Getting back into GameDev (for real this time) need some input

Published November 03, 2013
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Hey everyone, finally got all those W8 issues sorted out. Had to do lots of patching for VS2008 for school and had to disable secure boot ect... to get the UEFI layer to allow the video card to function but all is setup and good to go.

Over the past few days I am been really pondering various aspects of my hobbies. Micro Electronics is really cool but it does not seem to give me the satisfaction I originally intended from it. My goal with the Micro Electronics was to learn development at a very low level. Through various projects and experiments I realize it is really much more about the hardware design and circuits then it is about the low level development. The thing is programming a micro controller really is not programming per say in most common applications it is mostly configuring the internal hardware of the chip to act on various sensory data. The most programming you do is setting some bits and possibly performing a few calculations and that is about it. At least for the cases of what I have been capable off as I am severely limited when it comes to circuitry knowledge. Even from a robotics level it really is nothing more then acting upon the various sensory inputs to make various decision about motor speed and direction.

So through much thought and pondering I think for sure I am going to be getting back into game development as I am not quite sure what I can obtain from micro electronics but I do know what I can obtain from a knowledge perspective with games that could be useful in other applications like data modeling.

Right now I already have 2 game ideas I want to work on that have really been poking and prodding at my brain for the last few years now. One such game should be simple to implement and the other should be a good stepping stone from the first. Both games are 2D as I feel when getting back into this I should start from 2D and once I have the 2 games under my belt then I can consider the move to 3D if it still feels feasible at the time.

In the case of target platform I am not sure at the moment and this will directly effect various technology choices I will have to make. If I choose the PC my options are limitless, however, if I choose mobile I would have to target Windows Phone 8 as that is the device I own currently which I think would be awesome as it is really a great mobile platform. The issue with Windows Phone 8 is I would probably need to find a target API because XNA does not work on windows phone 8 to my knowledge I would need to aim at a API which covers the platform like MonoGame or DirectX.

Also I think there is a fee in order to utilize anything other then the simulator to develop for the windows store but the advantage with targeting this is I can target both Windows 8 and the phone. So this may be the route I take not sure yet.

Any input is appreciated here as I am out of my zone on the Metro/Phone platform as I have always been mainly a C Developer.

So the question is out what do you guys think? Would it be a good choice to target Windows Phone 8 there is a huge open market on these devices for sure and may open options to publish on Xbox in the future as well as Window 8 itself? If so what technologies should I be looking at?

If I do not see too many comments here I will post up in the forums I have been out of the game dev scene for years.
1 likes 5 comments

Comments

O-san

If you are going to make the game for mobile devices and strictly 2D I would take a good look at Cocos2d-x. It is an opensource cross platform game engine. I found it was really easy to get started with. Good luck!

November 06, 2013 02:09 PM
O-san

Oh, forgot the url if your are interessted:

http://www.cocos2d-x.org

:)

November 06, 2013 02:10 PM
jjd

Just to give more options (I know, just what you want, right), what about writing something for a browser? The reason I suggest that as a possibility is that to a large extent you side-step the application setup and interaction -- it's already defined and working so you should be able to get something working pretty quickly. Not sure if that is something that you would find satisfying, but it you want to make something and find your gamedev legs again, the iteration time should be pretty short :)

November 06, 2013 06:35 PM
blewisjr

Thanks for the input guys but overall I am probably going to go more low level then this. As of right now I am thinking about developing for PC using either SDL or SFML. I am not sure if I want to use C or C++ yet as I still may go with something like Python, C#, or Java on the language front.

I have not used C++ in a very long time been mostly engrained in C for the longest time so that is my comfort spot. I have used some Java lately so I am comfortable there as well to certain extents. Normally I would jump on C in a heartbeat but I am not sure it meets the requirements for the abstraction path I want to take still contemplating that.

I think my best bets for this game lay in the realm of either C++ or Python overall because there are solid api's in SFML/SDL2/PySFML/PySDL2 giving me solid options to work with and gives more leverage on the abstraction front. Hopefully I will have everything figured out by the end of the day today so I can hopefully get started tonight.

November 07, 2013 10:16 AM
jjd

I just added a simple python voxel renderer to github (https://github.com/jdowner/voxel). It is written in PyOpenGL. It was really a learning project for me to learn something about shaders and to use OpenGL in python. If you decide to go the python route, feel free to use anything you find useful from it.

-Josh

November 07, 2013 02:20 PM
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