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Ask HN: To make games, what tools do I use?
I am a developer with 5 years of programming experience and I now want to start programming games. What I'm asking is what the best way to get started is. I've used Haskell, Scheme, Ruby and JavaScript before, but I can probably learn some new languages if required.
- jmatthews 13y agoI'm a Unity fan-boy. Deploys to almost every modern platform and uses a "code-once" approach so porting from Android to IPhone to PC to Linux is largely straightforward. It lets you code in a subset of javascript or c# 3.0 and favors composition over inheritance. Just an incredible tool for productivity and the learning curve is pretty gentle. It also has a large community and a bunch of plug and play assets available in a built in marketplace. Be sure and check it out.
- timhaegblom 13y agoUnity looks nice. It's a shame I'm on Linux. Maybe it's worth it to dual-boot.
- jmatthews 13y agoWas about to say it deploys to Linux but I assume the editor doesn't run on Linux. Having a couple of decades alternating between serious game development and just dabbling I can't stress enough how big the delta between Unity and competing products is. A great indicator is all of the new kickstarter projects from big names in the business switching to Unity. Richard Garriot, The new wasteland game, etc...
- zura 13y agoI hate so much the designer approach of Unity, a lot of time is wasted in tinker in that complex UI... I wish it had support for fully code-only projects, even if it would require some boilerplate code.
- mscottmcbee 13y agoUnity3D is the current hot tool. You can use C# or an ECMAscript flavor called Unity Script. There's also quite a list of growing HTML5 game engines. Beyond that, there's really nothing stopping you from finding an opengl binding for the language you love and writing something simple.
- timhaegblom 13y agoHTML5 looks nice. I want to make a game where users can mod it easily and maybe download mods (scripts) from a server to store them locally. Is that possible with HTML5?
- mscottmcbee 13y agoAbout two weeks ago I started to explore a concept with a friend where people wrote the AI to a fleet of ships in browser using JS, which then got executed. It seems to work alright, but I'm no expert when it comes to JS, so I'm not sure what would need to be done to sandbox it and make sure the user-generated scripts didn't do anything nasty.
- iends 13y agoIf you want to make mobile games Java/Obj-C. Anything else, probably C++, or if you want to go the Unity route, C#.
- curiousphil 13y agoOur studio has been using Unity for the past year or so for iOS/Android game dev and we love it. For web games we've been using ImpactJS fairly heavily and really liking what it offers.
- anywherenotes 13y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned Corona. I did a couple of games natively on Android, and now trying to make one in Corona, and it seems to be an easier route. One big negative (if it applies) is it's 2D, whereas Unity is 3D. It also doesn't support as many devices, for example doesn't support windows mobile, but still majority of users will be android/iOS. I'm mentioning it only here to see if there's another thing I'm overlooking, and should switch to something else.