gdc2023
In 2019 I went to GDC for the first time and I had free beer and coffee and cookies at the Unreal Engine booth and I had a great time (proof on the left).
In 2023 I went to GDC for the second time and I had free beer and coffee and cookies at the Unreal Engine booth and I had an OK time, I forgot to take a picture of myself drinking a free beer at the Unreal Engine Booth so you will have to trust me on this one.
A big piece of this is because in 2019 I was a few months into the game industry, and I had to fly from Brazil to Canada and then San Francisco for GDC, that’s a whole fun adventure. In 2023 I live in San Francisco. Well, not quite, but close enough. So going to GDC is just going *there.* Another part of it is that the first time I went to this conference I was very excited and looking forward to the future and all the possibilities, but now that the future is here, the only thing I look forward to is going to the gym and sleeping.
There’s not a lot of exciting things happening, engines are trying to top each other on how many triangles they can show on screen or how much smoke effects they can throw at your face without dropping (too many) frames.
Right next to them you have speculative assets that didn’t exist 6 months ago and with not a lot of visitors. Where all that money is coming from?
There’s plenty of indie games but you already saw all of them on twitter, but it’s nice to see it, and hey, maybe you can talk a little bit with the developer that might be just there nervously watching you play their game.
GDC is an interesting experience because you can suddenly get insights and find your true intentions about being in this industry, mine is that I don’t really care about working on games, but I do care about working on tech to enable people to make theirs.
godot game engine
I’ve always wanted to be more comfortable with Godot. I like the engine, I like the community, and I like the fact that it is open-source.
But after months and months of not using it, and add to that the fact that they had a major new release, made it so I don’t feel comfortable anymore into just jumping into it and doing something. I feel like I needed to relearn it.
So I started searching for tutorials and courses. And I found this one: “Create a Complete 2D Survivors Style Game in Godot 4”
https://www.udemy.com/course/create-a-complete-2d-arena-survival-roguelike-game-in-godot-4
Now, I have played some Vampire Survivors, and I like its proposals and its simplicity, it’s an interesting game that appeals to your Lizard Brain, and when meditating on all these thoughts I had the idea of “Vampire Survivors, but make it Hades.” – What does that mean? I don’t know.
But what I knew is that this course would take me one step towards “Vampire Survivors, but make it Hades” so I wishlisted the course, waited for Udemy to have a sale (it took a total of two days), and then acquired the course.
And let me tell you, the Godot Game Engine is great, perfect, and I love it.
Obviously, it’s not perfect, it has its own weird things, I had this weird bug where mouse clicks wouldn’t register on the proper elements, and some things are weird and convoluted (looking at you, Tilemaps) and hard to setup, but once you wrap your head around it they all work great, and they all look great. I guess it’s just a normal thing about open-source software, it’s great for the most part, but with some weird UX problems and it has some inconsistencies here and there.
Maybe someday I will be able to get into the source code and improve some of those things myself, someday.
“But weren’t you writing your own game?! What happened with that? ” – No one
I am still working on a mess of projects that I nicknamed “my own game engine” – the overview is that I have gueepo2D, a simple 2D game framework. It’s code that you use to build a game engine, it’s not an engine itself. Then I have the Goblin Game Engine, which is a multi-purpose game engine with Lua and ECS, and then, The Machinist Game Engine, which is designed to be a game engine really good at making tactics games.
I’m not gonna sugarcoat it: The Goblin Game Engine is dying
I always wanted to be more of a Godot Guy, even though I work on my own game engine and I still want to keep working on it, but it just doesn’t make sense to build my own general-purpose game engine and want to use Godot, these two thoughts are competitive.
So I reevaluated if I really wanted to have my own general-purpose game engine and the truth is that no, I don’t. So I’ve decided to go away with the Goblin Game Engine. And I will be writing more about that in the future because I want to give it an honourable ending by making a simple game with it.
The Goblin Game Engine was really important because it got me unstuck on the problem I was facing on this whole game framework/engine development thing. Ultimately, Machinist only exists as a consequence of that, and I’m really happy with that, I’m really content with the structure of a “tactics game engine” and gueepo2D – a more general graphics framework.
So that begs the question: If I’m doing a tactics engine, what if I want to do something that is not a tactics game?
If gueepo2D is not designed for making games, and Goblin is no longer a thing, then the only answer really is Godot. Even when I am using Godot I wish things were different and how I could do better on my own game engine, and how I could be building tools to make the specific things I want to do on the specific game that I want to make, but these things take time, and what if I just want to do a quick game jam? It’s really hard to game jam on a custom engine, and I just can’t write and maintain two full-blown game engines.
Still on the topic of using Godot or my own game engine, I always knew that my own game engine is something that pays off in the long term, so I sort of made up this rule of thumb:
- If I want to work on a project for less than 3 months, I should use Godot – There’s no reason not to.
- If I want to work on a project for more than 3 months, then I can use Machinist, or spin up my own systems and tools on gueepo2D – But here’s the truth, here’s what took me a long time to recognize: I don’t want to make a game that is not a tactics and that will take more than 3 months.
I want to make a bunch of small games and try things out, sure, but when making full-blown games that I think are interesting, and that I think can ACTUALLY be good – These games always take the shape of an RPG/Tactics videogame – and that’s what Machinist is for.
ANYWAY.
gueepo 