Good Value Games

 What have I been doing in the long time since I've posted here? After the game jam in the last post I made, I wanted to the 12 games in 12 months challenge. First on the list: a breakout clone. I got a little side-tracked though, because I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if the bricks burst into clouds of coloured smoke." Almost 3 years and an endless rabbit warren later, I have this to show. I think it looks very cool. This wasn't a consistent 3 years worth of effort, but I do a lot of designing and engineering in my head, and I had a lot to learn. I still do.  More details will come soon, I'm very busy with life and mental health challenges, and much of the very limited free time I have I spend on development.  Recent tumultuous life events have encouraged me to dig in a little harder, whilst also overwhelming me at times, but a recent Reddit post showed me that there are people interested in my work, and seeing where it goes.

 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...