I've always loved playing video games. From the moment I realized there were places called arcades with wonderful machines that ate your coins, I was hooked. Game and Watch? Nagged my mom for every single one. Nintendo Famicom? We had ALL the bootleg cartridges. Gameboy? Couldn't afford it so I burned with envy. Original Xbox? I have 4 of 'em stashed away somewhere. Playstation 1-5? Heck, yeah. Mobile? My husband bought our first iPad because we saw someone playing Angry Birds on it. PC? I'm playing The Ascent with my whole family right now.
More than playing video games, though, what I wanted to do as a kid was to MAKE games. I still remember punching in a borrowed Mario Bros cartridge for the first time, pressing START and having a freaking epiphany. How cool was it that someone MADE this?? To heck with being an astronaut, when I grew up, I was going to do THIS. I knew it with all the certainty of 8-year-old me. But you know how it goes: like most childhood dreams, I put this one on a shelf and gradually left it behind. I didn't become an astronaut either (in case you were wondering).
What I did was drop out of university in my third year. And since then, I've been a copywriter, graphic designer, business owner, immigrant, stay-at-home spouse, and for a long time, the stay-at-home parent. And it's been great. Life with all its up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A's...it's all been wonderful.
"Hold up," you might say, if you're still reading this. "Why are you telling us all this? Boring."
Right. Let me get to it. I'm 48 and if there's a lesson that has been inescapable these past two years is that we may not see tomorrow. So, I've decided to focus on happiness in the here and now. Carpet diem, as my kid used to say when he was little. And you know one thing that has added to my happiness? Dusting off my dream, sitting my ass down and finally learning how to be a game developer. And happier still? I've done this with my husband.
So we've published our first mobile game. It's called "Slingshot Effect" and it's available on App Store or on Google Play. It's an infinite jumper that's easy to just pick up and play. Perfect for commutes or if you're stuck in a waiting room somewhere. It's a paid app because we feel strongly that the level of monetization in the casual game space is just...ugh...it's bad. Thanks for listening, I really appreciate it.
TLDR:
When I was a kid, I wanted to make video games. And now that I'm kind of old, my husband and I made one.
great story and the game looks cool from the screen shots and videos in the app store. wonder if you have plans to introduce a free version with in-app purchases. bet you will get more users.
You know, we've considered it and we've been approached by a couple of publishers in the "hyper casual" space to go the route of free-but-with-IAPs. First the terms of industry-standard contracts are onerous. And second...well, I personally love casual games. And I never minded paying a reasonable amount for games I play. And then there are games like Two Dots that I really, really liked but the endless monetization just gets to be too much.
This is just our preference. We don't have anything against ad-supported or IAP-supported games. We just feel that there is still a pool of mobile players out there who don't mind purchasing a casual game outright.
And who knows, we might decide to collaborate with a publisher on a future game. We'll see what the future brings.
I can only say anecdotally from my own experience, but the games we had listed for a price got 1% or less of the downloads of the same game after we made it free. People complain about free with IAP, but the $ shows otherwise.
I started out same as you, charge a dollar or two for a quality game seems like a fair trade. But I can't count how many conversations I had with people who would balk at 99 cents while either holding their $5 daily latte or paying another $10 for gems/energy for the "free" game they were playing. It's frustrating but the mentality of the mobile market. There are good/ethical and bad ways to approach it, though. I wouldn't do anything rash with your first game; let it be as-is out there for a while and try different ways to advertise or work with user feedback and see how it develops.
I was reading about how the mobile game space has taken a totally different path from PC/Console games. Players are largely onboard with the "value" of even the most casual games on the latter platforms. But there is now a lot of resistance to mobile games that aren't free...even though a player's regular spend on an IAP-monetized game might actually exceed the cost of even a subscription-type model.
Mysterydip, how do the sales compare of a game with IAP vs one with an upfront cost? (I ask as it is conceivably that fewer than 1% of people who get the IAP version pay, in which case you've made as much either way).
I've not done IAP, just ads and amazon underground (which has since been cancelled). My games weren't geared for IAP. Underground by far made us the most. To be sure there's companies squeezing every last drop psychologically out of its free users, and it irks me to no end. Games are supposed to be fun.
I meant kind of trial to buy model, not ad-supported per se.
There may be a lot of users who might give a try to the trial version which may just be a skimmed down version, if they like it they'll buy! I think a lot of people are afraid to spend money (no matter how little) and then get disappointed (not saying this game is disappointing)
I am developer with over 20 years of experience. I have learned programming from books where computers were generally not available where I grew up.
But my son is learning programming (started when he was 6, he just turned 8 recently).
