I'm curious about the goal here... if you wanted to learn how to turn gameplay ideas into playable video games, then the most effective way would be picking up either an ultralight engine like Defold or an ultra-tutorialized engine like Unity.
If you wanted to learn JavaScript by building games, then you should definitely not use Kaplay or Phaser, etc, since they're so far removed from JavaScript you wouldn't learn anything (other than how to build things in their particular environments). Web standard JS is more than capable of building simple games with no abstractions separating you from what you're trying to learn.
pull_my_finger · 1h ago
I'm confused by your advice, honestly. Defold is definitely not ultra-light, it's a whole ide/studio engine. If I was recommending for ease of entry, I'd 100% pick a "fantasy console" like Pico-8[1] or one of the many alternatives[2] that are free and use a different language if Lua isn't the person's thing.
Second, Phaser[3] actually IS regular javascript. It's the opposite of Defold that is a whole node based editor thing. Phaser is just a an API you use in a script file, that you just splonk into your html page. I don't know how much more standard JS you can get than that.
I don’t want to use JavaScript /TS but I want to make games for the web. Are there any nice framework which lets me write in Rust, it compiles to WASM for web?
lwansbrough · 7m ago
I’m working on something for this. It’s sort of on the back burner right now but perhaps I’ll put more time into it… https://rune.sh
Ironically web support is not in yet.
Ctrlmonster · 1h ago
Fyi if you're interested in making games on the web / with web tooling join the Web Game Dev Discord (we're over 2k devs in there).
QuantumNomad_ · 1h ago
You didn’t include a link but I assume it’s this one.
As it matches the name and has a discord channel with about 2000 members.
Ctrlmonster · 1h ago
Oh yeah my bad LOL. Yup that's the one.
reactordev · 3h ago
This is like those learn how to draw tutorials with the owl…
abetusk · 1h ago
For me, the "owl" was all the polish and game feel. "The art of screenshake" by Jan Nijman of Vlambeer [0] was what helped fill in the steps to "making the owl".
I think most people with reasonable know-how can make a basic game, whether it's asteroids, flappy bird, breakout, etc. For me, I never understood how to get past the "finished the tutorial" to "looks like an actual game". Screenshake, aka game feel/polish/production effects, was what made it gel.
There are very few game development tutorials which aren't how-to-draw-an-owl and I'm not fully sure why.
whartung · 55m ago
Because most game tutorials are about moving things around, maybe sounds, maybe collision detection.
And the actual mechanics of, notably, a 2D engine, are reasonably straightforward. But going from moving stuff around to “game” is a lot of work. A lot of polish, testing, feel, balance, etc.
Now, to be fair, a full tutorial of something like Breakout or Space Invaders doesn’t seem like too much to ask, since they’re so simple. But then it depends on what kind of games folks want to write.
Something like a simple RPG or platformer can be complete black holes.
jamesgeck0 · 1h ago
The Broughlike tutorial is pretty decent. It targets a very specific genre, but it does explain every step and you have a serviceable game at the end.
"Game development", "javascript", and "no experience" is quite the combination.
chrisco255 · 2h ago
If you have little experience programming, JS/TS is arguably one of the best choices for making a game. You have a built-in rendering engine in the form of the browser and it's universally accessible by nearly any device. There's no permission needed for distribution: just create a web page with a live demo and share the link. It's a great way to learn about game loops, pathfinding algos, state management, physics and world building and there's tons of free tools. A couple of my undergrad projects were JS games and they were very fun to work on. Clearly not the right choice for AAA game dev or a full length indie game, but definitely solid choice for learning.
__loam · 1h ago
For the record, Godot has a pretty permissive license and can export to the web. It also has JS/TS bindings iirc. Definitely worth a look if you're interested in getting deeper.
Benjamin_Dobell · 1h ago
I've been working on improving Godot's TypeScript development experience:
This isn't necessarily the case if you are looking at total cost of ownership.
3D provides things like perspective projection, which enables intuitive experiences and notions of "world space" that are fundamentally meaningful and map well with our physical reality. You can do a lot of damage with 3d primitives, an FPS camera, a skybox and some clever lighting.
jagged-chisel · 2h ago
And how did this illustrate that 3-D is not “More Complicated”?
prisenco · 2h ago
2D games can require a lot of assets. And most programmers are not artists.
