Me if i was a game dev

After years of game dev!

When your code game is strong

Client: I want a mobile game with Leaderboards, Social media sign-ins, In-game store, Ads, IAP etc in 2 months

Me: Cool, what’s your budget?

Client: $50

The JS Drinking Game:

1. Think of a noun.
2. Google "<noun>.js"
3. If a libary with that name exists, drink!

Now I want to create some kind of game, a bit like "hacknet" (check it out on steam, really cool), but the one who answers you is your own OS

When the senior Linux engineer puts a terminal game on a server everyone uses which launched at login and after a little you start hearing oh's, wtf's, laughing and everything and then you suddenly have a whole room of Linux engineers playing some kinda terminal space invaders game while doing customer support.

😆

Let the game begin 👹

I asked my teammates if it would be ok if I made multithreading code for the collisions of our game engine and they just sent me this, I'm going to try anyway. Yolo.

Unity is my game

To those who say game is not an art, we paint worlds with ones and zeros in real time that you can get lost in for hours. If this is not art, nothing is.

So in Telegram there is this funny little game called Lumberjack where you need to click left and right to cut the branches. My and my fellow students played this in the group. Then I got bored for like 30 minutes and decided to write a little bot which checks where the branches are with pixel detection and sends a left/right click to the window. Imagine my friends faces when all of sudden my score was 500+ and the character ran through this like a fucking jackhammer :D
#justmebeingaprogrammer

Me: I'm building for 32 bit.
Me: But I feel like I should be building for 64 bit.
Me: But not everyone has a 64 bit OS.
Me: But who the fuck doesn't?
Jerry: The people who can't run our game.

Let's play Sudo, a Linux board game

TIS 100 the assembly language game.

Recently took a screenshot in a game called Firewatch and out of curiosity tried it out as a wallpaper for my phone. It looks amazing 😍

After one year of procrastination I finally made the game with unity

Ladies and gentleman, spherical voronoi minesweeper

Yes, I made the game before with in c++ which looks quite shitty, but finally, unity

Game of Codes. Keyboard Throne!!

recently started game development... used trigonometry and algebra for the first time in real life..

:') remember this game?

You, stupid fucking game, have just sent me my new password in plain text via email?

"the password is encrypted and cannot be sent again"???
So… you send the password in plain text, and only then encrypt it, right?
But it's still in plain text in your email logs, fucking bastards.

This annoying fuck is the single most hated guy on youtube PERIOD.

Every time I try to watch a tutorial or some gameplay demo this fucking cunt comes up with his piece of shit game dev course.

Wierd Domains Game

Like: pornhub + StackOverflow
PornOverflow.Com

Add your entry in comment.

Winner will be get 1 domain + 1 year hosting

Hmm.. Should I work on my game.. ..or play Skyrim..?

Uggg.. Being an adult is hard.. q.q

Let's play a little game.
Your code has been overwritten.

Back when I was in school (about 15 years old) and I played games, I had a particularly favourite game that I would play. It was a lesser known strategy game made by a single hobbyist Dev.

I was already known in the community for making some mods for the game and chatbots.

What most people didn't know was that I had made a map hack and various other cheats that made it significantly easier to win by reverse engineering the game and modifying the x86 assembly in ollydbg.
One thing in particular I had been working on at the time was a game replay editor. I had reverse engineered the saved game (replay) format and was able to replay them, edit them and generate them.

During one particular match, a person in the community particularly annoyed me and I edited the saved game to change what his moves were and the words he spoke. It made him look a bit like an idiot but IMHO was only a slight exaggeration of the truth.
I posted the game replay on the forums and everyone was in hysterics about the crazy things he did and said in the replay.
As no one knew I had this capability they all believed the replay and even the guy in the replay couldn't believe it himself and didn't understand what happened. He just kept telling everyone it didn't happen and the 'truth is in the pudding'.

Although I originally intended to tell everyone what I did, I never did and whenever the guy entered in to a game everyone would laugh about it and say 'the truth was in the pudding'.

He was no longer annoying me and it sort of made me feel like a god at the time.
So that's my wk65.

Hello, world!

Hey, it's me. It's been awhile. How have you been..? :3

For those of you who don't know/remember, I'm the lead developer of a Desktop and (to-be) Hacking Simulator Game. My project should still exist somewhere on here. I just thought I would hop on, and catch you guys up on my progress. ^~^

So far themes are a thing! You can add custom fonts, wallpapers(or just a desktop color) and set the color/opasity of everything in-game!

I have also implimented a modding API. It's under-documented, but it works very well! You can add apps, commands, or even redesign the entire interface using it. It executes modded functions on specific events, so you could really have it do anything.

