Learning Game Development
The end of 2022 is rapidly approaching, and with it I’m starting to evaulate how the fourth quarter of the year went, and what I want to set my sights on for the first quarter of 2023.
I love the first quarter of the year. It comes with so much fresh motivation that I often meet the goals that I set out to meet, which sets a great tone for the rest of the year! Q4 of 2022 wasn’t without its successes, though.
My goals shifted a bit mid-quarter, as the opportunity arose to participate on a team for the itch.io game jam. This was such a fun experience! I spent way more time than I would like to admit in my November evenings working on the game jam, and I totally want to do it again next year. Here’s an overview of the project that we built!
Phaser
Our team chose to use Phaser, as most of us were familiar with JavaScript and it seemed like the fastest way to get moving. In the future I would love to go back to using Unity, as I feel like it provides a very good developer experience and has a ton of support from the community, which makes googling way easier.
Googling for issues with Phaser was… trying to say the least. The majority of this is due to the fact that we chose to use Phaser 3, the currently supported version of Phaser. There were quite a few use cases implemented in Phaser 2 that have not been implemented in Phaser 3, which made googling for problems that we came across a bit difficult. It meant having to be extra sure that the post was relatively recent (2019 or newer).
Learning Game Development
This project really sparked a passion for game development. It makes sense. I’ve been playing video games since before I can remember, and gaming is one of the initial motivations for me to start building software.
As part of this project, I spent a small amount of time learning about how to build a game. However, due to the quick nature of the game jam (only one month), I didn’t really have the opportunity to dig into the specifics of building a video game in the way that I would like. In particular, there is a lot around prototyping and learning that a game is actually fun that I would like to spend more time investigating.
I’ve done some research on resources that I want to pursue and have added it to my notes on game development, which will be a starting point on learning more! I’m planning to add game development to my quarterly goals for next quarter, so that when the game jam rolls around in 2023 I’ll be a bit better equipped to build something! In the meantime, check out our super cool game (with only the first level completed) here!