gotta wait until we decide something before they try making stuff. Chaos suits me. :slight_smile:

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I am so out of practice with coding that I don’t trust myself to pick a usable language, though I will take a look. :sweat_smile: I have the tiniest bit of experience with Godot from ~5 years ago, but I never went beyond following a few tutorials. It was very easy to set up, anyway. I have more experience with C# than C++; agree the former is kind of limiting, and would be fine with getting up to speed on C++ if we choose that.

Eleanor Brown Kart Racing! That could be fun! I loved the SNES Mariokart. That’s got to be too complicated for a first attempt, but maybe a toned down version could work. Battletoads Turbo Tunnel? https://youtu.be/oD9MarvOz1U?t=60

I’d never seen Blitter Boy before! What a weird, fun game. I like how straightforward the mechanics are. The most basic possible version of that seems achievable. I would be up for trying this as well!

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I forgot to say, Brentano mentioned godot because a friend of his has (co?)written a game using it and distributed it on Steam, so he figured that showed it was possible and we might be able to pester him with questions, if needed. I have no idea if anyone has played the game. :stuck_out_tongue: If I get more details I’ll prolly share those privately. Anyway, point is, dude has no gamesdev background, so looks like it’s usable for n00bs. :stuck_out_tongue: and now your testimony matches! So that’s a good sign.

(Also I was like, “iirc unreal engine requires you to faff with Epic Games stuff, and Unity was the more open option, but iirc they had some big drama recently, what was it, now…” Haha they were the ones who wanted to charge devs per install! So haha let’s not. xD)

So yeah, currently I think sounds like we should go with godot and switch if we hate it. Glance at docs mentioned a node system, sounded like something I’ll suck at, but will wait and see.

Blitter Boy is pretty obscure! It’s a Net Yaroze game (ps1 indie games that you got on a demo disc with the official playstation magazine, back in the day). Net Yaroze games are great from a dev pov because at least half of them were completely dreadful! xD you can really see what works and what doesn’t to make a simple game, like “why is this space invaders clone really fun, while this other one is unplayable?” You see what to prioritise. If you have a ps1 emulator I recommend trying them! Some of my fave games of all time are obscure net yaroze things.

So I suggested kart racing as a bit of a joke (even though I’d be thrilled if we COULD) because there used to be a truism that kart racers were always awful, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a good indie one. (My preference for real ones is Crash Team Racing, which aiui is just a mariokart ripoff) But yeah, a sidescroller like your battletoads link sounds more achievable, and a type I’ve wanted to try to make for ages! (I refer to that type as “dinojump/turmac roll/robot unicorn attack/Leo steel”). ‘dinojump with no birds’ is like my ideal game. XDDD I have to keep it simple or I get overwhelmed.

Tbh I’d love to do a rhythm game, but I bet they are a pain because of how quickly they need to pick up responses and how well-synced everything has to be.