As of yesterday, there is also a simulated FileSystem. You can navigate it using in-game terminal commands, and you can create and remove directories.

(in-game screenshots are also a thing, you can even set a timer - ps: this is a 100% mod! As are all apps and commands in the current unreleased version. PM me on Telegram @TheCyaniteproject to get a copy~)

A child is deleting all the necessary files required to run games, softwares etc.. He thinks they're virus just because he can't open and play with them.
Now he clicked on game.exe to play his favourite game but this happened:
"Error: blah blah
xyz file is missing"

He is confused. He is blaming his father for buying the worst computer for him

This child is me, 8 yrs ago :')

Someone played a random game that I'd made. He was really impressed by the story (mostly dialogs). And he asked me:
Him: "Did you pay much?"
Me: "What???"
Him: "Well, I'm sure you had to pull some strings to get that dialog"
I laughed hysterically.

Experience? Sure. Two full game designs and few smaller concepts created for previous company.
Can we see them? No, sorry. Previous company went bankrupt before releasing any of my work.
OK, we'll call you...

Story of my life

-Let's start making the game!
-Yaay
-We should focus on performance optimization!
-But we don't have anything to optimize yet..
-Performance optimization!!!

1 month later

-OK you were right, we can't focus on performance now. We need to start making this game!
-Finally!
-So we're in pre-production now, let's do some R&D!
-Awesome, I wanted to start designing our workflow for adding new content, and maybe also loca..
-NO! That's unimportant! We must do R&D!
-OK what should we Arr-and-Dee?
-Performance optimization!!!

Few weeks ago I was having a few beers and messing around with a Minimax AI that could be used for different games as long as you fed it possible moves and win/loose-conditions. Could be used for like Tic Tac Toe on a 5x5 field, connect four etc.

I hadn't got it to work yet as I tried to implement alpha-beta pruning to optimize it. When I was playing against it I thought "Damn you're stupid, why would you even make that move" but still finished the game.

Before I knew it I had fucking lost. It outplayed me like 6 moves before I even knew what was happening.

And that's one of the top coolest feelings I've had as a developer, got destroyed by my own program.

Headphone - an instrument to never get annoyed or distracted by loud or silly people's noises!

I just released a tiny game for iPhone!

It's basically an attempt to mix 'Heroes of Might & Magic' and mtg.

In the screenshot my terminal says 'helloworld.cpp'. That's right, this is my first c++ program and I don't care how crappy you think this game is, I'm super proud of myself!

I've always worked in data science where managers assume I know how to code because there's text on my screen and I can query and wrangle data, but I actually didn't know what a class was until like 3 years into my job.

Making this game was my attempt to really evolve myself away from just statistics / data transforms into actual programming. It took me forever but I'm really happy I did it

It was brutal at first using C++ instead of R/Python that data science people usually use, but now I start to wonder why it isn't more popular. Everything is so insanely fast. You really get a better idea of what your computer is actually doing instead of just standing on engineers' shoulders. It's great.

After the game was 90% finished (LOL) I started using Swift and Spritekit to get the visuals on the screen and working on iPhone. That was less fun. I didn't understand how to use xCode at all or how to keep writing tests, so I stopped doing TDD because I was '90% done anyway' and 'surely I'll figure out how to do basic debugging'. I'll know better next time...

Hi everyone! Progress is slow for the game development.
I'm finally (and hopefully) done character design though I have a fuckton to do for 10+ characters.
Tbh it was my first time but got the help from the art community to give me a lot of feedback!

Okay, question;

Can I use ANY phone number in my game?

According to Wikipidia:
"Numbers between (555)-0100 & (555)-0199 are reserved for fictional use."
But.. I'm wanting to have a little phone pop up in my game that you can enter phone numbers into and text the corresponding player (and i hope to have more than 99 players) I would just have contact names, but I want players ti be able to dick around with other players.. Like, post their number to in-game telemarketers and such. What fo you think I should do?

Making graphics is probably the most painful part of indie game development... :(

I finally ended my first side project ever. I challenged myself to write a Tetris game in vanilla JS (with the less possible lines of code), some algorithm was tougher than I expected (2d array hell) but I made it ! 500 lines of JS code, I feel I could refactor some stuffs now...

My manager just left the company to become a independent game developer. His game is also available in steam as early access.

He just became extra cool to me.

And he is using unreal engine for it.

