This isn't necessarily the case if you are looking at total cost of ownership.
3D provides things like perspective projection, which enables intuitive experiences and notions of "world space" that are fundamentally meaningful and map well with our physical reality. You can do a lot of damage with 3d primitives, an FPS camera, a skybox and some clever lighting.
>However, as opposed to using an engine like Unity, Godot, Unreal, using a frameworks still allows to you architect your codebase with a greater degree of freedom and prevents you from spending too much time learning how specific game engine workflows and UIs work.
If your goal is to make a game, these are exactly the things you should be learning, not reinventing your own architecture. If you just want to learn about engine internals, then sure go for it. But games (even very simple ones) are an incredible amount of effort that has nothing to do with programming. If you actually want to make one you should be working at the absolute highest level of abstraction possible so that you can start doing the real work; building the mechanics, creating the art, designing levels, writing the story, music, sound effects, etc. etc. Many of the succesful indie games these days are made almost completely via "no-code" visual tooling. It's basically a meme at this point for programmers to want to make a game and just end up wasting their time writing a naive engine.
I'd say any beginner should start with P5.js first before going into larger game dev frameworks. You can make simple games and the API is very approachable.
I'm curious about the goal here... if you wanted to learn how to turn gameplay ideas into playable video games, then the most effective way would be picking up either an ultralight engine like Defold or an ultra-tutorialized engine like Unity.
If you wanted to learn JavaScript by building games, then you should definitely not use Kaplay or Phaser, etc, since they're so far removed from JavaScript you wouldn't learn anything (other than how to build things in their particular environments). Web standard JS is more than capable of building simple games with no abstractions separating you from what you're trying to learn.
I don’t want to use JavaScript /TS but I want to make games for the web. Are there any nice framework which lets me write in Rust, it compiles to WASM for web?
10 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] threadThis isn't necessarily the case if you are looking at total cost of ownership.
3D provides things like perspective projection, which enables intuitive experiences and notions of "world space" that are fundamentally meaningful and map well with our physical reality. You can do a lot of damage with 3d primitives, an FPS camera, a skybox and some clever lighting.
If your goal is to make a game, these are exactly the things you should be learning, not reinventing your own architecture. If you just want to learn about engine internals, then sure go for it. But games (even very simple ones) are an incredible amount of effort that has nothing to do with programming. If you actually want to make one you should be working at the absolute highest level of abstraction possible so that you can start doing the real work; building the mechanics, creating the art, designing levels, writing the story, music, sound effects, etc. etc. Many of the succesful indie games these days are made almost completely via "no-code" visual tooling. It's basically a meme at this point for programmers to want to make a game and just end up wasting their time writing a naive engine.
If you wanted to learn JavaScript by building games, then you should definitely not use Kaplay or Phaser, etc, since they're so far removed from JavaScript you wouldn't learn anything (other than how to build things in their particular environments). Web standard JS is more than capable of building simple games with no abstractions separating you from what you're trying to learn.