Coolest thing i've built solo? I think it's my 3D snake multiplayer game.

It all started with a simple 2D snake game to teach programming basics at community college. Then i added a multiplayer mode based on a simple UDP implementation. Then i wondered how it would look ike in 3D and i had the idea to figure out how to implement a 3D engine by myself and i dove into the maths and wrote a simple 3D engine based on a windows forms picture box.
I showed the game to my colleagues and the loved it and we played it a lot.
So i added special mode boosters, and sound and map events and obervermode and observer polls.... you know it.

Here's a little collage of the journey...

My first dev project was making a small 3D engine in GameMaker 7 when I was 14. I had been using gamemaker for two years then but I never got past the "platformer movement and collisions" and "top down movement and collisions"

It was the first thing I made myself without following a tutorial and spend quite a few afternoons at school to ask my Math teacher to explain things like sin cos and tan. Words I saw on the internet but did not understand.

Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

First post here...Here's a funny thing that happened to me yesterday. I'm with my friend, we're both taking a break from school, and he comes up to me and mentions how he wants to make 3d games. Conversation goes a bit like this:

Friend: "Hey, I found this 3d model website. I'm thinking of using it for my 3d game."

He was already making a 2d game at this point, so I assumed he just gave up on it.

Me: "Well...do you have Unity?"

Friend: "Yes."

Me: "Well if you're going to make a game on there [stuff about c#]"

Friend insists he can easily make this. I tell him it would take years on end to learn C# and make a good game with it. And then he says something I never wanted to hear.

Friend: "Actually, no. You ever heard of Dani? D-A-N-I? He made a game in 2 weeks. He's actually making a new game and you should wishlist it on steam blah blah yatta yatta."

This guy believed someone else who was previously a game developer (if i recall) learned an entire programming language and engine in two weeks. He could've, but to me that seems seriously outrageous to someone who doesn't even know a smidge of programming.

He then advertised his YouTube channel and his games and brought down my arguments like "he probably had previous knowledge" completely. This guy doesn't even know where to start with C#. Really, all I could do after that was mention three.js (oh wow another JavaScript library, exciting), show him a game Google made with said library, and then said good luck...

Worst thing is, he uses Scratch to make games. And he genuinely thinks that is a real programming language.

That's it for my first post, thank you very much for reading :)

So I get to work on building a client at work for industrial automation. I am building a mini hmi to show customers how our server works. The code uses opcua. The reason I am making a client is because all the opcua hmis on the market are really expensive. There is nothing less than $600. There are hmis for free out there, but none of them say they support opcua. opcua has become a major protocol in the industrial automation industry.

It took me about 2 days to gin together a client that is pretty much abstracted and will be easy to maintain. A lot of that was just learning the opcua library client code.

Now I want to create servers and clients geared toward home automation for fun and profit. I want to take sensor data from arduinos using a simple serial protocol like modbus or other protocols that are supported. Then have an opcua server that collects this data. Then finally have an opcua hmi that I develop talk to these servers. The security model is much better and would be compatible with other vendors clients/servers. I already have a game engine I want to use for the hmi portion. It has tons of widgets for displaying data, graphs, lists, text, etc. It does both 2d and 3d.

This sounds like a project that could really fun, meshes with my work learning, and provides value to people that want to automate their lives.

The other side effect is that the next time I go looking for a simple and cheap hmi that supports opcua, there will be one.

I started down my career path to make games. I have never really made anything good. I think I am finally fed up with not doing this. So I am going to be working on selecting a game engine. I want 3D, I want to experiment with voxels, I want a permissive license, I don't want something huge, I want to contribute back in a meaningful way, it needs to support 3D. So after looking around I found Godot. Another programmer who lives near me uses this as well.

Does anyone else have some good positive experience with game engines for smaller projects? I have played with UE4 and Torque3D/2D. I don't like the bloated feel of UE4 even though its a very cool engine. I didn't like their install system at all. T3D is old and not up to date.

A question to game devs : which design/architecture patterns do you use ?

Everytime I try to take a look at game development, I feel like there is a lack of guidelines, mostly about architecture.

It's something strange to me as a web dev, as we use much of these patterns on a daily basis. Of course I think about the near omnipresence of MVC and its variants, but not just that. Most of frameworks we do use are essentially focused on architecture, and we litterally have access to unlimited tutorials and resources about how to structure code depending on projects types ans needs.

Let's say I want to code a 2D RPG. This has been done millions of time across the world now. So I assume there should be guidelines and patterns about how to structure your code basis and how to achieve practical use-cases (like the best way to manage hero experience for example, or how to code a turn-based battle system). However I feel these are much harder to find and identify than the equivalent guidelines in the web dev world.

And the old-school RPG case is just an example. I feel the same about puzzle games or 3D games... Sure there are some frameworks and tools but they seems to focus more on physics engine and graphic features than code architecture. There are many tutorials too, but they are actually reinforcing my feeling : like if every game developer (at least every game company) has his on guidelines and methods and doesn't share much.

So... Am I wrong ? Hope to.

What are the tools and patterns you can reuse on many projects ? Where can I find proper game architectures guidelines that reached consensus ?