Games you should do first, revisited
And two new fun content sources for you!
Thanks to the Nodepond Newsletter Nerdletter I learned of a great new channel on YouTube to follow!
Although it started with a longish video about shmup terminology, I decided to see what other content he was creating. Among many interesting materials related to Pico-8, I found some good stuff for beginners!
I will focus on two clips, but I encourage you to browse his channel and find content closer to your heart!
As a person who still did not finish (or even started) his first game, I started with "Bad genres for your first game":
Imagine my surprise when the first on the list was a platformer (aka the result of many beginner-friendly tutorials). Christian raises many solid points, very valid for beginning game developers (as in writing their first-ever games).
He also points out that gamers will run through levels in seconds, while the dev spends hours making it! Very pragmatic approach!
He says much more, including how to make a platformer if you still want to! But I don’t want to write down everything he said. He’s fun to listen 😉
What are other genres not that good for beginners?
fighting games (so much animation on collision boxes)
adventure/point & click games (very content-heavy)
RPGs (content heavy with choices, lots of mechanics, and UI)
tower defense (also a shocker for me).
Then I went straight to the obvious follow-up video - about overlooked genres for your 1st game.
And here Christian shines again, proposing games that would be low-scope and trap-free!
And although I'm not surprised to see Flappy Bird on that list, shmups being obvious here (I think that's what I'll be making first), the fact that he mentioned racing games is somewhat surprising! And yet logical.
He is very invested in Pico-8, but it has some of this romanticism for gamedevs that I also share. I would say, that he’s so inspiring in fact, that I think I will buy this Pico-8 fantasy console and…
And continue to learn Godot 😉
Hi interesting article and kind of agree with making Shumps or shooting games, I managed to clone asteroids ☄️ type shooting as my first game just to learn Unity Engine, but scoped it even down further but kept things like shooting and enemy gen. It was a good learning experience.
Another game genre to try next is endless runner since it’s simple controls, and repeatable assets you can use.
The game I made: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rH--XXWEL10
This is part of why I am focused on phone games which have long gameplay for the relatively small amount of code.
My first Godot game was a MERGE game. Lots of images that "merge" together into various merge trees. Generators make more images. Each image added to the tree increases the number of merges to get there exponentially.
To make it "fun", you need the balance of different trees and different goals to work together to require the player to strategize the desired outcome.
My game only had 1 gameboard / level which leads to HOURS (potentially unlimited) gameplay.
If you wanted to make it a multi-level game, then the clear goal needs to be readily accomplishable for every level that would then end and start the next one.
The other option (my next game) is the Match3 game like Candy Crush with its potentially infinite flow of pieces to match and act on. Candy Crush has many levels; there are other ways of doing a Match3 game that doesn't require "levels" per se.
Lastly, you can combine x game feature with y game feature to make a combination game that is unique to you yet still fulfills the intended premise of potentially infinite game time with minimal code. For example, RPG + Match3 or Match3 + Merge or Merge + RPG or Platformer + Merge or Racing + RPG. In many cases, the combination encourages the player to "farm" the same levels repeatedly for more materials for upgrades.
Add on a PvP aspect and a simple game with a few pieces (like Chess or Checkers) becomes a deep discussion in game theory and psychology.