That made him extra cooler to me 😁

5 years ago i was working on a 2D game using C and we needed to use the sleep function (I forgot why ) .but however one of my team member did something new , for each second he did an empty for loop from 0 to 1000000 .You never know maybe that's how it's implemented (sarcasm)

Welp my game dev career is over.

at the game jam afterparty everyone where trying to speak with my husband, instead of me. I saw human version of blue screens when was asked to list my project team and I didn't mention him.
- A-a-and what did Rik do?
- Oh, he didn't participate, he's a journalist and my +1 here. 😅

Even during games, I find bugs in it...
Just found NULL in FIFA GAME.
Wonder which object failed to pass it's value

Factorio. The game you didn't know you need.

I didn't know that the colour of the Chrome offline game changes once you have reached a certain score. Also these birds are annoying.

So my boss told be about this game, try it out the next time you have an office party with other developers. It goes like this... You all sit around a table with shots ready to drink at your disposal, each person takes a turn and must simply say a noun, it can be anything. The next person must then Google the noun + '.js' added to the end, if the library exists, that person must drink a shot. Continue until everyone is sufficiently in a vegetated state. Good luck!

To Code or to Game? 😒

Is it working..?
...

I think it's working! ^~^
Tell me if this looks correct, I'm trying to mimic the linux CD command in my game:

I had to create a c++ dungeon 2d game as University project.
The spec said "a terminal game made with char"
I and my team made a real game with anemies boss, and balanced stat in 15 days with Qt (we asked if can use external libraries)
We got 6/8 point for the project cuz we forgot to put protected/private the attribute of the player...

We need a devRant themed drinking game!

🍺Let's get some ideas going🍺

Starting my first front end dev job in 3 weeks AAHHHHH!!

The imposter syndrome is real.

After about 2 years and one restart of the project, I am finally finished with my first iOS game, and put it on the app store! Super proud!

I started a small open source game project to do in my spare time but I just can't find the *spare time* to use.

Me: yo pass me the photoshop
Friend: You better not make weeb idol game design
Me:

Wtf? Who parties in the middle of the week?
My Alcoludo game has been installed on 96 devices yesterday, when normally average daily installations are between 1 to 10. Not that I'm complaining 😅

//rant
When you make a mobile game and hope it gets downloads but you suck at marketing.. fml

For every game developer out there. Why so? 😂

I wish I had this board game when I was a kid

I'm learning Unity! I don't have a lot of experience with C# or game development but it's fairly simple and super interesting so far so I'm excited!
!Rant, just excited :)

Promotion by cozyplanes myself

Find my game in play store, and you will get $100 play store credit.

First come, first served.

Programme that simulates the rolling of the dice when playing the Risk board game.

No more dice that fall off the table. No more dice that throw the figures into disarray.

!rant
How many of you guys have played Uplink? IMO it's a game every dev should try. While it's not exactly realistic, especially today, it shows actually how powerful a hacker can be. And YOU are that hacker.

JavaScript drinking game: name a random word, and if this js framework exists, drincc

Over the past week I've been working on a game written in JavaScript (in the browser) which can be played with hand gestures seen by a camera (wanted to use an IR camera but couldn't get one in the time I had). It is the well-know Shell Game!

Blood, sweat and tears went into this because I wrote my code extremely bad so it became a huge clutter.

Will refactor some day, but I'm happy with the result!

I'm playing The Outer Worlds right now and came across this on one of the in-game terminals. I think this game dev needs devrant... 😂

To all the game developers here:
This really needs more attention.

Just finished 2nd year of uni and got a summer placement doing game Dev. I walked in to be the most experienced person there because I am the only one doing it.

I feel the whole universe is a programmed game and someone is playing us. Like when we're playing GTA.

Few of us are the main characters and the rest of us are just random objects to populate the earth, we don't have any rule in the story. :(

Birth is the Constructor()
Death is the Finalizer()

So my friend is learning the Java. And he says to me "Why would you even need dividing in game developing?!".

Have a somewhat good game idea/concept...

Have no experience with game engines...

This could take a while

Unnamed hacking game - "terminal" graphics
-Multiplayer. Last man standing.
-Like a tower-defence game but technical
You work for a company that has outsourced their technical department to Bykazistan, a country with good internet and bad laws. On one hand, labor is very cheap! There are no pesky laws protecting workers, so you don't need to pay them what they're worth. Phew. However, there are also no laws against cyber crime. But for a start-up like you, the risk is worth the reward!
...which would be great! If you were the only company with that idea. As it turns out, you aren't. All of your competitors also recently outsourced to Bykazistan, and that could be an issue.
You would be afraid, but you are a hardened businessman. You are familiar with the cut-throat nature of the business world and where others see risk, you see opportunity. Let the games begin.
Your mission is to protect your ciritical assets at all costs, eliminate your opponents, and make ciritical financial decisions - all while maintaining your uptime!
Build a botnet and attack your competition to decrease their uptime and disable their attacks. Port scan your opponents to learn more about their network, but beware of honeypots! Initiate devastating social engineering attacks - and train your employees against them! Brute-force their credentials, and strengthen your own.
Make sure to keep your software patched...