JoeyJoJoJr · 1h ago
Also, 2D assets are much more difficult to change later if you decide you need to change the aspect ratio or scaling later on. While a tile map is comparatively technically simple, the initial choice of tile size carries a rather critical importance to how the game development process unfolds. If you want or need to change it later it is likely going to be a fair amount of work, and that friction can hinder a lot of experimentation. Compare this to a 3d camera, that affords you the ability to completely change perspective with a few lines of code, it’s evident that a 2d game is not necessarily simpler to develop in practice.
dragonwriter · 38m ago
> 2D games can require a lot of assets. And most programmers are not artists.
That's just as true, if not moreso, with "3" in place "2".
Conversely, 2D games can also require very little in assets. It's just a matter of what game you are making.
bcrosby95 · 47m ago
Everyone is an artist. We're just not all equally skilled.
natertux · 1h ago
It is the exact reason why I choose to make my game in 3D.
I am making a game similar to advance wars/apes warfare in threejs.
My drawing skills are close to zero but thanks to the engineering background my CAD and 3D modeling are somewhat usable.
So I am currently learning blender to improve on top of that and I cannot fathom how much more time it would have taken me to make assets if those were to be in 2D.
imachine1980_ · 2h ago
Game like a short hike use rendering pipelines instead of accuracy in the models for example
thrown-0825 · 2h ago
better tooling around 3D in my opinion
p1necone · 1h ago
I think that statement can only be said with the right context.
Building an engine from scratch? 3d is definitely more complicated.
Using an existing engine? Tbh shoehorning 2d sprite based games into engines like unreal or unity is often harder than 3d because it gets less development effort on the engine side put into it.
Asset creation? Depends - the great thing about 3d assets is you only need to model each thing once, whereas with 2d unless you're doing skeletal animation you have to draw every frame, facing direction etc.
But on the flipside creating one 3d model could take just as much time as a pixel art walk animation in 4 directions.
There's also art styles for both 2d and 3d that can significantly cut down on effort (low poly, drawing everything from absolute top down perspective, using ascii characters roguelike style, using simple 3d primitives only, first person perspective etc etc etc).
darth_aardvark · 2h ago
That's really cool! Sounds complicated though.
IcyWindows · 2h ago
I wish the software/libraries mentioned had links to them, but the only links are to more videos from the author.
I'd say any beginner should start with P5.js first before going into larger game dev frameworks. You can make simple games and the API is very approachable.
ramesh31 · 2h ago
>However, as opposed to using an engine like Unity, Godot, Unreal, using a frameworks still allows to you architect your codebase with a greater degree of freedom and prevents you from spending too much time learning how specific game engine workflows and UIs work.
If your goal is to make a game, these are exactly the things you should be learning, not reinventing your own architecture. If you just want to learn about engine internals, then sure go for it. But games (even very simple ones) are an incredible amount of effort that has nothing to do with programming. If you actually want to make one you should be working at the absolute highest level of abstraction possible so that you can start doing the real work; building the mechanics, creating the art, designing levels, writing the story, music, sound effects, etc. etc. Many of the succesful indie games these days are made almost completely via "no-code" visual tooling. It's basically a meme at this point for programmers to want to make a game and just end up wasting their time writing a naive engine.
yoyohello13 · 2h ago
Exactly right. That’s why the joke “There are 100 game engines written in Rust… and 5 games” is so funny. Programming nerds love the engine stuff more than the art stuff. I know I fall in to this category.
socalgal2 · 1h ago
Arguably the reason is making a game engine is easier than making a game. Obviously creating all of Unity/Unreal is a ton of work. But, to make a game engoine you have a checklist of features (gameloop, rendering, audio, input, ...) each of which you can break into smaller features. It gives you a free todo list, each item on the list has generally known solution, and makes it feel like you're making lots of progress as you check things off and see systems come up. That progress feels great. And you are making progress but you're making progress making a game engine, not a game.
A game on the other hand is a blank sheet. There is no checklist. It's way harder to make progress on a game.
