Ask HN: How to get into game development

I've worked at gaming companies, and although I never worked on the games themselves (more the backend, console, etc), I would suggest just writing some games yourself!

There's a lot of aspects to game development, including gameplay, art, storyline, and many of those aren't technical. If you do get into a technical problem that can't be easily solved, cheat! Many games have an addictive mechanic that comes from a hard technical problem you want the player to solve.

There are some frameworks for writing games, and you can get familiar with whatever you think will solve the problem.

Also, just apply to a game company! They need web people too, and it's easier to use your skills to get your foot in the door, then you can learn from the inside.

You can start building casual games in any 2D platform. Both https://love2d.org/ and https://coronalabs.com/ are free (Corona SDK has a enterprise version as well) and both use Lua. There are decent tutorials on the web and you can build a small casual game in a couple of days. There are tons of HTML5 game libraries as well but with Love2d and Corona SDK, you can build native games.

I would check out http://phaser.io/

You should be able to find a lot of tutorials on the phaser site itself as well as https://www.reddit.com/r/phaser/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/

It's a HTML5 game engine and I've used it to create some really simple games, game development is a lot of work/time however so see if you can get into it as a hobby and you will know if the enjoyment to work ratio is worth it for you.

If you're interested in modern game development in 3D, you might want to look at Unreal Engine 4.

https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4

It is free to download, you can play with it all you want. You must agree to pay royalties (5%) if you start making money with a game you develop.