He started by goofing off with some robots programmed in visual languages. Then moved to goofing off even more in Scratch. When pandemic started we found a school that teaches programming online and they used Scratch to program Minecraft which got my son hooked up -- he likes Minecraft a lot and having it do stuff that wouldn't otherwise be possible was a huge motivation for him to learn. He is now attending a second semester in that school and they are using Kodu for some more advanced, 3d goofing off.
My son became big fan of Undertale recently and he approached me to learn to make some fan content based on Undertale. We did some research and found Undertale was made in Game Maker -- a game engine for 2d games. So this is what we just recently started learning. He is excited to finally start learning something that can be used to make professionally looking games and says that if it was good enough to make Undertale it is good enough for him:)
He also just got his own Minecraft server (ehm... Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM) and I am hoping that when he is bored with vanilla gameplay with his school friends he will want to start modding the game in some ways.
GMS2 is a good engine. I also built a Minecraft server for my son. Started with an RP4 but he complained about lag so I finally just let him a Linux laptop.
We use PaperMC too. We've tried to implement GeyserMC so that his non-bedrock friends can join but so far, no love. I haven't had time to dig into why.
Very cool that you can write plugins for your kid's server!
Yeah. When he was little younger he had trouble with navigation when flying Elytra between our distant bases. In particular he made a huge tower on a remote (4k blocks) mountain and we made gunpowder farm in the middle of an ocean (7k blocks away).
So I wrote a plugin where you can save your current location with a name and you get a small overlay that tells you where you are pointing -- ie. what is saved destination closest to where you are pointing and whether it is right or left of where you point and how far (1, 2 or 3 angle brackets ).
What do you use for programming in Minecraft? I tried Tinker with my son - but the process is rather tedious, you have to type in a command and an internet address to connect to with each game session, not to mention that Scratch block manipulation on iPad. Also the examples were rather limited. I don't play computer games at all myself - so I did not know what to propose to him.
This may not be age appropriate depending on your kid, but the (free) CS50 course for games from Harvard [1] is outstanding and accessible to someone with a beginner level of experience. It's not as intro level as something like Scratch would be, but it's very practical hands on learning with tons of resources for anyone who wants to get "serious" about game programming.
I'm entirely self-taught. My personal experience is this:
- Try a bunch of free engines and platforms. Depending on your son's age, this might mean starting with something like Scratch. I've played around with it myself and it's fun. It at least gives you a feel for game logic and how a game loop should feel.
- GDevelop has come a long way. My son prefers it when he's just doodling around.
- My husband prefers GameMaker Studio 2. But it's a paid program and the export modules (mobile, console, html5) are extra expenses that can add up. Also, GML is a nightmare (just my opinion).
- I use Godot Engine. It's free, lightweight, GDScript is Python-like so pretty easy to get a handle on. It's perfect for 2D development. And the teaching community is very rich.
- There's really no "x is better than y" as far as game engines, IMO...all depends on what you're trying to do and how far you are in expertise/experience. And it also comes down to what engine feels right to you.
- Start with 2D, cannot stress this enough. Make as simple a game as possible when you're starting. This also means staying away from Unity and Unreal because both are simply too much engine for a beginner.
- At some point, you're gonna have to learn how to code for real. Don't have to be a wiz...just enough to be competent.
- Be a generalist, if possible. Depending on what you want to do and/or whether you have collaborators or not...you might also need to have basic art skills. I'm a graphic designer by trade so this wasn't an issue. But I had to learn Blender because I wanted to incorporate 3D art in my games. My husband learned how to make music. I also learned video editing so I could make good trailers. Etc, etc.
- Love games. All kinds of games. I think this should've been first.
> Make as simple a game as possible when you're starting
Back when I had enough spare time to do game jams, one critical thing I learned was, once you have some idea, make it simpler. Now make it even simpler. And then, make it simpler again. Repeat that about 20 times, possibly more. Now you have something that you can possibly build and actually release, and guess what, counterintuitively, it'll be fun as hell.
Coz what makes a game fun is not the thousands of wonderful ideas you may have bolted on together, it's just a couple of things you distilled for the love of it, chiseling away, down to the core of the game mechanics, into some magical essence.
It's been frightening alright but I learned so much, and not just about game dev: lots of takeaways that apply to day-to-day development, like finding the balance between quality and getting things done, keeping things ultra-simple, understanding the value in inlining or even repeating code, finding the minimal abstraction sweet spot...
It's OK to be afraid! Turns out it also teaches that you can just let it go, go for it and enjoy the wild ride.
Guess my insecurity comes from not having any kind of programming or even math background. Esp in group game jams, I have a feeling I'd be the weakest link and everyone would yell at me.
