I'm feeling inspired now. I think I've always thought of game development as something that was painful and tough and something to leave for other folks, but it's also so fun to be a total noob and learn something from the ground up.
I'm taking on the goal of writing one simple game this year. I'm going to start with a follow-along tutorial while I scheme the game I want to make.
@ben
, what language(s) do you know best? Looks like from your Github page you use a lot of JavaScript and Ruby. You can do game dev in both of those! In fact using the canvas to create basic games isn't super difficult once you get used to it.
Most platforms / frameworks will provide you with an update and a render loop (or some sort of abstraction over one). Basically render paints whatever items that should be drawn and nothing else (no calculations unless absolutely necessary) and update is where you do all your collision detection, movement, etc. So you update your character's movement in the update loop and draw wherever the character is in render.
I mostly write in Ruby and JS, but I'd love to take the opportunity to do something totally different. I'd gladly take suggestions. I think I'm more concerned with tooling than language preferences, so something with good support and stable community that will allow me to have an enjoyable experience developing on my Mac.
Haxe's syntax is pretty close to Javascript, and it's easy to get it up and running on a Mac (although the homebrew install didn't work well for me, had to download it and its dependencies myself).
Also, if you're feeling extra inspired, make sure to check this out: onegameamonth.com/ ;-)
I'm feeling inspired now. I think I've always thought of game development as something that was painful and tough and something to leave for other folks, but it's also so fun to be a total noob and learn something from the ground up.
I'm taking on the goal of writing one simple game this year. I'm going to start with a follow-along tutorial while I scheme the game I want to make.
🙌
@ben , what language(s) do you know best? Looks like from your Github page you use a lot of JavaScript and Ruby. You can do game dev in both of those! In fact using the canvas to create basic games isn't super difficult once you get used to it.
Most platforms / frameworks will provide you with an update and a render loop (or some sort of abstraction over one). Basically render paints whatever items that should be drawn and nothing else (no calculations unless absolutely necessary) and update is where you do all your collision detection, movement, etc. So you update your character's movement in the update loop and draw wherever the character is in render.
You could even get fancy and go with webGL :)
I mostly write in Ruby and JS, but I'd love to take the opportunity to do something totally different. I'd gladly take suggestions. I think I'm more concerned with tooling than language preferences, so something with good support and stable community that will allow me to have an enjoyable experience developing on my Mac.
Haxe's syntax is pretty close to Javascript, and it's easy to get it up and running on a Mac (although the homebrew install didn't work well for me, had to download it and its dependencies myself).
Also, if you're feeling extra inspired, make sure to check this out: onegameamonth.com/ ;-)
And if you're ever uninspired, reading books like The making of Prince of Persia or Masters of Doom helps a great deal with that :-)