Recently I decided I want to pursue my dream of game development. It's not an easy decision, and it will take me back in my career. But it is a dream, and I will try to do it.
I started by searching "web dev to game dev site:www.reddit.com" I limited the search to Reddit, because I usually get good results from there, instead of click-bait blog posts that have no info.
Most of the posts were about a web developer who's interested in that direction, and many replies say he shouldn't. The pay is bad, it's very hard, etc. As with any dream, I want to fail myself, and I won't let anyone prevent me from trying.
So I went into gamedev.reddit.com to find a tutorial and found their faq. They had some questions about where to start if I'm a total beginner, and if I know how to code. I went into some of the "Paths to gamedev" they suggested, and what I saw is that they suggest creating something small. At the beginning of the search, I knew I need to choose a project, and I thought of porting blip 'n blop but after reading some of the posts, I realized I should start with something that is very simple, one suggested Tetris and another suggested pong. What they emphasized is to choose a game that is too easy, that I look at and think, "I should start with something harder, it won't teach me anything". The logic behind this is that I will learn the basics, like what is a game object, how to deploy a game...
So I chose pong. It's very easy, to play and build (at least, it looks so).
Here's a list of projects I thought about or saw online:
- Pong
- Tetris
- Soduko
- breakout (or superball as my father used to play when I was young)
My plan now is to start with pong, and continue with this list.
Now, I need to choose a game engine. of course, these games don't need them too much, but it would be nice to play a little with what's online.
Since I'm a web developer, I'll try to work with something that uses JavaScript, this way I can also put those online easily. In the future, I will probably consider something else, depending on my needs (I'm looking forward to Unity/Unreal/Godot)
Choosing a game engine
To start, I searched google for "web game engine" , the two first results were to actual game engines (Phaser, PlayCanvas), and the second 2 results were a list of game engines.
- html5gameengine.com is a nice list, but not updated (phaser says its last update is 2018), so I didn't read too much into its suggestions
- github.com/collections/javascript-game-engi.. - is nice, but there's no way to compare the projects.
I heard the name Phaser a lot in the last couple of days, and in other contexts, so I decided to go with it. Yes, there might be better, but I didn't want to go into analysis paralysis so I decided to take it, and after 2-3 games, I can try something else.
Starting the journey
What should I do? Maybe, start one of the tutorials on the phaser home page? Jump into creating Pong and reading the documentation? Look for a tutorial for building pong with Phaser?
I think I'll start how I usually do, start with a tutorial, until I have an idea of how to do stuff with Phaser, and then jump into Pong.