Ask HN: What is a nice way to begin learning game programming these days?

4 points by chriszhang 5 years ago | 2 comments

One thing I want to avoid is start with heavy and complex beasts like Unity which abstracts away a lot of the basic concepts.

I am looking for something more minimal. Game programming from scratch approach. Like the early days when people used to write programs in BASIC building all the graphical components and audio tones step by step.

Is there something available today? My requirements:

- No game engine.

- Portable technology. I should be able to share my game with users on other platforms and systems.

- A good learning resource to begin learning game programming from scratch.

- Support for graphics and sound.

Any help will be appreciated.

mrspeaker 5 years ago |

I'm biased (I wrote a book on it: https://www.sitepoint.com/premium/books/html5-games-novice-t...), but JavaScript is great for making games: certainly no game engine required, and runs everywhere. Just make a loop that runs 60 times a second, then draw images to canvas!

I personally like making things from scratch to understand every aspect - but I think the "fantasy consoles" really give the best feeling of the good-ol' BASIC days. I love Pico-8. It costs (not much) money, but the creator invented the genre of fantasy console and I think has the best "vision". There are some others that are more feature-rich and open source (Tic-80 is a popular one).

If I'm just prototyping an idea or just want to muck around, I'll do it in Pico-8. If I want to make something bigger and more serious, I do it in JavaScript with my own libraries and code (for 3D I'll use Three.js or roll-my-own WebGL - like this "from-scratch minecraft clone": https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels).

op03 5 years ago |

I like this dude's approach - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKCF8A3XGxQ&list=PLW3Zl3wyJw...