Unity or Unreal Engine... I am a noob to game dev. Please help

Highschool teacher tells us to work on a little text game, gives us 2 weeks. I wrote about 1600 lines of code with enemys, random map, fighting system,... And generally blowing everything out of proportion as always, because I'm so bored

I spent two days in a row fixing chairs at work because our whole dev team was waiting for issues (which means helping QA team and playtesters testing the whole game).

Just when everyone left and Im standing up to go as well a playtester comes up with a release breaking bug in the handwriting recognition code...
Since this game is build for a charity which will release it in a country at war we cant push the release date.

Guess who is making overtime trying to fix this bug?

This will be 4chan-r/greentext-ish in format. Also "me" is not me, PTH, it's referring to a game studio.

>Be me
>Be game studio
>Create event for weapon design
>Player base submit in a craptonna designs
>Holyfuck.jpg
>Create an internal service for voting
>Service doesn't check for vote except for a login
>MFW one submission has 6-digit votes
>MFW a lotta submission also start gain a lot of votes
>WTF.gif
>The vote count spiked
>Votebotting is here
>Ohshit.gif
>MFW I don't how to filter votes
>MFW I can't block rerouted traffics (VPNs, proxies, etc.)
>MFW the Discord server of the game gets vocal then Reddit.
>OhshitIfuckedup.mp4

Game of Thrones fans will know

!rant

I am so excited, I just got a response from Voodoo.io on publishing my mobile game. Hopefully it makes a decent amount of money!

One of the coolest projects I've worked on recently was this little adventure game I made for a game jam a while back, It was made from scratch with Golang and C over two days. It also features procedural level generation (that technically should allow the user to walk in one direction for at least 7 decades).

In a world full of game engines, only the courageous dare to use OpenGL.

Pretty cool how space engineers support in game C# programming.

I worked on a game jam last year, and for the first time I managed to finish a full software project that wasn't for a job or university. It was really fun to work on, and seeing my vision come to life, even if compromises had to be made, as well as applying all the programming and project management knowledge I'd picked up until then was an experience unlike anything I'd had before.

The community aspect was great too, everybody shared and discussed each other's games and were super friendly and encouraging.

Every Game Dev right now:

*using the patrick meme*

“We should stop updating our games in PC, and move to mobile!”

Is there any game developer around here??? :D

Took part on the Global Game Jam this weekend :)

Hi devRant, this is my first post so don't kill me :P,
What language do you recommend to start learning game development? I'm pretty good in Java and C#, I was told that to use C++, because everyone uses it, but to be honest I'm not that comfortable in it.
Thanks for any comments! :)

!rant
I laughed more than I should about my own code
Can you guess what small widely known game these textures belong to?

You make a platformer game and prototype open source and someone uses it and people assume i must be upset because they "stole" my idea. Wtf, i made it fpr the community to make something cool and thats it!

I learned computer science so i can create a small game some day. I spend my entire time on web development coz thats what makes money in my lame ass country. I come home too tired to go into game development which is an entire world to explore by itself. Cant apply to other countries coz game development companies wont recruit a web developer (i tried). Fuck my life

Who thinks a VR Cable Management Sandbox game would sell really well?

for game of thrones fans

Architects (of real buildings) can work in IT as game level designers.

Found this pearl on the code of the game I made with some friends on a game jam the last week
Beautiful

There's no better feeling than seeing a 5* review on your game after a rough day <3

So me and my friend started doing a video game project. To be honest I was expecting it to be nothing but pain and suffer.
But it turned out to be really fun experience for both of us (plus I’m learning Unity) 😁

GAME
The nickname of a person above your comment will be the name of your next project, tell us what it's about (be creative)

yay or nay?
for who are wondering what is on the screen :
i am working on a fish tank simulator gamr, which every fish have different unique combination and/or permutation. i combined this with cryptocurrency, the idea is similar to CryptoKitties and Insaniquarium combined. the implementation is not yet done, but currently i am working on the in-game market front-end functionality.

sorry no in-game preview/screenshot yet :P

curently thinking about considering to open source it and a collab.

Finally, after 42 days of in development, I can proudly say my game reached Alpha stage. All core mechanics are in place. I hope I'll be able to say the same thing for Beta in next 6 weeks too!

To be honest, I could do it better, but I didn't had much time.

Let's play a game.