Start with something that works, that has code, and that can be hacked on. When my kid was 9 we did the whole "decompile Minecraft" thing, and he made some pretty cool changes with no help from me. But I'm sure there are game tools with published repos that you can download and hack on. That's how I learned, except it was "typing in games from magazines" and modifying them. Starting from scratch (with "Hello World") just sucks.
Back in the very old days, early 1980s, magazines like Byte would include games in the magazine in the form of code you had to manually type in and save. The ones I did were multiple pages of pure HEX.
Later, magazines would ship with floppies that had the free software on it.
Wow, this was not a thing where I grew up. I never even saw a real pc until I was in uni. That sounds awesome. Thanks for explaining.
EDIT: Still totally fascinated by this. I asked my husband because I remembered that he had a much-beloved Spectrum when he was a kid and sure enough, he had digitized Your Sinclair issues on his iPad and he showed me several examples of games in Basic and hex. Super cool.
Note that half the time, you'd make typos and it wouldn't run. So it sounds nostalgic, but not so much.
However, debugging it helped to learn the language. :)
Dr. Dobbs Journal was probably the king of source code listings in magazine format.
Pre-Internet, there were some remarkable mass-distribution Unix magazines with significant source code for utilities: Unix Review and Unix World. Even today, the back issues would be useful.
I remember lusting over the AT&T 3B Unix machines advertised in those, but never could afford one. So I waited until VAX Unix in uni (the arts dept. had an unused one), then SCO and Linux.
So I can see how you can debug BASIC when you're doing the magazine thing and it doesn't run. But what about hex...how did people even find where they made had typos?
Most probably gave up on the hex listings if there were typos, but I never typed that in - it was all ASM or BASIC.
I think it's important to realize that there was a golden age of early personal computing, but for most people it wasn't the first couple of years of toggle switches, very limited RAM and hex.
Unlike Raspberry Pi's, the early PC was a standalone device that needed a usable UI before it had widespread appeal.
Yes, remember friends typing in games from a magazine on a zx81 around 1983. Horribly slow with the membrane keyboard. And then someone would touch the table, the 16Kb memory extension would disconnect and all work would be gone...
Logo can be a great place to start, it's good for simple games because each game element can be a turtle you can control relative to its own position. Logo interpreters suitable for simple game development include turtleSpaces https://turtlespaces.org
I love it! I'm finding it really hard to find the time, motivation, and focus to sit down and learn the prerequisites required to accomplish something truly challenging later in life (I'm in my late 40's too). Congratulations on shipping your first game! That is a tremendous accomplishment and you should be very proud!
Thank you, I appreciate it. Yeah, it really is hard. Time and motivation are rare currencies. There is just so much shit to do in "life-ing." I hope that you get to do the things that make you happy.
Thank you for both the inspiration and distraction! As a fellow-traveler (similar age, similar situation), I completely empathize with the struggle needed to accomplish something like this.
Bought!
Also: great set of credits including the tutorials and such, and waves to fellow Canadians
I'm going through a similar phase myself spurred on by the pandemic (games are, after all, why I started programming in the first place).
I'm continuously amazed by how complex even simple games can be, especially if you're not using one of the big game engines. It's incredibly easy to get sidetracked or over-engineer a certain aspect. It's made me realize just how tough shipping a game - so congratulations on that. It's a huge feat.
Not sure if I'm the only one - I loathe games and gaming in general, think that it is a lifewasting activity mostly... But I love game development, engine development to be precise.
Mhm...I love games so I'm not sure how to respond lol.
Ok, but maybe I can relate in a way...I love cultivating pot. For real, my other dream is to be a boutique grower one day when regulations aren't so red-tapey. But I really don't care for it. I don't like being sleepy. Just gimme a beer.
You're not the only one. Somehow games are worse than other forms of storytelling: netflix, tv, movies, reading. Maybe this always happens to the newest form of entertainment, maybe it's because unlike the other forms your playthrough won't be the same as my playthrough.
In the end all our learning, experience, and content consumption is wiped away. Only what we produce remains, and most of that remains only a little while longer. Still, that doesn't provoke a mass of memoirs from the majority of mankind, so it's okay to sit back, relax, and enjoy entertainment.
Perfect. I just bought it just because of that. (I might have bought it otherwise to if I remembered it tomorrow, but this was enough to get me to do it now :-)
So, you've published your first game. What's your goal? Is it to make money from this game or do you just want people to play it? Are you going to make a second game? If so, will the goal be any different?
In an ideal world, we'd want to be sustained by our creative efforts. Not be a gazillionaire out of it, just make a living in a way that is pleasurable and inspiring. This is something I wish for everyone, btw.
