So I've been making games this weekend...

This past week I've dropped all the typical backend engineering I usually do and did some game development.

It was a fascinating experience, it's like I've gotten back the joy of programming. Ever since I've started working professionally programming became more of a job and I've started to lose the awe of amazement in the things I create.

But coming back to game dev, it has reignited my passion for programming.

So let's see what I did during this weekend.

Game #1: Pong

Yep, we all start from somewhere and I wanted an easy win. So the simplest game I thought of would be pong.

For this game I used the Unity Engine, it was a pretty pleasant experience and the programming wasn't too hard. I've previously used C# in some old projects.

The whole thing was a lot simpler than I thought, you simply add some objects add some boundaries. The only code part was the movement script and the game logic where it keeps the count of the scores and location of the ball.

After this successful endeavour, I was pretty confident, I would say overconfident.

I wanted to make something I always liked to play myself.

A Role-Playing Game.

Game #2: Basic 2D RPG Game

For this game, I wanted to use Godot Game Engine because I've heard a lot of good stuff about it. The syntax was pretty simple, it's similar to python and the GUI was sufficient.

But I wasn't prepared on making an RPG game. That's why I've gone to YouTube and followed an excellent series on making an RPG Game using Godot.  

In short, the tutorial was 10/10. I've learned a lot and got something basic working.

After this series, it was pretty long took around 4 hours to follow along with the guy. I've dropped down the pen (or in this case my code) and called it a weekend.

I'm satisfied with my level of understanding about game dev.  

Conclusion

Will I be making any more games?

Probably not.

But should you?

If you never made a game, I would highly recommend it.

It was fun, informative and different. It's not your typical web or app project where you're trying to solve some business problem. This is more about making fun stuff that people would enjoy.  

With that in mind, I would like to end off with an update on 2022.

I would, first of all, like to wish you all a happy new year and this year I'm planning to do a lot more low-level content. I'm super interested in operating systems and how they are created so stay tuned for articles about that.

Another thing is DevOps, I'm also interested in that but that will come up in the second quarter of 2022.

As always thanks for reading and wish you a good year.