So you may not know this, but I’m a Software Engineer, I’ve been one for over two decades. I’m also an avid gamer, and as you can imagine, I’ve dabbled in game development over the years. However, I never made it a priority. Just like with my writing, there was always something else that seemed more important at the time.
While my main focus right now is writing, I’d like to create a video game within the next year or two.
Game Jams
Over the years I’ve experimented with several engines, including Game Maker Studio 2, MonoGame, Godot, Unity, Love, and Ebitengine.
The only one I really pushed with was Ebitengine, which I used in a game jam last year. I created The Social Contract, a social sandbox game. For it, I built an ASCII-based engine on top of Ebitengine, released as open source under the MIT license: GlyphEngine.
I didn’t do very well in the jam. Due to life happening the game never reached a polished state. Once again, game development wasn’t my top priority; life took the front seat.
Since I primarily work in Go, I was excited about sticking with Ebitengine. But I quickly realized how much tooling effort would be needed — things like integrating the SteamWorks SDK through a C wrapper with CGo. That’s not where I want to spend my creative energy.
So I decided to revisit two other engines I’d tried before. I built Mono-Pong in MonoGame a couple years ago, and about five years back I did a small proof-of-concept in Godot (though I no longer have that project).
What I Considered
I looked at a few other options, too.
- Unity used to be a favorite, but their licensing fiasco completely destroyed my trust in them.
- Game Maker Studio 2 is one I already own, but I don’t want to learn a custom scripting language, and their Linux beta didn’t meet my needs.
- Love (LÖVE) was also on the list. It uses Lua, which I do use in my Neovim setup, but I’m not comfortable enough with Lua to commit to it for a full game.
My Decision
After going back and forth for a while, I came full circle: despite the extra tooling challenges, Ebitengine is the best fit for me. I love Go, and it’s perfectly suited for the kind of 2D games I want to build.