I hope that people will play our game so that we can keep doing this. But maybe they won't, that's ok too. I've been discussing this very thing with my husband and he said something that was inspiring to me: our dream and our income stream don't have to be the same thing.
In gamer metaphor, we know our main quest...but sometimes you need to gear up before you can tackle the more challenging stuff. And so I've never minded the side quests. :-) The path will reveal itself.
Congrats on shipping a game. I'm almost 40 and have started so many engines and infrastructure projects that I'm looking forward to retiring early to make games. Carry on!
I'm 49 and I have basically the same story you did... and also share the same secret dream to write games "one day", so I'm starting really small with a simple little 2D game in GameMaker Studio. So far it's slow going but super fun. But you've inspired me to keep going, so thanks!
I'm really enjoying it so far. It seems to fit with my mental model of making video games, which basically ended when I was 15 and writing games in MBASIC on my Heathkit (and later QuickBasic on MS-DOS, but I sort of stopped making games at that point) Obviously the language is very different and it's object-oriented, which MBASIC definitely was not, but it sort of feels... similar somehow? I can't really explain it.
Some things about the GML language are a bit odd, and sometimes it seems like people on the forums believe wrong things about it (I read more than one person complaining that you couldn't define your own functions, which is not correct, but the docs could be a lot clearer on that) But overall I'm happy enough with it.
I'm recreating a game I wrote in interpreted BASIC back in 1987 [1] and so far I've got the levels, basic player movement, simple enemy AI, and a very basic game loop. It's nothing fancy but I'm learning a lot so far.
Thanks! I think it's just a combination of the limited graphics character set on the Heathkit, plus eight years of practice (at the time) making games using it.
The stuffed animals are from my childhood, so I kept them on my childhood computer. I think they're happy there. :)
I usually post gifs on Twitter (same username), but I've been doing more web dev recently. 2016-2018 are full of abandoned prototypes. Finished stuff and ludum dare entries get posted to my website at (username).com
This is very inspiring - I started out life as an artist and then became a programmer in my late 20's. I'm now 37 and feel that I could have been a game developer but that I'm a bit too old to start.
I don't think it's ever too late to start. And really, even just a few years back, barriers to entry for anyone who wanted to be an indie dev were a bit high.
I was born and raised in a 3rd world country. And while we had consoles and devices thanks to being in Asia, hardly anyone had a computer. I first touched a PC when I was in university. Before that, personal computers might as well have been alien technology.
Nowadays, there are lots of free/affordable game engines to choose from. Soooo many game devs who are also great teachers (I'm not one of them) and they put out a lot of content.
If you're an artist who knows how to code, you are already way ahead of the game. So many indie developers are hampered by being a specialist in one domain or another. Give it a go!
Congratulations! Game development is what got me interested in programming in the first place. Once I put my first pixel on the screen and I figured out how to interact with it blew my mind, limitless possibilities. Since the pandemic started my wife and I have published one game [0] and currently have a second one [1] in a pre-release phase (probably going to make a separate SHOW HN post once it is live).
Keep up the great work! We use Unity3D for our development
The curve is a bit steep but once the things start clicking you productivity goes through the roof. You'll be able to make game prototypes in a few short hours.
I admit that building 2D games with unity is a bit of an overkill but the fact that everything just works across different platforms makes it well worth it. I originally developed games using Java and a cross platform framework called libgdx. It was fun till you needed to implement things like cross-platform advertisements and IAPs. With unity you know that the support will be there for the foreseeable future and no other engine comes close in terms of the available free online resources.
I love the Unity asset store and I use it a lot for graphic assets. I intend to get back to Unity when I feel a little more competent and not feel like I need a whole bunch of third-party programming assets to do what I want to do.
The easiest way to learn unity (or any other new framework/engine/language) in my opinion is to recreate the project that you've already built. And you have one.
I just paid for your Android app and had a play with it and left a review. It is more polished in-game than I expected from the Google Play listing; the icon for the app looked a little bit 2009. So I was pleasantly impressed with the game itself. Great work!
Sure thing!
BTW, I upgraded and tried your game and it's great! LOVE the authentic indie DIY backstory -- and "No ads / IAP / data collection of any kind" -- and the game itself is charming and challenging enough to make for a fun diversion. An absolute winner for casual iOS game. Hope it's a huge success and you go on to make lots more!
Thank you very much. You're not the only one who's been surprised about the iOS 15 thing. We'll be more mindful about version compatibility with the next update. We're not using any cutting-edge features here, so we probably don't need to set compatibility to the latest os version.
Nevertheless, I appreciate that you tried our game even with some UX friction and if I could impose on your kindness a little more, please consider leaving our game a rating and a review if you have extra time.
