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Making small games, which is fun in itself
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- doctorpangloss 3y ago[flagged]
- SamBam 3y agoDo you know for sure this was written with GPT4? I might have missed a statement in the article to that effect. I think if one isn't sure, it's politer to ask than assume. That said, a number of statements do sound very GPT4-ish. > The common narrative surrounding small games posits that creating them is a crucial preparatory step towards developing larger, more polished games. Many articles overwhelmingly advise beginners to start with small games. I've found GPT4 loves to sound grand if not told otherwise. That said, I think it's likely that the author's first language is not English. If so, I think GPT4 is a great tool for communicating across language barriers, so I don't begrudge them at all.
- nottorp 3y agoFunny that it shares the homepage with an article about curl receiving LLM generated fake bug reports for the bug bounty. That's done for self promotion, and so is this. Personally I'd rather have bad English.
- Kiro 3y agoWhere do you find that article? Also don't understand your comment about self promotion.
- nottorp 3y agoHere: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-f... It seems to be gone off the first 3-4 pages of HN.
- quickthrower2 3y agoIf they used GPT it is most likely just for a summary of the blog post as the first few paragraphs seem human written to me. If they did I encourage them to point out that is what they did. To make it clear it isn’t all AI. The “additionally” and “often” words give it away a bit. AI spiel and paper abstracts talk this way!
- meheleventyone 3y agoI doubt the submitter is the author of the games or this guide. The original author is also Japanese which might explain the slightly odd prose better than it being AI generated.
- Kiro 3y agoWhere do you see obvious GPT content?
- 8organicbits 3y agoThe quick-to-build game model is quite fun. At the start of the pandemic I created a few games, probably about 30min each. My toddlers got to feel part of the process (which unicode emojis should I use?) and they played the games for much longer than I took to build them. These are by no means at the quality of the submission, but they were how my kids learned to use a mouse and keyboard. I definitely encourage others to try making their own. It is fun. https://alexsci.com/games/ https://alexsci.com/games/ (only works on certain screen sizes, some need a keyboard, no instructions, etc)
- memalign 3y agoYour toddler game ideas are thought-provoking. Thank you for sharing!
- klyrs 3y agoHahaha, life hack, if my youngster wants more screentime he can spend it playtesting :evil laughter:
- netghost 3y agoI had a similar experience! My son is 8 now, and he still occasionally asks me to load up the "game" where you choose an emoji and type a number and it show that many of them on the screen. It's not "fun", but dad made it and he had a say in how it worked, which is huge for kids.
- dash2 3y agoI really enjoyed Find The Pig!
- prakhar897 3y agoI've learnt that Game Designing and Game Development are two very different things. You need a creative mind to know what mechanics will be tight and grab the audience. Development on the other hand requires ruthless execution. hence imo in the beginning, it's best to recreate existing games with atmost a small twist. This makes sure i'm learning one craft adeptly before moving to the next. Here's a freeboard of a game I worked on recently: https://li-quoridor.vercel.app/ https://li-quoridor.vercel.app/ [Still a work in progress]
- felipemnoa 3y ago>>Game Designing and Game Development are two very different things Right on. Took me a while to realize this. Game Design is the blue printing process of a game. Game Development is the actual building of the game. And Game Design is way harder than what I expected.
- 3737hdhd7372 3y agoYeah a lot of people think of game design as just being about brainstorming cool ideas But in reality it’s actually a pretty technical job from what I’ve seen Can involve a lot of staring at spreadsheets and dealing with stats
- hesdeadjim 3y agoSo hard. As a programmer it’s so much easier to get deep in the tech and push off the ambiguous, frustrating, yet rewarding craft of designing content. I built half the content of a VR game I released a long while back with a friend, and the only thing that got me through it was listening to talks by John Cleese on the topic of creativity. My process could be summed up as: beat my head against a wall, make something okay-ish, get frustrated, try again and again, sleep on it, and eventually repeating that enough times results in awesome stuff. But I have a hard time calling it “fun” even with the luxury of 7 years of hindsight.
- greggman7 3y agoThis is super true. It's why programmers like writing game engines. It's relatively well defined all the parts needed so it feels like you're making lots of progress when in reality you're just re-inventing the wheel and not doing the truly hard part, the actual design and content creation. I'm super guilty of it myself.
