
Last week it hit me. The problem had nothing to do with the idea or the ideas it spawned. Nothing about the format or whether I have the right skills. The problem was hiding in the corner all along: procrastination.
So let’s just throw out all that idea waffling and just start making something. I still don’t have any fully fleshed-out story ready to go yet, but the idea that all the other ideas have been hanging off of is one big fictional setting. So let’s start with that.
Next up, how to publish a setting in an engaging way, without necessarily having a story ready to go yet? How about an exploration game sandbox? It can just be a room or a building to start, then it can be added to with characters, places, mechanics. Who knows, maybe actual fun gameplay. Making a game or getting into game development was always an item on my bucket list anyway.
Usually the first question that comes up when you start talking about game development is “which engine?” Without going into details, I won’t use one of the major ones. I’m going to try and stick with the web browser as my engine. Good old HTML/CSS/JavaScript. This might be making things unnecessarily hard on myself, but I don’t know what I don’t know, you know? As least JavaScript and the DOM have a lot of good tools that wasn’t there not too long ago (intersection observers, web components, mutation observers, gamepad and pointer APIs, etc), so we’ll see how well it serves.
In the interest of just getting this ball rolling and stopping procrastination in its tracks, I’m going to start right away, on this site. I’ll document my journey as well, hopefully this helps someone else looking to try web game dev, learning some more complicated coding, or just getting out of a procrastination rut. So what’s the first step?
A prototype.
@harlan interested in recommendations? I’d love to hear more about the art-style you want to go for, that could determine if some of the popular web game libraries might help.
Hell yeah! Good luck!
@schizanon I’m happy to hear any recommendations, but I can’t promise I’ll use any of them! I don’t have an art style in mind, it could be anything from 3d stuff to pixel work. Prototyping comes first – finding out “the art of the possible” and all that.As for libraries, at the moment, I’m aiming for a zero-dependency build, so as to learn as much as I can as well as making it a small package (it will be delivered over the web, on a page, after all).
@harlan you mean you want to use the bare web apis? Nothing wrong with that but you end up reinventing a bunch of wheels like map tiling and sprite collision. Fun stuff, but I’ve come to feel that with games (esp 3D ones) you should focus on the experience you want to give, and just use whatever gets you that easiest.
@schizanon I mean to go more in detail on this later where there isn’t a character limit, haha!What I mean is that I don’t want to pick a framework, then be locked into that framework’s opinions and methodologies when it’s not necessarily needed. I want to start with bare APIs, then take on dependencies once the benefits outweigh the potential costs. I get that from being a corporate dev I guess.And, one of the reasons for this is for my own learning, so making the wheels from scratch helps.
@harlan I can help you on anything, I’m an experienced gamedev ๐