3vidence · 1h ago
After bouncing off of Unity the first few times, I finally decided to commit to it after trying out some of the JS game frameworks (like Phaser)
Absolutely worth it, have made lots of games in Unity just for myself that feel pretty polished, there are just so many systems to make a game work.
The advice around game engines kind of seems like "to learn how to write programs first create the compiler.
Not to say all games should be made in engines but it certainly helps.
If you wanted to learn JavaScript by building games, then you should definitely not use Kaplay or Phaser, etc, since they're so far removed from JavaScript you wouldn't learn anything (other than how to build things in their particular environments). Web standard JS is more than capable of building simple games with no abstractions separating you from what you're trying to learn.
Second, Phaser[3] actually IS regular javascript. It's the opposite of Defold that is a whole node based editor thing. Phaser is just a an API you use in a script file, that you just splonk into your html page. I don't know how much more standard JS you can get than that.
[1]: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
[2]: https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy
[3]: https://docs.phaser.io/phaser/getting-started/set-up-dev-env... (linked to the hello world example)
Ironically web support is not in yet.
https://www.webgamedev.com/
As it matches the name and has a discord channel with about 2000 members.
I think most people with reasonable know-how can make a basic game, whether it's asteroids, flappy bird, breakout, etc. For me, I never understood how to get past the "finished the tutorial" to "looks like an actual game". Screenshake, aka game feel/polish/production effects, was what made it gel.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJdEqssNZ-U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
And the actual mechanics of, notably, a 2D engine, are reasonably straightforward. But going from moving stuff around to “game” is a lot of work. A lot of polish, testing, feel, balance, etc.
Now, to be fair, a full tutorial of something like Breakout or Space Invaders doesn’t seem like too much to ask, since they’re so simple. But then it depends on what kind of games folks want to write.
Something like a simple RPG or platformer can be complete black holes.
https://nluqo.github.io/broughlike-tutorial/
https://breaka.club/blog/godots-most-powerful-scripting-lang...
I've got a HEAP of stuff I still need to upstream
https://github.com/godotjs/GodotJS/compare/main...Benjamin-D...
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This isn't necessarily the case if you are looking at total cost of ownership.
3D provides things like perspective projection, which enables intuitive experiences and notions of "world space" that are fundamentally meaningful and map well with our physical reality. You can do a lot of damage with 3d primitives, an FPS camera, a skybox and some clever lighting.
That's just as true, if not moreso, with "3" in place "2".
Conversely, 2D games can also require very little in assets. It's just a matter of what game you are making.
Building an engine from scratch? 3d is definitely more complicated.
Using an existing engine? Tbh shoehorning 2d sprite based games into engines like unreal or unity is often harder than 3d because it gets less development effort on the engine side put into it.
Asset creation? Depends - the great thing about 3d assets is you only need to model each thing once, whereas with 2d unless you're doing skeletal animation you have to draw every frame, facing direction etc.
But on the flipside creating one 3d model could take just as much time as a pixel art walk animation in 4 directions.
There's also art styles for both 2d and 3d that can significantly cut down on effort (low poly, drawing everything from absolute top down perspective, using ascii characters roguelike style, using simple 3d primitives only, first person perspective etc etc etc).
If your goal is to make a game, these are exactly the things you should be learning, not reinventing your own architecture. If you just want to learn about engine internals, then sure go for it. But games (even very simple ones) are an incredible amount of effort that has nothing to do with programming. If you actually want to make one you should be working at the absolute highest level of abstraction possible so that you can start doing the real work; building the mechanics, creating the art, designing levels, writing the story, music, sound effects, etc. etc. Many of the succesful indie games these days are made almost completely via "no-code" visual tooling. It's basically a meme at this point for programmers to want to make a game and just end up wasting their time writing a naive engine.
A game on the other hand is a blank sheet. There is no checklist. It's way harder to make progress on a game.
Absolutely worth it, have made lots of games in Unity just for myself that feel pretty polished, there are just so many systems to make a game work.
The advice around game engines kind of seems like "to learn how to write programs first create the compiler.
Not to say all games should be made in engines but it certainly helps.