I'm almost 30. (Like +1 or -1 to 30)
Are you older than or younger than me? Just answer "older or younger" is fine.

I'll reply my impression of our age difference truthfully.

For example, I have an impression that dfox is older than me but trogus is younger. (I seriously don't know their bio, couldn't bother to check out 😬)

I've just realized that a game with over 1 million downloads (the ranking list is over 2 million people) has its solutions saved in the preference's file. So anyone with a rooted phone can access this file. This make me so fucking crazy: you make a stupid shitty game and get over 2 million users and don't even bother to make it good.
Now I have to decide whether to write to the developer to inform him that this is a stupid way to store the solutions or to make an app to let everyone know the solutions.

OK so after working with SDL for a bit, we have a circle rendering!

Next step is to start working on keyboard input and then onto importing sprites, first time building a game engine from the ground up and working with Vala in this capacity...

EDIT: Gif in comments because it doesn't want to work .-.

Found out today that someone who started game dev with a game jam I started in university has a top 10 game on steam!

So a guy made us develop a website, an Android app and an iOS app prototype under contract for a really low amount. We had initially agreed as it would be a learning experience.

3 months later we are still doing bug fixes for end-to-end deployment. For some reason we are responsible for publishing and deploying the whole system. He hasn't paid us anything yet and has given a shitty LOR which has been taken off the net.

I'm finally making some visible progress on my Unity mobile game called "it goes number in the night!" gotta add a scoring system then I'll have a playable demo.

When I'm in bus, I'm bored and I have no game to play... Made my own game using Photo editor xD

Any other Screeps players here?

for the people running into a "Screeps is not defined":
Screeps is a MMO RTS where you code your "army" to do stuff in Javascript (a la NodeJS).
Code how your harvesters should behave, how your soldiers should behave, how your builders should behave etc. etc.

So far, it is quite a fun game, tho my (Intel Nehalem based) laptop has issues handling it (thanks to a awfully slow GPU...) so it's difficult to play for me at the moment (I'm on holiday, my home PC is a LOT faster).
It costs about 15 euro on steam, and if you're into this stuff, it's well worth it.
Just make sure you finish the tutorial first... I didn't and I regretted it when I bought the game (it's a huge pain in the buttocks to get started if you don't understand the API and such).

Currently just playing on my own localhosted private server to discover how the game works and such, but will be setting up a public server later down the road to play with others.
Tho it would be nice if Screeps would allow for "team-based" gameplay as well so it'll be slightly harder for early players to bully the newer ones.

Probably when I was younger and got my AI working for her checkers game I made in Z80 asm for TI-86. Spent so much time on it not working and then seeing it finally working and taking jumps and scoring the board positions and it seemed semi intelligent even thought it was a very weak ai ... Still I was excited 😁

Hi guys, I have been accepted into game developing (college), do you have any advice (language, and etc) for someone looking to start learning before even he starts his college course?

I just do not feel that I should waste time to wait for my college to start and then wait for a couple of years before I do something... I would love to progress a bit faster, as I am highly motivated.

Dear Game-Devs,

if your game takes some time to load that's fine but please do NOT let me press a button after starting the game and THEN start loading the menu for some time and instead load the menu immediately! What's the point of that? If I know it takes some time I want to start it and maybe get a coffee and when I come back everything is loaded...

!rant

Just finished my first game jam officially, it was fun and our game though being not working 100% was well done, we had art people and a sound guy, who btw made some amazing music for the game. A couple of us plan to work on the game after the jam (because we have time) and since it's more of a local jam our deadline for submission is extended until a week after the jam finishes. (Game broke after merge issues :D)

Glad I decided to go and try it out.

Hah but my issue was that moreso my time was spent on getting unity and a git gui or some sort to work on Linux mint, by half way through Saturday I did lol. Also not much for me to do since we had a total of six programmers.

So if I don't get a new laptop for the next game jam, it's setup to work, which is awesome.

Hi devRanters
I have been working on an android game in my free time as a hobby. It has been 2 years, so I have decided to finally put it up in play store (maybe as alpha or beta). If there is interest I might keep working on it. Any advice? It is the first time I make a game and I am completely green in regards to publishing it and things to take into account.
All advice is appreciated. I am a bit nervous as it has been my baby for 2 years...

Once upon a time i had a great idea.
Because i couldnt be bothered to do anything productive i created a simple app in the C# that would look into every .js file (from a game that uses it for the gui/main menu) and search for "//todo" lines.

I did it mostly for kicks. I got that idea when i encountered one //todo in a file when i was trying to mod that game.

Yes i know grep exists: fuck you.
It would have taken me more time to learn that than to write that 20 line program...

