Game Development Help

Game development has always been a dream of mine and I want to get into it as a career. I am currently a CS major and I planned to go to a college which had CS with a concentration in game design/programming but thinsg didn't go as planned. My only experience is when I did Unity back in high school. Anyone know how I can build my profile so I can get a job out of college in the game industry and where I should start in order to get practice?

I've no advice to give but I'll tell you my own experience with my own game dev journey: I wanted to make an atmospheric text rpg/adventure game in ncurses with sdl-audio. I was huge on the creative side but actually planning the C project was a bit too much for me (no professional/school background in CS). It was very enlightening designing the game. In the end I wasn't able to keep up the momentum of learning so many things and I think my project is now dead. If you're looking to be apart of a big dev team then I suppose just getting handy with UE4, Unity CryEngine etc. is a good move as well as your own interest (level design, engine scripting or programming, 3d modeling, creative writing, storytelling).

I have been deving games for years but i have no idea how to make potential employers take it. If you need advice on how to make games i can tell you.

>>69 I will keep all of that in mind >>70 That would be well appreciated

>>71 First writing an engine from scratch is suicide, chose one that does the job. Plenty around and also foss ones too. I can recommend a few if you could tell me what genre. The programming language will be determined by that, in most cases they have embedded scripting languages now days luckly. Obviously there will be constraints by both the language model and the api, but nowdays even free engines can do next to anything if you can work aroudn the knacks. Some masochists may chose to work on an engine that doesnt have a clear game/engine code seperation layer but that only makes a mess in most cases. The usual free tools are things like blender for 3d, gimp for 2d, audacity for sound and any generic text editor of your choice. Levels/maps often have a specific format and a tool that you need to make them in, but there are also work arounds and converters if you dont fell like chaining yourself to a utility, i dont have any urls handy so you gotta look them up on your own. You can also find plenty of free art around, mostly soykafty but better than working from scratch in some cases. Its way more work than it seems and its a pain in the ass too getting specific stuff done. Most of all dont expect anyone to appreciate what you do. If you need to know anything more specific im always glad to be of help in that regard.

>>72 I was thinking about using unity for a 2d platformer as my first real project

>>73 Generally i can recommend godot for 2d and some 3d things. http://godotengine.org A platformer should be a piece of cake with that.

>>74 >>68 This, use Godot. >Truly free software license (MIT) >Works on Linux and Mac without a hitch (very portable) >Comfy Python-like scripting language for normal dev and prototyping >C++ modules, source code, AND GDNative plugins (Use any language you want) for perf-critical functions >Godot 3.0 coming out in a month with PBR shaders >Doesn't mash 2D and 3D dev into one renderer (has a 2D renderer for 2d games, 3d renderer for 3d games) >Whole engine has a 30MB binary The main downside is that it isn't very popular yet, so there isn't so much documentation or tutorials. But there are more than there used to be. Dip your toes in with some of the demo projects, you can even edit their scripts in realtime iirc.

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>>74 >>83 Damn. That's pretty awesome.

If youre still searching for an engine blender has a game engine as well

>>83 Sadly it depends on pulseaudio.

>>350 firefox does so too now :(

How educational is game development in Unity? I'm going to a mediocre university of applied sciences (code monkey school), so I will need to learn on my own how to actually build stuff. Unfortunately, I also have a mediocre ability to stay focused. For the sake of motivation and obsession-fueled endurance, I could try to tap into video game nostalgia. Right now, my plan is to build a 2D, turn-based strategy game in Unity. The idea is to go OCD on the logic and rudimentary AI, and worry about other features later.

>>350 Libpulse, not pulsed. If you're running alsa without pulsed, it'll pretty much just bypass into alsa like you want, AFAICT. And there are systemdless patches available. I know all this because I'm running systemd-less arch and pulsed isn't running on my system. FF, Godot, etc run like a dream.

I need some help with this. It is written in batch, but I think I should move it over to other language. what is one I can use with out sacrificing the multi window layout and the style?

>>413 Honestly this is pretty neat... I haven't seen many games written in batch before, good job. If you felt up to it, you could actually write your own simple terminal 'multiplexer' for your game. Something that divided up the windows. in one terminal sessions ie. ***************************** * * * * * * * * * ***************************** * * * * * * ***************************** I don't think this would be incredibly difficult although you'll have to write some lower level functions for text wrapping and such

>>379 it depends on what you want to learn, and what you already know. the workflow in unity is based around writing little scripts and patching them together in the editor. probably isn't going to teach you anything unless you're brand new to coding. look into using the XNA/Monogame framework directly. you'll feel like you're making your own engine, but it does all the hard stuff for you. >>413 this is dope. literally any language that lets you read from stdin and write to stdout would work. just pick one with good string handling. >>415 on the other hand, i like the idea of someone running this on a headless box and having to switch between login sessions to view their inventory.

>>413 If you are looking for almost effortless string handling you could try straight up python, you wouldn't even need to use a framework like 'pygame'. If you are looking for a really neat challenge you could use Common Lisp. There's a great book on the topic called 'Land of Lisp'

Thanks to all of you. To elaborate, my Mau issue is that variables do not between the windowd. For example: if I were to move in the main screen. The map would not change without having to close and reopen the map window. >>415 How? Can you please elaborate >>417 Yep, that's the good thing about text based games: wide selection of languages >>418 So I looked this up. Its definitly a language I need to learn since it is modifiable. I will need to actually start programming with it to see.

>>419 I don't really know how to elaborate further, there's a few ways that I would handle it though. The way you'll probably have to do it is create something like a 'formatted screen buffer' set up as a 2d array based on the character width and height of the screen as well as the height and width of your sub-screens, you're going to print your text to that buffer (and apply all your formatting functions like calculating screen wrap and the screen subdivisions and stuff like that) and then you're going to print the buffer to the actual window. So you might have something sorta like this. raw data -> buffer -> console "info" -> =============== -> =============== = = = info = = = = = = = = = ============= ============= = = = = = = = = = = = = ============= ============= You can use actual characters to break up the 'virtual consoles' for inspiration check out the screenshots (from tmux (a console multiplexer), caves of qud, dwarf fortress

>>419 i'm not >>415, but you're probably going to want to use ncurses for this. it gives you some useful abstractions for "drawing" on the terminal buffer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ncurses here's some info if you're going to be using python https://docs.python.org/3/howto/curses.html

>>421 >>420 ありがと I am a new user, but I love this chan so far

It's great, just remember in CGI it's all gigs. I learned via DOOM modding, GTA loader scripts & Counter Strike source, so I can drop ESRB complaints all over Steam marketplace. Unity is one packet among MANY worthwhile engines. FOSS is

FOSS wasn't free yesterday

Writing an engine from scratch might ineffective but it will really teach you a lot if you hold on through.

>>536 You cant really talk about game development there, its an unrealistic expectation to make both a game and an engine. Its hard enough to make a game already and im talking from experience. Its true you learn a lot that way, but im sure there are many ways to learn and get something done that wont end up being overshadowed by existing software.