Beginning game development

[Slugsie]

So I've been a corporate software dev for a very long time. Mostly data entry and reporting systems, all very boring and I'm losing the joy of coding that I used to have. So...

 

I'd like to try my hand at game development. Nothing big or fancy, just something simple and fun in my spare time. I'd probably start trying to recreate an 8bit game from my teenage years (I'm old, I was a teen in the 80s).

 

But I have no idea where to start. I mostly do VB/C# at the moment, but I've dabbled in many other languages over the years. I guess Unity might be a good starting point? Can anyone point me towards a good resource for beginning game development please?

[astropheed Veteran]

1 hour ago, Slugsie said:

I mostly do VB/C# at the moment

I would suggest the following:

Unity; C#, Very easy, does 2D but it's not really designed for it.

Godot; GDScript (and, claims C#), Very easy, does 2D/3D. Quite fun, interesting slightly non-intuitive way of using game objects.

LÖVE2D; LUA, No editor I think, just straight code. Honestly, as a dev, I'd have the most fun with this.

 

The easy way in is Unity, the fun way in is LÖVE2D.

 

There is also non-programming engines such as Construct, Clickteam Fusion and Game Maker Studio. As a developer I imagine those would frustrate you, but Game Maker may be acceptable. It, like Godot, uses a proprietary language (GML).

 

Have fun.

[Slugsie]

Thanks, I think I'm going to give Love2D a go to begin with. Always fun learning a new language. 

 

Any other suggestions are welcome. 

[firey]

I am in the same boat as you. Been an APP/Tool Dev for 10 year professionally and on my own for years before then.  Have always wanted to get into game dev, and even though I have more experience than most fresh out of school, since I don't have University (just College) I don't stack up qualification wise.

 

I do a lot of cross-platform dev using Typescript so for my game-dev side projects I stuck with what I know and have opted to go with ThreeJS to use WebGL but have the hard bits done.  Then you can use whatever you want for the backend (I use C#/.NET CORE) and for front-end can use any handful of libraries (Angular, React, jQuery) and I just render basic components as HTML Elements and then just the main game view-port is done with ThreeJS.

 

That said, if you want a bit more basic (2d, 8 bit style) you could look at something like Phaser.

[Slugsie]

Thanks Firey. At the moment I want to 'Cut My Teeth' with something desktop as that's what I'm most familiar with. Phaser looks like a good candidate for cross platform 8bit style games, so I might also give that a go too.