Good Value Games

 I did a game jam. It was fun. This is what I made.  Caves of Goo by SkotDude

 So here I am, over a year later from my last post. I'm not going to say something foolish, like I'll try to post more. I would like to. Time will tell. Game design is still a passion for me, but I struggle with motivation. I keep house. I raise 3 kids. One has recently been diagnosed with ADHD, the other was born with a fairly significant genetic condition. The economy seems to be circling the drain as the cost of living rises. I sleep little. I hurt more.  I waste my little leisure time with endless youtube tutorials, devlogs, philosophy,  psychology, and yes, much mindless drivel. It is hard to justify spending hours of my life for what may never produce an income. On games no one may ever see, stories that touch no mind. Something worthwhile will take so much time, something quick and easy will not be worthwhile. Quick is relative, even then there is hours of learning required, and there are standards I hold myself to that drive me to unattainable perfection. And yet,...

 So you wanna make games... well, where do you begin? I spent a little time learning about what goes into a finalised game, and first things first... how do you build it? Do you code an engine from scratch? If so, what language?  Do you use an engine? What one do you use? So many questions, with no universal answers. At first I considered building my own engines with C++ or C#, so the research began. I knew very little of programming, at this point I had mostly learned in BASIC and Python. Yes, BASIC! Python is very versatile, with a million and more libraries to handle any situation with relative ease, but it seems not the common choice for game dev, so I looked into C. Now there is a big difference in a loose language like Python and C, and to be honest, it was overwhelming. I stuck with it, but it seemed like there was a large amount of work just to get an image on screen, let alone move it. So I looked into libraries for C to expediate the game development process, but the...

  Hello from Good Value Games. As any coder does when learning a new language, first we say "Hello, world!" In a way, a devlog is a new language, and blogging is an entirely new environment for me, let alone language. If you continue to visit, you'll see me learn in real time. I'm SkotDude, the one and only employee of Good Value Games, an independent game developer from Australia. My passion for game design goes back to 1994, playing games like the first Duke Nukem and Lemmings on PC, Gunstar Heroes and Streets of Rage on Sega Megadrive (known as Sega Genesis, elsewhere in the world). The industry was already well established, but it of course has grown much since then. My interest continued, finding a love for all games, unwittingly studying the design, the stories, the art. Come the time for high school graduation I was dedicated to a life of being part of that world, having self taught myself the very basics of programming, and even making a lot of projects with t...