i have been working on an open source custom-engined game nearly half my waking hours for the last 3 months.
every feature you add adds 10 bugs to fix. every bug you fix introduces 2 more elsewhere.
sometimes you are wondering if that other guy messing with LuaJIT somehow made pairs() leaky because for some reason it's grabbing values you are sure are not IN the table, just adjacent to it, and then 4 hours later with your console absolutely spammed with info updating prints you realize you wrote squad.taskName = taskName in a random spot hidden in a bunch of code where squad isn't the actual squad, but for some damned reason you wrote it so that it's actually squad.Actors in that context...
make your unity asset first person shooters all you want dude, but real games are hell to make.
Yeah, I don't know what he's talking about. I sat down to follow a tutorial to make a match three game from scratch in Godot and stopped on Part 10 of 100 video playlist because my time was better spent on D&D prep.
What? 100 part for a match 3 game? So I went to look it up, sure enough 76 part video. Fuck that bro, I mean your majesty, I was about to come and say that sounds like it's a you problem. But it's not, you picked a shit starter tutorial.
The idea is to have a foundation, get comfortable with navigating around the UI, and tinker with the code to see if you can modify and improve the tutorial game based on what you've learned. It's okay to break thing. Low time investment. (stop reading here)
(rant) It's not for everyone, and it's not "fun", but I think it's rewarding, I like to think some of the really bad shit I made is my love letter to the world. There is no better time in history to start being an indie dev. No cost start, free video tutorials, royalty free engine, AI coding assist and asset gen, low system requirements, self publishing. Of course it's also the worst time to be an indie dev, satiated market, don't expect to make money off it, for every Vampire Survivor there are thousands of good, polished games that never get the attention it deserves. But then I see some motherfucker who puts up a pixel platformer for 2 dollars on the Nintendo eshop and it plays like some 2008 flash game and it's on the featured or curated part of the shop and I go: that can be me, my shovelware could be featured and then I'd be swimming in tens of dollars! And that keeps me going.
Yeah, it's not for me. Like I said, that itch gets scratched in D&D prep, trying to trick the VTT into doing what I want. That way, my progress sees immediate use the next time we play.
I've never had someone acknowledge my royalty on here. If you ever need to make a new account, I grant you permission to come back as Sir_Jack.
I do make games and have published before :-D I'm switching over to Godot atm, although it's just a long list of tutorials on my youtube playlist at the moment. I have a few game ideas I'm bouncing around but if I publish them I won't talk about it here as I want to be apolitical and don't wish to be targeted for wrongthink.
But yes it baffles me how many modders spend hundreds of unpaid hours making content for games. Yeah, like a handful got jobs out of it but for most its just a passion for a game they like, commendable I suppose, but baffling for me.
I've spent loads of time toying with gamedev in the past, way back to trying to roll my own 3D engine with C++, more recently Android and VR with Unreal, but now I'm focused exclusively on mods for my favorite game... so I guess I'm in that baffling camp. I totally get what you mean - it's ultimately a waste of time with no concrete payoff - but it's really an extension of playing the game you enjoy. What people miss when they say "just make a new game bro" is that you can't reproduce a beloved setting without stepping on copyright. Gameplay (like the god game mechanics of Black & White) can easily be transferred to new contexts, but we often like a particular game's world, setting, or story. We want to keep that and put our own touch on the world, unlock avenues that were originally blocked off, or perfect something that was left unfinished. It's as much a form of creative exploration as exploring the world according to game's rules is.
Or like here we can't fully enjoy a game until we remove some woke bullshit. Or we just want Skyrim but with degen big titted anime elves and shit.