- edfletcher_t137 3y agoThis is a lovely book, thank you for putting it together! Immediate bookmark. They really are fun. In fact making small games was my pandemic challenge: I decided that it was finally time to try these things. I ended up building a tool for cutting up and annotating tile maps first - https://tmt.computerpho.be/ https://tmt.computerpho.be/ - then used it to create a minimal browser city simluator, https://pc.computerpho.be/ https://pc.computerpho.be/. These also served as experiments into building single-file "apps" for the browser, which was fun as well!
- yrandom 3y agoI think this is a fun and productive way to learn how to code which I why I built https://xcadia.app/ https://xcadia.app/ which has lots of examples of simple retro games that you can edit and learn coding from.
- jessecoleman 3y agoLike others in the comments, I also used my pandemic free time to build a game. building a prototype took me a long weekend, but the long tail of adding state management, mobile responsiveness and animations etc has dwarfed the initial development time. It quickly went from a fun playground for experimenting with mechanics to a long term project. It's been a great learning experience, and still a lot of fun to work on. But the pure creative joy of concepting and building has been supplanted with the tedium of maintenance and bug fixing. My game for those interested: https://gramjam.app https://gramjam.app
- josh-sematic 3y agoFun premise! I will note that the dictionary is not as complete as I might hope—it didn’t recognize “tasers,” and there was one other word it rejected that I thought it would get (forgot what it was though). Still, a fun game!
- jessecoleman 3y agohttps://www.anagrammer.com/scrabble/tasers https://www.anagrammer.com/scrabble/tasers You'll find a lot of variation between dictionaries. I was surprised to discover that curating the dictionary is one of the hardest aspects of building a word game. People have a lot of opinions on what should or should not be included, I've spent a lot of time manually filtering out profane and questionable words. Another interesting constraint of this particular game is that unlike Scrabble there's a lot of accidental word discovery, which can create a poor user experience if a bunch of obscure words clear and ruin a player's intended word. P.S. I will probably add tasers after you flagged it
- josh-sematic 3y agoInteresting points for word games in general and this one in particular!
- maaarghk 3y agoI played this for hours last night, I'm going to need to block it :) Set myself a target of 2048 for nostalgic reasons, turns out it takes a long time (for me anyway). You're right about the dictionary, actually the whole time I kept wondering about how annoying it must have been to choose a dictionary for this game. Even though not accidentally making non-obscure words without noticing is part of the challenge, accidentally making obscure words is annoying! Maybe I just don't know enough words - but looking through my game log, I was annoyed by "cony", "smit", "huic", "yipe", "nome", "torii", "agon", "mairs", "imido" and "sial", some of which don't display a definition when you click them, but all of which appear in all the scrabble dictionaries referenced on the website you just linked. Meanwhile I was sad to discover vape is so far only in one scrabble dictionary :) And annoyed to discover "oxalic", which is also in all the dictionaries on that site, was not accepted. I guess there's a spectrum between "advanced scrabble player level vocabulary" and "fun word game", because I imagine (and suspect you have probably had feedback along these lines) _not_ allowing a word which is obscure but still unambiguously used in the modern era would be worse UX overall - the sort that's more likely to make you rage-quit. I can see why you'd try to get a bit of wordle-esque shareability out of the daily mode even though I like the classic mode more myself. But I think the tutorial popup isn't as comprehensive as it needs to be for someone's first game to be fun. The first time I clicked the link I did an abysmal job at the daily challenge, I think it wasn't obvious that swaps didn't need to be neighbouring like the given example. Something that might be better is to make an interactive tutorial for first-time visitors - come up with a 5x5 board that is quickly solved and demonstrates several strategies and then walk the player through clearing it. I also think the help popup being one click away would be useful. I would also have liked the help popup to let me know that progress is saved if you close the page, I ended up checking in an incognito window because I had no time to keep playing but wanted to come back and try to reach the target I'd set myself another time! Anyway - criticism and suggestions aside - well done, it is a fun game and concept!
- mteam88 3y agoIn the first game pictured, timber test [0], you can spam cut repeatedly to get some pretty high scores. I love finding little strategies like this. This is only possible in games with a tiny feedback loop, which I think makes them fun to play on a whole new level. [0] https://abagames.github.io/crisp-game-lib-11-games/?timbertest https://abagames.github.io/crisp-game-lib-11-games/?timberte...
- croniev 3y agoI played and enjoyed the game, getting the hang of it quickly. What confused me though was that the tapping sounds were not always that consistent with the cutting and mainly that from the beat it sometimes felt like a rhythm game that makes sense, but sometimes was just completely off. Or maybe thats just a skill issue.
