Does anyone here code video games?

[BrokenBoy]

I'm coding a visual novel in Ren'py. Despite the fact that those types of games aren't known for "exciting" gameplay, programming the branching narratives seen in those games can be a big mental challenge as they require tons of if statements to get the result you want.

But overall I think I'm doing ok with my game. It could be worse.

 

[Misery]

Depends on what you consider "coding", some people seem to have a different idea as to what it is and what it isnt.

I've done dev work before, on 2 released games and.... some number of expansions, but my part in it (typically enemy/boss design & balancing, in a bullet-hell type game) was done in XML. And anything I make is always a spaghetti mess. There was alot of yelling involved, I've no patience whatsoever for bug-hunting. Probably a good thing I never tried for a real career.

I can also make things with Clickteam Fusion (and I might indeed try to make an entire game on my own that way) but I rather expect that most professional programmers would just giggle if I tried to refer to using Fusion as "coding".

 

[BrokenBoy]

Depends on what you consider "coding", some people seem to have a different idea as to what it is and what it isnt.

I've done dev work before, on 2 released games and.... some number of expansions, but my part in it (typically enemy/boss design & balancing, in a bullet-hell type game) was done in XML. And anything I make is always a spaghetti mess. There was alot of yelling involved, I've no patience whatsoever for bug-hunting. Probably a good thing I never tried for a real career.

I can also make things with Clickteam Fusion (and I might indeed try to make an entire game on my own that way) but I rather expect that most professional programmers would just giggle if I tried to refer to using Fusion as "coding".

Do you enter code? Then you are a programmer IMO.

 

[Misery]

Well, what I mean is, normal "coding" tends to look like this:

It's exceptionally complicated and getting even a small thing to happen onscreen, like an object moving when you hit keys, takes a long time and a ton of typing.

Fusion, on the other hand, looks like this:

Most of what is in there is done via clicking, not typing. The checkmarks you see there are the core of it, representing an interaction between the "event" on the left, and an object at the top. Needless to say there's still alot going on here, but... well, I'll put it this way, if you gave me just 2 hours, I could recreate Space Invaders on here. With normal "coding" it'd take about a million years. Even for just small things... if I had the ship at the bottom, and I wanted it to fire a shot upwards, it'd be this long barrage of code when done the traditional way. In here, it's just "spawn object, set object's speed and direction to this" and that's it. Takes less than a minute to create a simple interaction like that. It's marketed as a tool for game creation where "no prior programming knowledge is necessary".

It actually originally showed up in the 90s, under the name Klik'n'Play. Even kids could make games on that (though obviously they'd usually make bad ones), and that was back in the 90s when computers werent user friendly. Though it's obviously come a loooooooooong way since then.

So, yeah, often you hear "it's not really coding" from programmers, that sort of thing. Despite the sheer versatility of it.

 

[Misery]

My only experience with any form of game development has been through trying to write support conversations for Fire Emblem Awakening on the Nintendo 3DS. There's a program with a GUI that uses a simple script editor and text editor. I lost interest in the game and no longer play it, but it was fun to mess around with the support conversations. It was like writing fanfiction with extra steps.

My dream has always been to get into game dev but I can't see it happening now. The only thing I'm even remotely good at is writing, so unfortunately if I want to make a game I'd have to pay other people to do the art for me. I could probably try writing and programming a visual novel, but then it wouldn't actually be a VISUAL novel without art...

Nah, you could do it if you wanted to... never say never. I mean, I used to think the same thing, and then I got a contract offer, and now have 2 released games and some expansions for those games. And the funky part is, I didnt get that offer because I had like some impressive degree or something like that. Which is what I used to think, that I'd *need* an impressive degree to ever do it. No, I got that offer because of a couple of bullet-hell gameplay videos I posted on Youtube. I'm pretty sure one very specific 10-second bit of one video is what really did it. What a strange reason, eh? But it made sense in context.

In other words: you never know what might happen or where things might take you.

If you really want to try developing a game... the only way to get into it is to just freaking DO it. Go have a look at that program I showed up above, Clickteam Fusion 2.5. You dont need crazy coding skills or whatever to make something... logical thinking, that's what it takes to use that program. It aint some weak program either. You cant make true 3D games with it, but within the 2D realm, it can do pretty much anything. And 2D is exactly where any new game dev should start anyway. There's been some very well-known games made with it. The entire FNAF series for one thing (and that's made by ONE guy, not a big team), or something like Freedom Planet.

Even a solo developer can really make truly amazing stuff... it just takes effort and a willingness to try new things and experiment. A number of my absolute favorite games of all time were made by solo devs.

TL;DR, dont give up, and give it a try. You never know till you do.

 

[Nervous Rex]

I've been coding professionally for 25 years. I've made slot machine games, but not video games.

A year or two ago, I had to work on some of the UI elements of a slot machine game in Unity and ... I didn't like it. It's just setting values in dialogs and dragging and dropping visual elements onto other visual elements to trigger baked-in behaviors. It's too abstract for me to know what's going on in the background. I would follow the instructions and it would work, but I would be left thinking, "But what does it actually do?"

It also didn't help that the visual and UI stuff is meaningless to me. I have very slow visual processing and no visual memory. My brain is 100% formatted for text, so the "video" part of video games is lost on me.

Now I'm working on low-level C code that goes directly into a hardware device, and I'm excelling because I can track everything that the code does and know all its effects. I can get right down into what the processor is doing, what's in the processor cache and what binary operations are the most efficient.

This makes me feel old.

 

[Matthias]

I've been coding professionally for 25 years. I've made slot machine games, but not video games.

A year or two ago, I had to work on some of the UI elements of a slot machine game in Unity and ... I didn't like it. It's just setting values in dialogs and dragging and dropping visual elements onto other visual elements to trigger baked-in behaviors. It's too abstract for me to know what's going on in the background. I would follow the instructions and it would work, but I would be left thinking, "But what does it actually do?"

It also didn't help that the visual and UI stuff is meaningless to me. I have very slow visual processing and no visual memory. My brain is 100% formatted for text, so the "video" part of video games is lost on me.

Now I'm working on low-level C code that goes directly into a hardware device, and I'm excelling because I can track everything that the code does and know all its effects. I can get right down into what the processor is doing, what's in the processor cache and what binary operations are the most efficient.

This makes me feel old.

I'm guessing you wouldn't like Unreal Engine's blueprints:

 

[BrokenBoy]

The amount of branches and lines in that diagram reminds me of the plot branching in my game lol.

 

[Misery]

I'm guessing you wouldn't like Unreal Engine's blueprints:

That reminds me of Factorio: