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This is a great answer, thank you. I have a day job as a .NET developer but I am bored and looking into developing (indie) games (I envy your 5 years AAA experi

This is a great answer, thank you. I have a day job as a .NET developer but I am bored and looking into developing (indie) games (I envy your 5 years AAA experience!). I have tried Lua and Go and like both. They seem both simple enough to be productive in but with some very powerful features at the same time (e.g. concurrency in Go, tables and coroutines in Lua). I have tried Clojure (as a language, not for game development), but the 'mental overhead' for me is just too much. Rust seems to be a bit more heavy on syntax and features, but I will have to look into it a bit more to find out if that is justified. I have tried Unity (especially since I could leverage my C# experience) but as a developer I like the 'code-first' approach rather than being tied down in a graphical tool with scripting capabilities (especially for 2D games?).

NickPollard 13y ago
I wouldn't dive into Rust right now if you're trying to get into game development at the same time - leave that for when you're a bit more used to general game dev. Using Lua inside a development environment/engine could be a good start - there's a couple of Lua-based development frameworks that might be worth checking out. Start with 2D games as they're much simpler to get going with and get used to how a game engine will look. After that, it depends what you want to do. If you mostly want to create some interesting games and care more about the gameplay design side, using a pre-existing engine/framework is best. If you are interested in the development and high-performance side of things as I am, then learn C (not C++) and OpenGL. This is not as hard as it might seem. The best OpenGL tutorial I have found is http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Chapter-1:-The-Graphics-Pipeline.html http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Cha... - this will get you writing graphics code from scratch and starting to understand what is going on. You don't need to become a graphics expert, but actually understanding how this side of things works will be invaluable. If you have questions, my email is in my profile and I can be reached there. Happy to answer individual queries. I'm not currently working in the Games Industry (day job is Scala in Finance) but my side project of the last 2 years is a cross platform engine + game written in C and Lua.

NickPollard 13y ago

I wouldn't dive into Rust right now if you're trying to get into game development at the same time - leave that for when you're a bit more used to general game dev. Using Lua inside a development environment/engine could be a good start - there's a couple of Lua-based development frameworks that might be worth checking out. Start with 2D games as they're much simpler to get going with and get used to how a game engine will look. After that, it depends what you want to do. If you mostly want to create some interesting games and care more about the gameplay design side, using a pre-existing engine/framework is best. If you are interested in the development and high-performance side of things as I am, then learn C (not C++) and OpenGL. This is not as hard as it might seem. The best OpenGL tutorial I have found is http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Chapter-1:-The-Graphics-Pipeline.html http://duriansoftware.com/joe/An-intro-to-modern-OpenGL.-Cha... - this will get you writing graphics code from scratch and starting to understand what is going on. You don't need to become a graphics expert, but actually understanding how this side of things works will be invaluable. If you have questions, my email is in my profile and I can be reached there. Happy to answer individual queries. I'm not currently working in the Games Industry (day job is Scala in Finance) but my side project of the last 2 years is a cross platform engine + game written in C and Lua.