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Discussion on: What are your programming goals for 2017?

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gonzalodelgado profile image
Gonzalo
  • Write at least 3 simple games
  • Learn at least 3 new languages (already learning Haxe, want to also learn Lua, and maybe Lisp)
  • Write my own todo-list app
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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Nice! What platform are you targeting for the games?

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gonzalodelgado profile image
Gonzalo

The one I'm currently working on is written in Haxe, which makes it easy to port to almost any platform, so that'd be a PC (Linux, Windows, MacOS) release, and maybe Android :-)

If I learn Lua, I'll probably make another game using LÖVE, which I believe also makes it easy to port to any PC OS.

Lastly, I want to make a game for the Uzebox :-D

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Ben Halpern

I've never done any game development, and feel like such an outsider that I don't even know where to start, but it's something I'd like to carve out some time to try. Any starter suggestions for a total noob?

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gonzalodelgado profile image
Gonzalo

I totally felt like that for years!

Then I stumbled upon Handmade Hero, which provided a huge inspiration.

Also, finishing any "make your own game" tutorial (HaxeFlixel's is quite good) helps a lot in motivating you to work on making a simple game of your own.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

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.

🙌

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binaryidiot profile image
Kris Siegel

@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 :)

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Ben Halpern

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.

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gonzalodelgado profile image
Gonzalo

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 :-)