Congrats! It's absolutely refreshing to dust off an old hobby and do something with it!
I'm only 28, but during the pandemic I decided to dust off my old electronics hobbies that fell by the wayside when the mobile app boom started.
Middle school and early high school me thought I was going into robotics, but the iPhone came out the year I started high school. When the App Store came out the following year, the smartphone revolution started, and about a year later I went all in on mobile apps and gaming for the rest of high school and my college years. Contract iOS and Unity3D work got me through college.
It's somewhat ironic, because I haven't written or worked on a single mobile app since I left college (nor have I owned an Apple device). I ended up taking all of the knowledge of embedded Linux systems I gained doing robotics and started doing esoteric high performance storage virtualization systems as the starting point of my career. Never saw that one coming.
I hadn't really done any serious hobby electronics in nearly a decade, but I've continued to lug all of the equipment around every time I move. So, I dusted off some old hardware and got hooked once again, only to find out that the AVR is old news and everyone is into ESP32 and ARM these days :)
Thanks! I've always been fascinated by electronics and I so envy people in that domain. I bought an Arduino board (sorry if that's totally kiddie to you) and some parts and so far, my son and I have made a little robot that runs very inefficiently on 9-volt batteries. I just want to plug the damn thing in to overcome the power issue.
(I don't know how much you know about electronics so sorry if I'm stating the obvious here)
9V batteries sound and look like they should last long, but putting 6 1.5V batteries in series should last much longer.
9V batteries have a typical capacity of ~550 mAh, 1.5V batteries (even rechargeable ones) have a typical capacity of 2000~3000 mAh.
I'm glad my lil research has been validated. Last week I bought one of those adapter cases that accommodate 6 1.5Vs but have 9V terminals. Now how to tape that case to my little robot.
The Arduino regulator can very likely take 10 Volts - although do check first.
Advantages: fairly cheap, rechargeable, and you can give PowerBanks to kids or whatever when finished or if you upgrade to something better. Maybe get kids to help!
> sorry if that's totally kiddie to you
Things are only kiddie if you think they are (personally I enjoy learning from children).
Worrying too much about what others think will hold you back from having fun! Enjoy the game programming!
Thank you. I guess a lot of people (including me) can be apprehensive about wading into technical domains. I've run into some hostile online environments, for sure. But a great majority of people are are always enthusiastic to help anyone who wants to learn.
> But a great majority of people are are always enthusiastic to help anyone who wants to learn.
That's one of the things I miss about "the old Internet". I remember when I first started using it around ~2000 to communicate with other electronics hobbyists, back when avrfreaks was big or just random people's widget shops has forums. There seemingly wasn't the level of toxicity that exists today. The first time I think I ever ran into someone being toxic (directly to me) was about 2009. IIRC they were saying that because I wasn't an EE I shouldn't be attempting to help people or something (I was halfway though high school at that point).
If a friend who knows nothing about computers asks me for help, they are often ashamed of their lack of knowledge. I usually can fix the problem. However I feel even more deeply ignorant than them, since I have spent my life working with computers and electronics. For example I might reinstall Windows, and my friend thinks I am a computer wizard, but I am fraudulent in my own mind because I didn’t actually diagnose the cause of their problem. By learning more we discover the depths of our own ignorance.
I’m not sure how to nurture my own inner child of discovery and protect it from the unconstructive bullies in the world, or my own negative inner voices. We all have to learn our own techniques, since they have to be personalised to our own personalities.
Anyway, good fortune on your own path of discovery, and thank you for publishing your journey. I do find it inspiring!
> I bought an Arduino board (sorry if that's totally kiddie to you)
Not kiddie at all, AVR microcontrollers have been used commercially for ages and they have some properties that can be nice, e.g. they are fairly simple cores, they operate at 5V and their output pins can sink ~40mA, so you can easily e.g. drive a MOSFET gate.
The Arduino ecosystem is huge and it's great to get things up and running quickly.
Barely scratching the surface of that domain. I'm mostly enamored of enabling little automations in my other hobbies. Like moisture sensors and auto sprinklers for my indoor grow.
By the way, do you have a blog or a github account?
I am quite comfortable finding useful information and lately I have collected a good amount of game development libraries and resources that could help me become a better programming adventurist.
We have a github that I plan to populate with the useful bits and pieces that I've written along the way. Will come back here when I stop procrastinating.
Mind sharing please? I am in the lookout for game dev libraries and resources as well. I am at the unity stage now and i dont much to share in exchange tho. Thank you!
Looks cool, bud! I was in a similar situation a while back and published a game too. It never made any money, mostly because I didn't market it too hard, but it was one of those milestones that I accomplished just to say that I did. :)
Heads up! You misspelled 'distractions' in your screenshot.