The result? Over 30 lines of //todo with some briliant pearls in the type of:
>Temp workaround because X
>Workaround for race condition
>Clean that up
>Obsolete

When i return home i will post real quotes. They might be amusing to read...

The game is based on a custom C++ engine. HTML, CSS and JS is used for main menu and some graphical interface in game.

The most amusing thing is that this inefficient sack of chicken shit is powering one of the biggest (no playerbase but unit, world, gameplay vise) rts that i have ever played.

But still in spite of a dead community, buggy gui as shit and other problems i love this game and a lot of other people love it too. It is a great game when it works correctly.

To the interested: JS portion uses jquerry and knockout lib.

Hey devrant!, I'm currently developing a hacker game! herer is a little sneak peak all the graphics are temp will be changed as soon as i get some cash! enjoy!

Just thought I'd mention that there are some assets and training material for cryengine available on humble bundle right now for those of you who are into game dev

Why does everyone hate Unity (the game engine)? I've used it and it's honestly not that bad.

Lets make an app that shows a lot of ads. Oh, people actually have to download and use it? Well, let's half-ass a game and name it [...] of[...]!

-every mobile game studio

I want to get into game dev, but don't know which engine to choose, Unreal or Unity. Both would be free, because Unreal is free for students. I already know C++, but I think it depends more on the API than the language itself. Maybe I would like to create games for Android too.
Which one would you recommend? Any experience?

Your monthly reminder about The Game

If I pass an interview easily I won't consider to take the job. I've learn my lesson wasting time working on or with stuff that's just don't excite me. I got a job as JavaScript dev where my scope is mainly on animation and game dev, good luck to me!

Feature request: swipe from rant to go back to list of rants. It would be easier than reaching up for the "back" button.

Made a game, it was like tetris but you had to connect at least 3 blocks of the same colour.

I worked on it for like a month, about 50h overall, and it was downloaded by 10-11 people all over the world and then removed after like an year or so for no real reason.

I then stopped making games.
I was too depressed by the whole thing

I need a good programming game for Android, and I need it now! (Stuck at a party)

Playing at bomberman with my son, a PC game of 1991, has no value.

Arg!

Revenue from ads going downhill and I can't release a new version of a game because it's tied to an event, and I can't even announce it yet.

Sent a proposal for a government grant. Deadline was Aug. 15th, but still no word on it - they didn't even updated the website, which by all means, still have the "send proposal" button active...

Meanwhile also developing another game, but I can't seem to decide on the music and sound fx for it. Can't find some style that will "fit".

Oh the joys of gamedev. :P

Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.

What is a game?

I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.

both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).

a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.

theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.

now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.

Now what is a toy?

There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.

An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.

"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.

Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.

But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?

Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.

Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.

Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.

This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.

But what makes a good game?

A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.

In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.

Me and a friend starting to program a game in Unity, he's worried and I think we will ace it! How f***ed are we? (5 years of website development experience each)

Hey fellow devs, my friend showed me this Godot game engine. Ive spent 15hrs over the weekend building strategy game client which consumes my api server. Ive done a lot! It was easy to understand custom Gdscript which is okay. But before i dig in, i want to know what you guys think about this game engine? Is it going somewhere? Is it good option for indie games? Is it good option for building android/ios games? I need to make my mind 🤔

I think one of the hardest part while making an RPG game is setting the prices of the shop items and determining the rewards you get from quests.
Really struggling right now...

Its been so long since I had a weekend in which I wanted to be productive and also was as productive as I wanted to.

This weekend everything turned around. Last week I learned to use blender to make basic models while I was traveling to and from work.
Today I was really productive and started working on my VR wooden toy block building game.

I now have an infinite blocks box, with randomly colored blocks which you can color yourself as well.
Gonna do performance and textures tomorrow.

Cant wait until Ive finally made a playable game, its been 4 years now.

Building games for people to whom the expression "game design" evaluates to "game UI design", which a fancier way to say "a bunch of static slides with arbitrary screenshots"

my longest coding session was from 10am to 2am, so 16hrs
was in first semester of uni and we had to build the game "breakout" using a predefined guideline.
i had to program the collision detection of a ball against some blocks that had to be destroyed
took a long time for me to do the task, as i'm not the fastest coder (and often neither the smartest😅) and had to fight a bunch of bugs too.
in the end it kind of worked but the performance was horrible at best

Just a small discussion topic, if you could look through the source code ad have full access to 1 project/application/game/moon base forever, what would you choose and why?

For me, I would love to go through the source code for the game Hyper Light Drifter, would love to see some of the inner workings and just learn new methods of doing things.

