Learning game development and creating my first game

Hello, so this is my first blog post, I will be sharing my experience making Pong.

if you just want to play the game, go here: Pong Minigame

if you want to check out the game’s code: github repository

On this post I am going to write about why I started creating games, my struggles choosing a game engine/framework and pong.

Why I decided to learn game development

My only hobbies at the time was playing games, and I was getting kinda bored, not having fun anymore. I wanted something new, something that could result into something and maybe give me some extra income (I’m not sure if this will ever happen).

So, since I have some years of experience developing software and always had the curiosity to learn how to create games, I decided to learn game development.

Well, I just started but I have been enjoying it so far, just be aware of the learning curve when starting to learn anything new.

Choosing a game engine/framework

I struggled quite a bit on this one, I wanted to find the perfect tool, so I just lost countless hours researching and testing every single game engine and framework.

In the end I decided to go with what I am confortable with, I guess it’s better to do this if you are just starting. So I went with a javascript framework and ended up using ExcaliburJS, pretty good experience it’s really simple if you are used to typescript.

Making Pong

I went with a simple game to start. I got to learn how to handle user input, positioning, velocity. Some things I struggled with a lot was making the game look the same on any screen size, my perfectionism trying to make everything perfect even if nobody was gonna play it and my lack of art skills so any game I made had to be using blocks and circles.

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Well, thanks for reading, I didn’t think anybody would make this far through my boring wall of text. Cya