SNKRX VS blog

One thing that really helped me is looking at the source code and assets of one game that I really enjoyed -- SNKRX, the creator of the game, a327ex, put everything on Github so you can take a look how a finished game looks: https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX/. The repo even includes the various images needed for Steam, this was very nice so I could make sure some of the assets I made aren't unfit for their purpose: https://github.com/a327ex/SNKRX/tree/master/assets/media . There are also some Photoshop files provided on the Steamworks FAQ which are very useful too, but they mainly show just in which area of the image you shouldn't put important text etc.

If it helps, here's a devlog for a reasonably successful game built in love2d.

SNKRX/devlog.md : daily breakdown of what he actually worked on from the start for his SNKRX game

SNKRX daily devlog for the first 3 months << very detailed of what he was doing each day

I'm the developer of SNKRX and on top of what most other people mentioned, the truth of the matter is that making games is hard and making games while working on someone else's codebase is even harder. Anyone who has the capacity to do anything useful with your game's codebase will likely also have the capacity to make their own game from scratch, so they'll just do that instead.

SNKRX is a commercial game and is open source (MIT), but it's not an open source project -- the developer is focused on improving their game for their gaming community and not building a development community around the game.

In a similar vein, the developer of BYTEPATH used to use Github issues as their blog. I also thought it was clever. You even get a commenting and reaction system for free!

https://github.com/a327ex/blog/issues

a327ex/blog : blog from before his bytepath game, it has posts like "Thoughts on making small games", "The Indiepocalypse Isn't Real", "Roguelikes and Grinding", and "Luck Isn't Real"

As for resources, not sure on physical books, but here are a couple of resources I found useful when I started with it: Sheepolution Bytepath's Articles

bytepath tutorial takes you through the creation of a game. Code seems fine, but I haven't looked at it that hard. Unlike most tutorials, it asks you to answer some questions yourself and to implement some content yourself. Seems like a good learning exercise and translating Lua -> C++ will keep you from cooypasting.

a327ex/blog (pre snkrx blog on github)

Thoughts on making small games

Instead of following tutorials, follow a game making lesson. Try something like the bytepath tutorial, use whatever language/framework you want, and figure out the details of how to make it all work. It will force you to work like a real programmer: googling for how to do things until you've retained enough to solve simple problems on your own (then you Google for harder solutions).

I've noticed lots of people on here feel like imposters because they don't know how to build something from scratch. If you want to practice building things from scratch, check this repo out. It has +70k stars on github, and covers over 20 different programming languages . The projects range from simple (todo list) to advanced (build an excel clone, C compiler, and even a game). I'm not affiliated with this repo, simply stumbled on it and thought of this community.

There's the bytepath tutorial and Sheepolution tutorial .