So you may not know, but I am a Software Engineer. I have been for over two decades now. I am also an avid gamer and as you can imagine I’ve dabbed in Video Game Development in the past. However, I never made it a priority. Just like with my writing there was always something else that came up which seemed, at the time, more important.
I finally decided I want to make a game from start to finish. My love is with retro 2d pixel art games, usually top down with a strong RP element.
Game Jams
I’ve played with several engines over the years including Game Maker Studio 2, MonoGame, Godot, Unity, Love, and Ebitengine.
Ebitengine was the only one I made a real effort with in a game jam last year.
I created The Social Contract, a game designed to be a social sandbox. I build an ASCII based engine on top of Ebitengine and released it as open source under the MIT license which I called GlyphEngine. I did not do very well in the game jam since I never got a chance to polish it. Once again game development was’t a priority, life took a front seat.
I am primarily a Go developer in my day job, and really wanted to use Ebitengine in my game development. However, I realized how much tooling work I would have to do around integrating the SteamWorks SDK with a C wrapper using CGo around the C++ Steamworkd SDK. I don’t want to spend my creative energy wrestling with that type of tooling.
I decided instead to refocus my efforts and go back to two other game engines I played with in the past. I built Mono-Pong in MonoGame two years ago. Around five years ago I made a small POC with godot that I no longer have.
What I considered
I had considered a few other game engines I have tested over the years. I used to love Unity, however, the licensing fiasco destroyed my trust in them as a company.
I reviewed Game Maker Studio 2 since I own it, however, I really do not want to have to learn a scripting language and I use linux. The beta of their linux version did not meet my needs.
I looked at Love which is Lua based but while I use Lua in my neovim setup but I am not that familiar with it.
My Decision
When I move forward I am planning to use Godot, it just offers a platform for a quicker release cycle and can handle any type of game I may want to make now or in the future. While right now my heart is set on 2D games I admit I have considered 3D games and my son still loves VR games.
However, right now I am planning to put more work into my writing so while I will be learning Godot it may be some time before I publish anything in it.
