The n00b Game Developer's Dilemma
One of the ancillary things I’ve been doing lately (besides putting the finishing polish on Eventbook 2.0) is playing about with is getting a decent environment on my local Mac for doing quick prototypes of various random game ideas I have in my head.
In terms of game development… the closest thing to a native tongue for me is Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio stack, which I seriously enjoy working with – but a combination of my Windows laptop having a severe hardware failure, plus my Mac lacking the space to do a real Windows installation, mean it’s something I simply don’t have as much time to play with for now.
Of course, there’s also the I-don’t-have-a-satisfactory-startup-project-which-I-can-use-for-quick-sketches problem, which means there’s now the need to create a new project in Visual Studio by hand, configure my dependent libraries, and do whatever else it takes to have something I can use as a clean slate.
All of that is what drove me to looking for alternatives. Having something which is cross-platform means I’m able to run it from within OS X natively, which is important when you’re on the go.
There’s also the novice factor: without having had the experience of releasing any actual games yet (with my current project trapped out in development hell) there is no real way to know if the existing stack I have is satisfactory or not – or even how extensible it will be for future projects.
I guess at this stage, the best solution is to go and play around with what’s out there. I’ve spent some time this past week just doing that, and attempting to get to grips with a couple of simpler stacks for building 2D games.
My goals in doing this? Firstly being able to simply have more experience with doing games development. Generally what I’ve been working on for now has fallen into certain traps, and I’d love (as a developer) to be able to move on beyond those and play around with some more concepts.
Secondly, I want to be able to get a better understanding as to what is including in a decent framework, which I can then use as potential features in my own code for later projects.
I guess as a third goal, is simply to see how things are beyond the XNA camp. As much as I enjoy working with it, the ecosystem for XNA development is less rewarding. With Xbox Live Indie Games simply not available to purchase in Australia, combined with what I feel is an unfriendly situation for PC deployment makes me question how much of a commitment I want to have working on the platform.
Besides, it’s always good to have options regardless of the situation :)