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[ 8.5 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadMore than playing video games, though, what I wanted to do as a kid was to MAKE games. I still remember punching in a borrowed Mario Bros cartridge for the first time, pressing START and having a freaking epiphany. How cool was it that someone MADE this?? To heck with being an astronaut, when I grew up, I was going to do THIS. I knew it with all the certainty of 8-year-old me. But you know how it goes: like most childhood dreams, I put this one on a shelf and gradually left it behind. I didn't become an astronaut either (in case you were wondering).
What I did was drop out of university in my third year. And since then, I've been a copywriter, graphic designer, business owner, immigrant, stay-at-home spouse, and for a long time, the stay-at-home parent. And it's been great. Life with all its up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A's...it's all been wonderful.
"Hold up," you might say, if you're still reading this. "Why are you telling us all this? Boring."
Right. Let me get to it. I'm 48 and if there's a lesson that has been inescapable these past two years is that we may not see tomorrow. So, I've decided to focus on happiness in the here and now. Carpet diem, as my kid used to say when he was little. And you know one thing that has added to my happiness? Dusting off my dream, sitting my ass down and finally learning how to be a game developer. And happier still? I've done this with my husband.
So we've published our first mobile game. It's called "Slingshot Effect" and it's available on App Store or on Google Play. It's an infinite jumper that's easy to just pick up and play. Perfect for commutes or if you're stuck in a waiting room somewhere. It's a paid app because we feel strongly that the level of monetization in the casual game space is just...ugh...it's bad. Thanks for listening, I really appreciate it.
TLDR: When I was a kid, I wanted to make video games. And now that I'm kind of old, my husband and I made one.
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/slingshot-effect/id1537916631?...
Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thirteenba...
This is especially the case in multiplayer games. Making it free removes a check on "low quality users" - e.g., hackers, griefers, etc.
This is just our preference. We don't have anything against ad-supported or IAP-supported games. We just feel that there is still a pool of mobile players out there who don't mind purchasing a casual game outright.
And who knows, we might decide to collaborate with a publisher on a future game. We'll see what the future brings.
I can only say anecdotally from my own experience, but the games we had listed for a price got 1% or less of the downloads of the same game after we made it free. People complain about free with IAP, but the $ shows otherwise.
If you want to do this as a business, free with IAP is a must.
Out of curiosity, when were you approached by publishers? After you had launched?
Just my 2 cents.
What path did you take to start learning game development?
CodeCombat
Construct 3
But my son is learning programming (started when he was 6, he just turned 8 recently).
He started by goofing off with some robots programmed in visual languages. Then moved to goofing off even more in Scratch. When pandemic started we found a school that teaches programming online and they used Scratch to program Minecraft which got my son hooked up -- he likes Minecraft a lot and having it do stuff that wouldn't otherwise be possible was a huge motivation for him to learn. He is now attending a second semester in that school and they are using Kodu for some more advanced, 3d goofing off.
My son became big fan of Undertale recently and he approached me to learn to make some fan content based on Undertale. We did some research and found Undertale was made in Game Maker -- a game engine for 2d games. So this is what we just recently started learning. He is excited to finally start learning something that can be used to make professionally looking games and says that if it was good enough to make Undertale it is good enough for him:)
He also just got his own Minecraft server (ehm... Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM) and I am hoping that when he is bored with vanilla gameplay with his school friends he will want to start modding the game in some ways.
Additionally, I can write plugins for PaperMC which is the whole point of having the server in the first place (at least in our case).
Very cool that you can write plugins for your kid's server!
So I wrote a plugin where you can save your current location with a name and you get a small overlay that tells you where you are pointing -- ie. what is saved destination closest to where you are pointing and whether it is right or left of where you point and how far (1, 2 or 3 angle brackets ).
I am also working on couple other plugins.
[1] https://www.dk.com/us/book/9781465477330-coding-games-in-scr...
[1] https://cs50.harvard.edu/games/2018/
- Try a bunch of free engines and platforms. Depending on your son's age, this might mean starting with something like Scratch. I've played around with it myself and it's fun. It at least gives you a feel for game logic and how a game loop should feel.
- GDevelop has come a long way. My son prefers it when he's just doodling around.
- My husband prefers GameMaker Studio 2. But it's a paid program and the export modules (mobile, console, html5) are extra expenses that can add up. Also, GML is a nightmare (just my opinion).
- I use Godot Engine. It's free, lightweight, GDScript is Python-like so pretty easy to get a handle on. It's perfect for 2D development. And the teaching community is very rich.
- There's really no "x is better than y" as far as game engines, IMO...all depends on what you're trying to do and how far you are in expertise/experience. And it also comes down to what engine feels right to you.
