Learning my first game engine after years of making games without one

Recently I’ve gone back to my hobby of making games, which includes learning a game engine. Even though I have been interested in the game design and development areas for years, I’ve either fallen for the tutorial hell trap or used a series of other programming resources in order to make games without game engines (namely making games based on a C++ prompt or an HTML page).

I’ve always enjoyed participating on game dev I also participated in many game jams and college projects as a writer and game designer, which are other parts of making games that I really like. Only now, years later, I’ve finished programming my first project on a game engine,

College project I helped writing and designing (UFRN the videogame)

Earlier this year, when I decided to go back to making games I’ve chosen Godot for its simplicity and for the upcoming news of its updated version, Godot 4. I’ve picked-up the very popular (and helpful) Godot Action-RPG tutorial by HeartBeast and saw many episodes of it. It was very useful for understanding the editor, functions, sprite and file management..

I’ve watched nearly all of the 22 episodes of the series, which helped me a lot to grasp the basics. I had to stand away from studying game programming every day for a while in favor of studying web and mobile development. During this time I even participated in a game jam on a solo project using C++ prompts and HTML (which I did because I didn’t felt secure about using Godot or other game engines).

Presenting the comedy console game I made at the Global Game Jam 2023

For that matter, I should point out that I actually love working with these unusual and different tools to make games, and that I probably will keep using them to make fun and creative projects. I do believe that a limitation can do wonders for creating unique, interesting and out of the box solutions. That said, it’s been 14 years since my first attempt at making a video game, and I believe it’s about time I get comfortable with a more usual and effective tool.

So, as a way to practice the things I’ve learned months prior, and not start back from scratch at a new tutorial, I decided to come back with a simple project, space invaders. Making a game clone is an amazing project for practicing a programming tool. It’s great for keeping the scope in check, saves you time on projecting and testing the game balance and game rules, gives you a pretty clear objective and skips a lot of the procrastination of defining how the game will be, especially the part of cutting out things you want to add but aren’t 100% sure will be actually possible to actually implement.

It was my first time using Github to do code versioning on a game engine. I was impressed by how smooth it went, and it was also pretty helpful in organizing the features and fixes on branches and merging them later. This was also my first Build in Public project, from time to time when I made an upgrade on it I’d post it on my Twitter for as my #100DaysOfCode update. Even though my game was a simple study project, people still enjoyed seeing the evolution of it and I’ve enjoyed sharing it.

I’m also glad I could make it playable on browser, give it a page on this site and list it on my itch.io page. I intend to start making my games to be seen and played by other people, more than projects that I keep for myself and never see the light of day. Also on that topic, experience taught me that working secretly on a game for months and trying to suddenly get many people to play it after you finish it can be pretty stressful, so I intend to keep on this trend of sharing and updating online as I build it.

After setting it to be playable on a live web page (you can play it here) I considered this project as finished. Even though I could add some more features here and there, in the end it’s still a Space Invaders clone. I really want to join the gamedev discussion and showcases, and I need something original for that. My next step is starting another project that I have in mind, simple enough that I can finish, but different enough that can get people interested.

And that’s it for today’s post, thank you for reading! Soon I will be making another one about my experience of making this game Godot4 instead of the more stable Godot3 version of the engine and escaping tutorial hell. Stay tuned!

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