- JaDogg 3y agohaha, nice mine are basically what I wrote as demos for Yaksha https://yakshalang.github.io/demos/ https://yakshalang.github.io/demos/
- GenericCanadian 3y agoI learned a lot about Rust by making games with Bevy and writing down everything I learned: https://taintedcoders.com/ https://taintedcoders.com/ The smaller the game the more likely you are to finish. I usually started with making the movement fun and then developed some game like concepts around it. I also highly recommend starting by making simulations instead of games as when you're alone they are still a blast to see come alive. Building boids is a fantastic exercise I do in any new engine.
- cjstewart88 3y agoI enjoy this kind of programming too! Here's one I made a while ago: https://cjstewart88.github.io/n/ https://cjstewart88.github.io/n/
- dimenoz 3y agoIn the same spirit: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoThat is impressive number of games And a lot of them look polished enough to publish. Did any make money?
- msephton 3y agoBelieve it or not he doesn't do this as his full time job. I understand he thinks his games are too simple to sell commercially. He creates games and shares them for fun. http://indygamer.blogspot.com/2006/12/kenta-cho-mtv-interview.html http://indygamer.blogspot.com/2006/12/kenta-cho-mtv-intervie... That said, at least one of his early games has been commercialised (Tumiki Fighters became Blast Works; it's a shoot'em up where you can collect debris to increase your ship size/shield/scoring). About that one, he commented that a lot of extra work was necessary to expand his concept into a game that was considered sellable (the work was done by another developer).
- araes 3y agoMay not be obvious from the article, yet all of the authors games are available for play [1] [1] http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/ http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/ And there's also a breakdown of games by their included game mechanics at [2], which from my own perspective is perhaps more fascinating. [2] https://abagames.github.io/action-mini-game-mechanic-tags/index.html https://abagames.github.io/action-mini-game-mechanic-tags/in...
- mortallywounded 3y agoI'm in love with the idea of making games-- it got me into programming. It's an absolute blast to do. There's nothing quite like grabbing SDL2 and going HAM for a few days. Some of my fondest memories are with lazy foo's tutorials :) https://lazyfoo.net/ https://lazyfoo.net/
- redbell 3y agoAnother interesting article by the same author is "Joy of small game development" discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37799387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37799387 Yesterday, a game made by this author, called 1D pacman, was trending with more than 1,700 points, available here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38845510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38845510 For me, this proves that this guy really knows what he is talking about. Kudos!
- j0hnyl 3y agoThe pacman game is definitely sticky, it makes me want to try making a "small game"
- mikhmha 3y agoI've been working on a game since quitting my job. Having some of the most fun in my life doing this. I used to find making games very overwhelming. But some time ago I realized that you can make game mechanics out of anything! There are no rules. Well - the rule is that it has to be fun! And I played Baldurs Gate 3 a few months ago which really inspired me. I have been playing RPG games for a long time now but I never tried a real "TTRPG", most of my experience was playing JRPG's when I was younger. And I knew about DnD but never felt compelled to try it irl because it seemed "kind of lame". But then I played BG3 and I really understood what "RPG" means. The game made it all click for me.
- jvm___ 3y agohttps://rockpaperscissorslizardsomething.neocities.org/ https://rockpaperscissorslizardsomething.neocities.org/ I had chatgpt make the code for this for me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alexpls 3y agoI've been playing around with the Playdate SDK (https://sdk.play.date https://sdk.play.date) over the holidays and it's awesome for small games like the author describes. Working with a tiny 1-bit screen and ~150MHz CPU puts some serious constraints on what you can do, which I've found to be pretty freeing (less analysis paralysis, more doing...)
- j0hnyl 3y agofirst i'm hearing about this platform. how poppular is it? seems so obscure.
- sp332 3y agoThey sold over 50,000 of them in the first year (by May 2023). Maybe we'll get another sales update this year.
- cableshaft 3y agoA Playdate game, Yoyozo, actually made Ars Technica's best games of 2023 list. Looks to be a bit of a small game like this. I have one, it's fun to play with, and I have one of my games working on it, although I don't think it's good enough to release yet. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/ars-technicas-best-video-games-of-2023/7/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/12/ars-technicas-best-vi...
- nxobject 3y agoIt’s also worth thinking about other small things to program that are fun in and of themselves - for example, take a vintage photo platform. What fun toys can you create for them? What would it be like to add alt-tab to them, or Exposé?
- sharat87 3y agoMy little daughter, and my mother, love playing a little game I made. That made making the game oh so much more rewarding and fun! It's at https://play.sharats.me https://play.sharats.me.