- Start with 2D, cannot stress this enough. Make as simple a game as possible when you're starting. This also means staying away from Unity and Unreal because both are simply too much engine for a beginner.
- At some point, you're gonna have to learn how to code for real. Don't have to be a wiz...just enough to be competent.
- Be a generalist, if possible. Depending on what you want to do and/or whether you have collaborators or not...you might also need to have basic art skills. I'm a graphic designer by trade so this wasn't an issue. But I had to learn Blender because I wanted to incorporate 3D art in my games. My husband learned how to make music. I also learned video editing so I could make good trailers. Etc, etc.
- Love games. All kinds of games. I think this should've been first.
- I hope that helps.
Are you working on a next game?
Congratulations on getting it finished and out there!
Maintaining this game but also starting on next ideas.
Thank you very much!
Back when I had enough spare time to do game jams, one critical thing I learned was, once you have some idea, make it simpler. Now make it even simpler. And then, make it simpler again. Repeat that about 20 times, possibly more. Now you have something that you can possibly build and actually release, and guess what, counterintuitively, it'll be fun as hell.
Coz what makes a game fun is not the thousands of wonderful ideas you may have bolted on together, it's just a couple of things you distilled for the love of it, chiseling away, down to the core of the game mechanics, into some magical essence.
It's been frightening alright but I learned so much, and not just about game dev: lots of takeaways that apply to day-to-day development, like finding the balance between quality and getting things done, keeping things ultra-simple, understanding the value in inlining or even repeating code, finding the minimal abstraction sweet spot...
It's OK to be afraid! Turns out it also teaches that you can just let it go, go for it and enjoy the wild ride.
https://replit.com/site/kaboom
Later, magazines would ship with floppies that had the free software on it.
EDIT: Still totally fascinated by this. I asked my husband because I remembered that he had a much-beloved Spectrum when he was a kid and sure enough, he had digitized Your Sinclair issues on his iPad and he showed me several examples of games in Basic and hex. Super cool.
https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the-trash-80-part-3/
Have been following it for years and would recommend reading it all the way through. Maybe even get an idea for the next project :)
However, debugging it helped to learn the language. :)
Dr. Dobbs Journal was probably the king of source code listings in magazine format.
Pre-Internet, there were some remarkable mass-distribution Unix magazines with significant source code for utilities: Unix Review and Unix World. Even today, the back issues would be useful.
I remember lusting over the AT&T 3B Unix machines advertised in those, but never could afford one. So I waited until VAX Unix in uni (the arts dept. had an unused one), then SCO and Linux.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_UNIX_PC
I think it's important to realize that there was a golden age of early personal computing, but for most people it wasn't the first couple of years of toggle switches, very limited RAM and hex.
Unlike Raspberry Pi's, the early PC was a standalone device that needed a usable UI before it had widespread appeal.
Bought!
Also: great set of credits including the tutorials and such, and waves to fellow Canadians
I've re-written the game several times over the years - always a pleasure.
Current iteration: https://github.com/whyboris/Gravity-Wars
I'm going through a similar phase myself spurred on by the pandemic (games are, after all, why I started programming in the first place).
I'm continuously amazed by how complex even simple games can be, especially if you're not using one of the big game engines. It's incredibly easy to get sidetracked or over-engineer a certain aspect. It's made me realize just how tough shipping a game - so congratulations on that. It's a huge feat.
Ok, but maybe I can relate in a way...I love cultivating pot. For real, my other dream is to be a boutique grower one day when regulations aren't so red-tapey. But I really don't care for it. I don't like being sleepy. Just gimme a beer.
Btw, do you have a game engine I can check out?
In the end all our learning, experience, and content consumption is wiped away. Only what we produce remains, and most of that remains only a little while longer. Still, that doesn't provoke a mass of memoirs from the majority of mankind, so it's okay to sit back, relax, and enjoy entertainment.
I hope that people will play our game so that we can keep doing this. But maybe they won't, that's ok too. I've been discussing this very thing with my husband and he said something that was inspiring to me: our dream and our income stream don't have to be the same thing.
In gamer metaphor, we know our main quest...but sometimes you need to gear up before you can tackle the more challenging stuff. And so I've never minded the side quests. :-) The path will reveal itself.
I'm 49 and I have basically the same story you did... and also share the same secret dream to write games "one day", so I'm starting really small with a simple little 2D game in GameMaker Studio. So far it's slow going but super fun. But you've inspired me to keep going, so thanks!
EDIT: Purchased! Looking forward to playing it!