I lost the game. 🤷‍♂️

Suddenly remembering that you're in a two week game jam and you've only got 3 days to put something together!

First time joined js13k competition, without concrete reason. Just wanted to try out am I able to use my JS knowledge and fit game into 13kB. And actually, I'm really happy with final shape of game. Did anyone else participated? :)

I had a brainfart and I can't google it, do you happen to know of a game that deals with inventory in the style of a stack (large, but you can only access the topmost few elements at any time)?

I'm looking for a game recommendation to play with my (non-gamer) dad
What I'm looking for:
- Android
- Online 1vs1
- Turn based (async)
- Simple
- Free
- Lightweight if possible (my dad's phone is kind of old).
Something like checkers or chess but not checkers or chess :)

The most fun I've ever had coding was creating a hidden object game in school (with Flash/ActionScript3). I even had a dude do voiceovers, it was dope! I would love to learn more gaming development but no time. :(

I was trying to build a simple 2D (drag the fish to eat other fish) game in JavaScript, cause why not there are already many libraries i will certainly find one for my use.

I'm already familiar with p5.js thanks to Daniel Shiffman and his coding train sessions.

I thought to build the game with p5.js with the play and 2Dcollide libraries, but it turns out they don't have a custom irregular sprite collision detection neither the other thousands libraries which are rotting on github.

Guess, I need to build somethig own my own.

And I also hate it, cause I have to design those fishes, the main game logic, this collision detection function and levels

I need a coffee with a coding partner

Can anyone please suggest me a good strategy game for android or desktop. A game which force me to think.

So my friend had an idea for a game and asked me if I could help him develop it. Now, he understands how the code works and can even write quite a bit himself. On several occasions (including today) this happened:

*writes code*
*tests code*
Me: Hmm... this isn't working like it's supposed to
Friend: It looks pretty good, maybe check to see if everything is in the right order
*checks code*
*tries alternative solution*
*checks again*
Me and friend: Well this is even worse than before
*presses ctrl+z a lot to go back to the original*
*opens new project*
*writes new code for same purpose*
*checks code*
Both of us: IT WORKS!!!
*checks again just to be sure*
Both of us: IT STILL WORKS!!!
*compares new code to original code*
Me: It's the exact same code with different variable names!!! Why did this not work before?
Friend: No idea
*puts new code into main program*
*it still doesn't work*

Reasons Java makes me cry sometimes

Headsup: if you're making a game, or want to, a good starting point is to ask a single question.
How do I want this game to feel?

A lot of people who make games get into it because they play and they say I wish this or that feature were different. Or they imagine new mechanics, or new story, or new aesthetics. These are all interesting approaches to explore.

If you're familiar with a lot of games, and why and how their designs work, starting with game
feel is great. It gives you a palette of ideas to riff on, without knowing exactly why it works, using your gut as you go. In fact a lot of designers who made great games used this approach, creating the basic form, and basically flew-blind, using the testing process to 'find the fun'.

But what if, instead of focusing on what emotions a game or mechanic evokes, we ask:
How does this system or mechanic alter the
*players behaviors*? What behaviors
*invoke* a given emotion?

And from there you can start to see the thread that connects emotion, and behavior.

In *Alien: Isolation*, the alien 'hunts' for the player, and is invulnerable. Besides its menacing look, and the dense atmosphere, its invincibility
has a powerful effect on the player. The player is prone to fear and running.

By looking at behavior first, w/ just this one game, and listing the emotions and behaviors
in pairs "Fear: Running", for example, you can start to work backwards to the systems and *conditions* that created that emotion.

In fact, by breaking designs down in this manner, it becomes easy to find parallels, and create
these emotions in games that are typically outside the given genre.

For example, if you wanted to make a game about vietnam (hold the overuse of 'fortunate son') how might we approach this?

One description might be: Play as a soldier or an insurgent during the harsh jungle warfare of vietnam. Set ambushes, scout through dense and snake infested underbrush. Identify enemy armaments to outfit your raids, and take the fight to them.

Mechanics might include

1. crawl through underbrush paths, with events to stab poisonous snacks, brush away spiders or centipedes, like the spiders in metro, hold your breathe as armed enemy units march by, etc.

2. learn to use enfilade and time your attacks.

3. run and gun chases. An ambush happens catching you off guard, you are immediately tossed behind cover, and an NPC says "we can stay and fight but we're out numbered, we should run." and the system plots out how the NPCs hem you in to direct you toward a series of
retreats and nearest cover (because its not supposed to be a battle, but a chase, so we want the player to run). Maybe it uses these NPC ambushes to occasionally push the player to interesting map objectives/locations, who knows.

