Game Dev Journey - II

January 23rd, 2021

Hello everyone, it's a bit sooner than I expected but I wanted to make a quick update about the current status of my game dev journey. I'm currently following a path and I want to remember my approach during those times when I look back at them from the future.

What's New?

Actually I don't have many major updates about the my way of thinking, I just have some updates, upgrades and insights that I can share with you guys.

I'm currently following a tutorial series that dives deep into a 2d platformer game with the help of some other popular programs. For example we are currently using Tiled for the tilemap creation and the concepts of mapping tiles as arrays just looks so elegant and cool, I don't even know what are the other common practices on this area maybe this is the most common way but either ways I loved how easy and programmatically efficient the way of us creating the worlds at the moment. Another reason why I loved learning Tiled is, it's widely used and there are no having hard times when looking for resources about the software. The interface is truly great and the software is really easy to pick up in general. A problem that I've faced so far was the way of exporting tilemaps, a property was replaced with something else on the newer versions of the software so instead of spending time to solve the problem I walked around it by downgrading software to 1 version older. When I sum up all the pluses above with the fact that I'm going to use Aseprite for creating sprites, that part of the course is truly attractive to me.

Another thing I loved about the Phaser at the moment is it allow users to make lots and lots of Object Oriented JS and it seriously reducing the amount of regret comes with spending time on game development instead of serious stuff. I mean it's probably also about the tutor of the tutorial I follow, he explains even the slightest details and problems that could occur around the project and sometimes intentionally creates and removes the errors to demonstrate how easy to face up with errors. Using individual class for each different actor of the work provides a solid and mostly robust auto complete for most cases, I say most cases because I've witnessed some cases that auto complete is just not working well, there was no particular pattern that I can associate with those types of malfunctions but they happens from time to time and it can be a little time consuming if you don't know what you are doing.

Here is a small example from my Player.js file for example:

I mean when I take into account the fact that all the code I wrote is going to run on a browser following some decent practices from the beginning can the really beneficial in the long run.

Yes, I know that if I want to achieve some serious results about the performance I should just go ahead and do all that stuff in vanilla JS but I'm truly not interested in that kind of grind and I don't think that I have that kind of a patience to create something beautiful with vanilla js only. I would absolutely think of that kind of an approach if I had enough time but since this is only a hobby, choosing such a path is a luxury for me, a really expensive one.

Other Stuff

Since I was kinda away from the gaming world for a while now, I started to follow people who are talking about best practices in the field that I'm entering into. I'm trying to follow all kinds of content about the related fields except the music creation at the moment, I'm not planning to look that part at it any time soon too.

The stories of the some successful games also attracts me a lot, because the success is always hidden into even the slightest of the details and it's awesome to see how detail oriented work and hard persistent work can lead some decent results over time. I'll cover all additional non-technical sources that I'm using during my learning journey in detail with another post.

Thank you very much for taking the time everyone, I don't really expect to see this post is getting a lot of views and reads but it can be a nice thing to look at in the future as I already mentioned above, if I can help 1 or 2 people during the process, that's a win.

Until next time, take care :)