(WIP)

The point of this list is to keep track of things. Some of the ideas here I'll never start or never return to. But I want to still remember them.

My first game was a Snake clone in LOVE. There was nothing exciting about it except for the joy of learning programming.

I recruited a couple of friends and we made a game for a game jam. We used Box2D which came with LOVE out of the box. But frame rate was broken for some reason, so what ran fine on my PC ended up being super wobbly and janky for everyone else. In the end, the wobbliness made the game better because it was a classic "I learned my first game engine 2 days ago" game, even though I was learning LOVE for a while at the time.

For the longest time the game I was most proud of was Body Snatcher, made for Ludum Dare is a weekend. It's a top down shooter with a small gimmick, and I'm still a fan of top down shooters. I can't believe it worked, I probably can't understand its code now.

Another Ludum Dare game. Another top-down shooter, this time fighting a single boss that keeps growing more branches and parts. This was where I was trying to put as much "juice" in the game as I could, even though it ended up being not much juice at all. I was abusing bump.lua's query functions to make lasers, adding tons of small animations to everything to make it slightly move around and change color, and I got too buried in the technical details to make any graphics or come up with a name.

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After that, I failed a Ludum Dare or two and stopped making games for years.

Previously I was using LOVE because it felt like I was learning programming as well as making a game. Now I tried using a tool that helped you make games instead of play around with code. Of course, you can make a game in LOVE or pure Lua or pure C or whatever, but the difference in approaches was still large.

The tool was Unity. They have really good example projects with lessons which help you learn different tools. I started using the FPS example, added a few things suggested by the tutorial and then transformed them into my own ideas. The idea was to make a bullet hell game in 3D. So the enemies were shooting slow moving bullets and you were supposed to dodge and weave and shoot them.

The game was still 90% just the original example project, but what was really different was the parts I was focusing on. When I was making games in LOVE (and in JavaScript later), I was mostly focused on the code. How do I program movement here, how do I program this interaction, how do I add this effect via code. When making Bullet Limbo I was focused on level design. How to tweak the enemies' stats so they're fun to fight. How do I make the location of the game feel like an actual place, and also like there's some fun stuff to explore. Which enemies should I add so that they pose a challenge.

The level I made was a simple one. The mechanics I added were small. It was still a good experience, and it showed me that if I wanted to actually make a game instead of using it as an excuse to learn a new language, I should use a game engine. Something like Unity, Game Maker or Godot (though I didn't know about Godot at the time).

So, I started learning JavaScript by making games in it.