Oh oops, I’ve been away from the forums for a bit and missed this conversation! Thanks for the kind words and such!!
I know Toru Iwatani was (is?) a game design professor, so maybe he taught about his own game some time in that range? For me personally I learned about Libble Rabble from the Action Button Pac-Man review :-)
Anyways, I put up a Steam page for the game, if anyone feels like wishlisting. It’ll probably end up being $1 or free. I’ve heard from a handful of folks that having something up on Steam looks good in a portfolio, and I figured I have the time so hey why not! Lots of things have been updated since the gameplay above, and more things are being worked on whenever I have the free time. I’m looking at releasing in ~early-August.
I’ve been back on the game dev train lately, having a lot of fun with it. I just released the first early access version of what I’m currently working on: SokoWorld. Trying to make a robust, free, open source, polished Sokoban client with hundreds of levels that runs on everything (web, desktop, phones).
You can check out 20 levels so far and play it right in your dang browser:
I’m working on adding rewind support, more levels, polish, desktop builds.
I’ve been using the Rust programming language because I’m interested in going a little lower level than I have in the past, and I’d prefer something that’s code-only where I can build my own dev tools (again, focus on me learning ). So far, so good! Enjoying the language and process.
Jam game I did this weekend with 4 of my friends ^^
The premise of the jam was that each team member can only spend 3 hours working on the project. As the programmer I went over time by ~2 hours (oops!), disqualifying us from winning.
Dosen’t matter too much though, I had so much fun making it and we’re all really proud of it.
I have written about my game in another thread about First-person-cuters. But I thought I’d share it in this thread too since I recently updated the demo for it and made a new trailer!
Here is RADIANT ELUSION, a first-person single player platformer with arcade and metroidvania:esque progression systems! I envision it as Mark Fishers Capitalist Realism meets Jumping Flash!
I really dig the style you showcase in your games and 3D models. These minimalistic yet expressive characters and environments that harkens back to early 3D games. Just the stuff I like hehe!
Your vaporwave landscapes are super dope too!
But what happened to your juggle-fps-game? That one looked super nice as well!
Been working on a framework for old-fashioned adventure games that’s based on a bunch of windows that can be moved around, similar to the MacVentures series.
It’s pretty tricky to make it work well with either mouse, keyboard and gamepad, without the different methods interferring with each other.
gbStudio is actually pretty easy to get something up and running quickly if you’re interested in making something simple and 2D. Bitsy, too.
A lot of “just start making shit” in 3D focused environments can be bolstered by plugins for unreal and unity. But, uh, unity has had a lot of community drama and lack of foundational support lately, so most people would tell you to avoid it as a platform. Godot is great conceptually, but still growing and might not be the best fit for learning basic skills while it’s still growing.
If you want to do anything text heavy, twine and ren’py will get you going in no time.
There are a thousand different routes to one’s first videogame, but here’s one that will set you up with a fairly common kind of environment for game making:
This is for the Godot engine, which is flexible and powerful and free. If part of your objective is learning how to code, this is a pretty friendly way to dabble.
Honestly I’d recommend looking into Game Maker. I used Game Maker 15ish years ago and liked it very much. From what I understand it’s really grown into something that people use. I don’t personally know if I’d use it for any kind of ambitious project, but it’s very fast and not very abstract. You’ll be able to learn a LOT of game engine concepts that will cary over to the more complicated engines. Or you can just stick with Game Maker. Distorted Travesty is one of my favourite series and it’s made in Game Maker. Undertale was made in Game Maker too.
If you’re somebody who easily goes and learns stuff then you might be able to throw yourself right into Unity and learning c#. People have mentioned the messy state of things with Unity, but they’ve always been good at learning resources. Unreal has recently gotten pretty good for that. The bonus of Unreal is that you can throw stuff together with zero programming. It’s very intuitive to do the visual scripting in Unreal. The downside is that unreal seems more tailored towards bigger teams (imo). There’s stuff that will (for a solo dev) take twice as long in Unreal because it’s built to accommodate the workflow of a studio.
(sorry about the double post, I didn’t want to shill my game in a reply)
Working away on a 3d platformer. I’ve posted it around here once or twice. All the stuff in it is done, just doing polish and testing right now. Hopefully out early next year! I love doing a whole bunch of different genres inside the game and playing with all that stuff. Massive feature/scope creep, but it’s done! Levels have automatic camera, hub works are full camera exploration zones. There’s an overworld that you drive/fly around
Here’s a trailer
DM me if you’d be interested in playtesting, I’m at a point in development where I basically don’t know what is good or bad anymore.
I was lucky to be a part of the EEK3 Indie Game Showcase this past friday/saturday. They used an older trailer showing the games combo-collectathon mechanic. I had a newer one that I instead posted yesterday in conjunction with an update to the games demo that I wish to present to you lovely ppl
If you are interested in the EEK3 showcase, here’s the link to that one (RADIANT ELUSION is the 67:th game in the list hehe): EEK3 Indie Games Showcase
). So far, so good! Enjoying the language and process.
youtu.be/kEGlUGyknBU?..” — Bluesky