10-13-2020, 07:07 PM
When the stay at home and mass closures first happened, I basically was doing nothing but watching tv and playing video games - just trying to keep my mind occupied. The more games I played, I started thinking that one of my old dreams was to make video games. As I get older, (I'm approaching 40 now) it is becoming very apparent that life is short and there's no time to idle on ones dreams...
So I decided to loosen up the purse strings just a little bit, and bought myself the cheapest laptop I could find (70$ USD for a intel core2 duo, 4gb ram, 250gb sdd disc) and set about chasing the dream.
My low end laptop won't run the more powerful game dev tools (unity, unreal) or even godot. My integrated video card is only capable of WebGL1, so that limits the tools I can use. I found some FOSS called GDevelop which is surprisingly full featured for what it is.
GDevelop is a visual scripting editor that uses javascript to create HTML5 games which can be exported to other platforms using other tools (cordova, ant, etc). While it's less powerful than other engines in terms of rendering and scripting, it's extremely easy to use and great for someone like me with no legitimate education in programming. I also like that because it uses javascript, anything I make with it is highly accessible and runs on just about anything.
I have a few smaller projects I've put out, and a few larger projects that I try to work on some every day. Progress is slow. It's tons and tons of work to make a video game... I can see why the big companies have huge teams working on it... but it's a hobby and I don't mind moving slow as long as I'm moving forward.
If it interests the community I wouldn't mind to make a thread in the gaming area to promote some of the things I'm working on. If not, and someone's curious you can just shoot me a pm
So I decided to loosen up the purse strings just a little bit, and bought myself the cheapest laptop I could find (70$ USD for a intel core2 duo, 4gb ram, 250gb sdd disc) and set about chasing the dream.
My low end laptop won't run the more powerful game dev tools (unity, unreal) or even godot. My integrated video card is only capable of WebGL1, so that limits the tools I can use. I found some FOSS called GDevelop which is surprisingly full featured for what it is.
GDevelop is a visual scripting editor that uses javascript to create HTML5 games which can be exported to other platforms using other tools (cordova, ant, etc). While it's less powerful than other engines in terms of rendering and scripting, it's extremely easy to use and great for someone like me with no legitimate education in programming. I also like that because it uses javascript, anything I make with it is highly accessible and runs on just about anything.
I have a few smaller projects I've put out, and a few larger projects that I try to work on some every day. Progress is slow. It's tons and tons of work to make a video game... I can see why the big companies have huge teams working on it... but it's a hobby and I don't mind moving slow as long as I'm moving forward.
If it interests the community I wouldn't mind to make a thread in the gaming area to promote some of the things I'm working on. If not, and someone's curious you can just shoot me a pm