Some things about the GML language are a bit odd, and sometimes it seems like people on the forums believe wrong things about it (I read more than one person complaining that you couldn't define your own functions, which is not correct, but the docs could be a lot clearer on that) But overall I'm happy enough with it.
I'm recreating a game I wrote in interpreted BASIC back in 1987 [1] and so far I've got the levels, basic player movement, simple enemy AI, and a very basic game loop. It's nothing fancy but I'm learning a lot so far.
[1] https://jeremyreimer.com/rockets-item.lsp?p=282
And it's adorable that you had stuffies on your monitor.
The stuffed animals are from my childhood, so I kept them on my childhood computer. I think they're happy there. :)
I was born and raised in a 3rd world country. And while we had consoles and devices thanks to being in Asia, hardly anyone had a computer. I first touched a PC when I was in university. Before that, personal computers might as well have been alien technology.
Nowadays, there are lots of free/affordable game engines to choose from. Soooo many game devs who are also great teachers (I'm not one of them) and they put out a lot of content.
If you're an artist who knows how to code, you are already way ahead of the game. So many indie developers are hampered by being a specialist in one domain or another. Give it a go!
Keep up the great work! We use Unity3D for our development
[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gibberish-game-against-friends...
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-setting-sun-block-puzzle/i...
Thanks for the links, I'm gonna check out your games!
I admit that building 2D games with unity is a bit of an overkill but the fact that everything just works across different platforms makes it well worth it. I originally developed games using Java and a cross platform framework called libgdx. It was fun till you needed to implement things like cross-platform advertisements and IAPs. With unity you know that the support will be there for the foreseeable future and no other engine comes close in terms of the available free online resources.
Nevertheless, I appreciate that you tried our game even with some UX friction and if I could impose on your kindness a little more, please consider leaving our game a rating and a review if you have extra time.
Thanks again!
I'm only 28, but during the pandemic I decided to dust off my old electronics hobbies that fell by the wayside when the mobile app boom started.
Middle school and early high school me thought I was going into robotics, but the iPhone came out the year I started high school. When the App Store came out the following year, the smartphone revolution started, and about a year later I went all in on mobile apps and gaming for the rest of high school and my college years. Contract iOS and Unity3D work got me through college.
It's somewhat ironic, because I haven't written or worked on a single mobile app since I left college (nor have I owned an Apple device). I ended up taking all of the knowledge of embedded Linux systems I gained doing robotics and started doing esoteric high performance storage virtualization systems as the starting point of my career. Never saw that one coming.
I hadn't really done any serious hobby electronics in nearly a decade, but I've continued to lug all of the equipment around every time I move. So, I dusted off some old hardware and got hooked once again, only to find out that the AVR is old news and everyone is into ESP32 and ARM these days :)
9V batteries sound and look like they should last long, but putting 6 1.5V batteries in series should last much longer. 9V batteries have a typical capacity of ~550 mAh, 1.5V batteries (even rechargeable ones) have a typical capacity of 2000~3000 mAh.
And I don't know much, so thank you.
Advantages: fairly cheap, rechargeable, and you can give PowerBanks to kids or whatever when finished or if you upgrade to something better. Maybe get kids to help!
> sorry if that's totally kiddie to you
Things are only kiddie if you think they are (personally I enjoy learning from children).
Worrying too much about what others think will hold you back from having fun! Enjoy the game programming!
That's one of the things I miss about "the old Internet". I remember when I first started using it around ~2000 to communicate with other electronics hobbyists, back when avrfreaks was big or just random people's widget shops has forums. There seemingly wasn't the level of toxicity that exists today. The first time I think I ever ran into someone being toxic (directly to me) was about 2009. IIRC they were saying that because I wasn't an EE I shouldn't be attempting to help people or something (I was halfway though high school at that point).
I’m not sure how to nurture my own inner child of discovery and protect it from the unconstructive bullies in the world, or my own negative inner voices. We all have to learn our own techniques, since they have to be personalised to our own personalities.
Anyway, good fortune on your own path of discovery, and thank you for publishing your journey. I do find it inspiring!
Not kiddie at all, AVR microcontrollers have been used commercially for ages and they have some properties that can be nice, e.g. they are fairly simple cores, they operate at 5V and their output pins can sink ~40mA, so you can easily e.g. drive a MOSFET gate.
The Arduino ecosystem is huge and it's great to get things up and running quickly.
One day, I'll do something about everything!
By the way, do you have a blog or a github account?
I am quite comfortable finding useful information and lately I have collected a good amount of game development libraries and resources that could help me become a better programming adventurist.
Heads up! You misspelled 'distractions' in your screenshot.
EDIT: The video from your 13bananas site should be the first thing in the App Store page.
Looks very well done, still confused about what the goal is other than flying around planets.