"Pokémon: Sapphire" was an awesome experience from the beginning. I discovered a lot of creatures, maps and enemies... and since then, I started asking myself: can I modify the game itself? Can I create my own?
The gamedev train is ready to go! Next stops: ROM hacking and RPG Maker!
Since these first steps, I tried a lot of technologies to create new videogames, if you want to know more, follow me in this incredible adventure!
pygame, making gamessss 🐍
When I was learning programming on my own, Python was presented as "the best programming language to learn", easy to learn, easy to see results... So Pygame was a good option to start with... and what a mess!
You can even see a video of that little experiment:
Game Maker Studio, old but gold! ⚰️
What next? Game Maker 1, rest in peace! It was cool to start creating games with a proper game engine. It included a drag and drop system, and results appeared quickly.
But... the resources (sprites, levels, scripts) were very limited in the free version, so it didn't last in my computer.
Unity 3D, the king? 👑
Next step was Unity3D, starting with 3D projects to learn the basics... C# was the first programming language I learned in a proper course, and now I'm a .NET developer. A happy ending! So it was cool to use this language for apps and also games, reinforcing knowledge!
Godot Engine, the titan 🤖
First time I heard about this game engine was in a YouTube video, talking about this open-source tool that was about to unseat Unity3D as the main engine in the market. I was soooo skeptical about it, watching some of the features that were showing without seeing any benefit... and I forgot about Godot.
The most relevant detail was it was OSS, but nothing else.
Until the day came when everything changed. That day I wanted to make a 2D game, something simple and fun. And Unity3D doesn't feel good when making 2D games, so I decided to try something new. I wasn't going back to Game Maker Studio, where to go now?
Godot Engine was the solution.
Nice, open and growing community, cool IDE, script editor and game engine sharing the same window, GDscript (based on Python)... it was so different to what I used to think about this!
At the time, a new stable version has been released: Godot 3.1! There's a lot of new features and changes to discover, this project in development is focusing in a good user experience, taking care of developers and our needs.
the future 🔮
Maybe a new, open source and powerful game engine arises and I fall in love again, maybe I will stay with Godot for years... who knows?
Whatever happens, I'll make sure to keep learning and have a lot of fun at the same time... and I hope you too.
See you soon, thanks for reading!
Top comments (4)
Personally, I think that pygame is good if you're wanting to learn coding/game development, as it DOES help train you to think in a different way. It also works well with other python libraries/modules, and for simple games, it works well.
At that time I did not know which way to go or what technologies to use, so it was an intermediate step to realize how I should think or what I might need.
Thanks for your comment!
I wish Godot was available in GoLang, I love the small, typed, fast GO lang :)
maybe in the future! 🤞