4. The scouting system from State of Decay. you get a certain amount of time before you risk being 'spotted', and have to climb to the top of say, a building, or a tower, and prioritize which objects in the enemy camp to identity: trucks, anti-air, heavy guns, rockets, troop formations, carriers, comms stations, etc. And that determines what is available to 'call in' as support on the mission.

And all of this, b/c you're focusing on the player behaviors that you want, leads to the *emotions* or feelings you want the player to experience.

Point is, when you focus on the activities you want the player to *do* its a more reliable way of determining what the player will *feel*, the 'role' they'll take on, which is exactly what any good designer should want.

If we return back to Alien: Isolation, even though its a survival horror game, can we find parallels outside that genre? Well The Last of Us for one.

How so? Well TLOU is a survival third-person shooter, not a horror game, and it shows. Theres
not the omnipresent feeling of being overpowered. The player does use stealth, but mostly it's because it serves the player's main role: a hardened survivor whos a capable killer, struggling through a crapsack world. The similarity though comes in with the boss battles against the infected.

The enemy in these fights is almost unstoppable, they're a tank, and the devs have the player running from them just to survive. Many players cant help but feel a little panic as they run for their lives, especially with the superbly designed custom death scenes for joel. The point is, mechanics are more of a means to an end, and if games are paintings, and mechanics are the brushes, player behavior is the individual strokes and player emotion is the color. And by examining TLOU in this way, it becomes obvious that while its a third person survival shooter, the boss fights are *overtones* of Alien: Isolation.

And we can draw that comparison because like bach, who was deaf, and focused on the keys and not the sound, we're focused on player behavior and not strictly emotions.

I want to get at least a skeleton made for this game I want to create. I've been putting off starting it for a whole year now.

Decided to change how my game engine asset loading and sorting systems work, giving up on making everything editable JSON files just so it's easier to manage and actually build things.

Currently trying to work out a way to load all of the packages sprites into 1 singular asset bundle and here is the evolution so far...

Revision 1: Compiles a single 328KB PNG into a 24MB file in 190 seconds.

Revision 2: Compiles same image into a 24MB file in 5 seconds.

Revision 3: Compiles into a 16MB image in 4 seconds.

It's not much but it's a start :-D

(Still haven't built a loading system so who knows if it works yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

Lets play a little python game together and win some devRant points :

We have an array of integers named L

We need to sort this array so that the biggest number be in the beginning and lowest at the end..descending order

Rules:
-You are not allowed to write more than one line of code in the comment...only one

-if you comment once...you cannot comment directly after that...you have to wait for two other comments after you so you can comment again

-you have to build your code upon the previous comments ... you cannot start from scratch

-the lucky one who puts the final comment is the winner..and we should all ++ his comment to give him the biggest amount of points

Lets start and see who will win :)

Don’t have much to do right before Xmas, so I started learning game theory. Jeez, it’s so easy to create dictatorship in voting🤔

Another small update on my games modding stuff...

Currently building a command line tool to pack the game data, currently have a working sprite packer and am able to actually read data from the packed file and export all images byte for byte... Holy shit I might be able to actually do this!

Let me know if anyone might be interested in seeing a demo or some very unclean source code!

The good parts of being a game developer: watched E3 all week. Now back to work...

Replayed Prototype 2 today. In about 7-8 hours.
It is about to be 4 am rn. My head is like replaying all the voices of the game + my vision is like if I am high :D
Like if I would have a ping of 999 lol

Okay, going to delve into the world of C game programming. I come from a JS/React background and wondering where to start. I did a C project back in uni so I know some foundations.

Idea is a 4x space game with simple 2d shapes representing ships, inspired by an old game I can't remember the name of (anybody?)

Firstly, I am thinking Allegro as the lib, it seems to be more maintained than SDL. Does that seem good? Though not sure where to start, or any tutorials for someone who is scratchy with C.

Any advice on how to structure my code?

I like the idea of entity component system, is that sensible?

Cheers for any help

Anyone with game development experience? I'm thinking of doing a game development side project soon. Not expecting the best results, but games like cuphead, hollow knight and salt & sanctuary inspire me (2D platformers).

Will PyGame or LibGDX suit me fine or should I use a bigger engine like Unity or Unreal?

hi guys.. anyone with game programming experience?
any suggestions to start?

The fuck-game:

First I write fuck once, then someone answers that saying fuck twice, followed by either me or someone else saying fuck three times in the same comment.

Person 1
Fuck
Person 2
Fuck fuck
Person 1
Fuck fuck fuck
Person 3
Fuck fuck fuck fuck

The game goes on until someone accidentally types "duck" instead of duck. At that point, the world cries.