The Harsh Truth of Video Games Programming

• nkeyrollover

  1 2 10.0 Python

  ASCII side-scrolling beat-em-up game

Sure: https://github.com/dobin/nkeyrollover. You can play it with "telnet exploit.courses". It will crash a lot. Stole some animations from "Stone Story" (Steam)

• adama-lang

  26 104 9.9 Java

  A headless spreadsheet document container service.

I want to make games, but even some years ago I realized it was not a great path for a multitude of reason (many of which are in this article).

My path, and what I recommend, is do something hard and important which pays the bills at a premium. I did infrastructure work, and I was lucky to have a great decade long career allowing me to "retire early".

Now, I can work on a game at my pace building the tools that I see fit. I'm focused on board games because they have a timeless quality about them. I'm developing an entire SaaS platform and programming language to make the network goo beyond easy. http://www.adama-lang.org/

As I'm getting close to some kind of launch for the SaaS, my next thing is to build up my own web based IDE with a release-often ideology such that I can build a Roblox for online 2D board games. Honestly, I'm having a blast because I'm not suffering tools which are going to fade.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• flecs

  48 5,475 9.7 C

  A fast entity component system (ECS) for C & C++

I'm currently building a game engine using flecs as my ECS: https://github.com/SanderMertens/flecs

There's lots of great example code in the docs and within the repo itself, for what it's worth!

• TIC-80

  134 4,744 9.2 C

  TIC-80 is a fantasy computer for making, playing and sharing tiny games.

I'm just getting into game dev, though starting with the tic 80 [0]. I've found it kind of funny how, like, matter-of-fact it is. In my mind there was always some magic algorithm going on and I guess there arguably is but it more like, "check the x and y coords plus the character's height and width and do those coords touch a coord on the map that is considered solid and if so, set the player's velocity to 0." It's like, "Oh ya, duh. Damn, I was hoping it was just magic."

In the spirit of this article, I was going hard at it for several days but have not worked on it since last week.

[0] https://tic80.com/

• game-programmer

  34 17,188 0.0 Python

  A Study Path for Game Programmer

For procedural animation: I have yet to find the path to learning this skill. It is very opaque, and I think you just need to attack it with your brain and learn it.

For shader and graphics programming: I liked this tutorial series as a "first steps" by Freya Holmér: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfM-yu0iQBk

Here is another list: https://www.alanzucconi.com/2018/01/03/learning-shaders/

The Book of Shaders is a popular suggestion, but it appears to be abandoned: https://thebookofshaders.com/

I also discovered this AWESOME list of learning paths for all gamedev concepts: https://github.com/miloyip/game-programmer

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project