(if we're talking about making Total Conversions with existing games, yeah that seems pointless these days with so many easy to use engines out there)
You're right, nothing wrong with it at all and I appreciate each and every mod I've used and its creator for making it, god knows you can't play stock TES or Fallout because it's dogshit and relies on free labor from passionate fans to make it amazing. (just don't ask me to pay for mods)
i have been working on an open source custom-engined game nearly half my waking hours for the last 3 months.
every feature you add adds 10 bugs to fix. every bug you fix introduces 2 more elsewhere.
sometimes you are wondering if that other guy messing with LuaJIT somehow made pairs() leaky because for some reason it's grabbing values you are sure are not IN the table, just adjacent to it, and then 4 hours later with your console absolutely spammed with info updating prints you realize you wrote squad.taskName = taskName in a random spot hidden in a bunch of code where squad isn't the actual squad, but for some damned reason you wrote it so that it's actually squad.Actors in that context...
make your unity asset first person shooters all you want dude, but real games are hell to make.
Yeah, I don't know what he's talking about. I sat down to follow a tutorial to make a match three game from scratch in Godot and stopped on Part 10 of 100 video playlist because my time was better spent on D&D prep.
What? 100 part for a match 3 game? So I went to look it up, sure enough 76 part video. Fuck that bro, I mean your majesty, I was about to come and say that sounds like it's a you problem. But it's not, you picked a shit starter tutorial.
While I can't give you a good tutorial to start with I will say that you want to aim for something that will show you results quickly at first, 10 minute snake video, 2 hour vamp survivor, 10 minute 2d platformer
I'll try a few of what I listed this weekend just so I put my money where my mouth is. Including this recently uploaded one.
The idea is to have a foundation, get comfortable with navigating around the UI, and tinker with the code to see if you can modify and improve the tutorial game based on what you've learned. It's okay to break thing. Low time investment. (stop reading here)
(rant) It's not for everyone, and it's not "fun", but I think it's rewarding, I like to think some of the really bad shit I made is my love letter to the world. There is no better time in history to start being an indie dev. No cost start, free video tutorials, royalty free engine, AI coding assist and asset gen, low system requirements, self publishing. Of course it's also the worst time to be an indie dev, satiated market, don't expect to make money off it, for every Vampire Survivor there are thousands of good, polished games that never get the attention it deserves. But then I see some motherfucker who puts up a pixel platformer for 2 dollars on the Nintendo eshop and it plays like some 2008 flash game and it's on the featured or curated part of the shop and I go: that can be me, my shovelware could be featured and then I'd be swimming in tens of dollars! And that keeps me going.
Yeah, it's not for me. Like I said, that itch gets scratched in D&D prep, trying to trick the VTT into doing what I want. That way, my progress sees immediate use the next time we play.
I've never had someone acknowledge my royalty on here. If you ever need to make a new account, I grant you permission to come back as Sir_Jack.
I do make games and have published before :-D I'm switching over to Godot atm, although it's just a long list of tutorials on my youtube playlist at the moment. I have a few game ideas I'm bouncing around but if I publish them I won't talk about it here as I want to be apolitical and don't wish to be targeted for wrongthink.
But yes it baffles me how many modders spend hundreds of unpaid hours making content for games. Yeah, like a handful got jobs out of it but for most its just a passion for a game they like, commendable I suppose, but baffling for me.
I've spent loads of time toying with gamedev in the past, way back to trying to roll my own 3D engine with C++, more recently Android and VR with Unreal, but now I'm focused exclusively on mods for my favorite game... so I guess I'm in that baffling camp. I totally get what you mean - it's ultimately a waste of time with no concrete payoff - but it's really an extension of playing the game you enjoy. What people miss when they say "just make a new game bro" is that you can't reproduce a beloved setting without stepping on copyright. Gameplay (like the god game mechanics of Black & White) can easily be transferred to new contexts, but we often like a particular game's world, setting, or story. We want to keep that and put our own touch on the world, unlock avenues that were originally blocked off, or perfect something that was left unfinished. It's as much a form of creative exploration as exploring the world according to game's rules is.
Or like here we can't fully enjoy a game until we remove some woke bullshit. Or we just want Skyrim but with degen big titted anime elves and shit.
(if we're talking about making Total Conversions with existing games, yeah that seems pointless these days with so many easy to use engines out there)
You're right, nothing wrong with it at all and I appreciate each and every mod I've used and its creator for making it, god knows you can't play stock TES or Fallout because it's dogshit and relies on free labor from passionate fans to make it amazing. (just don't ask me to pay for mods)