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by kragen 1911 days ago
Well, one day last week I wrote this game http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/invaders without a game engine. Then I decided that it would be a lot better with a game engine, so I wrote a game engine for it http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qj2d.js and rewrote the game over the next couple of days with the engine http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qvaders. Then during the rest of the week I used the engine to write http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/qabbits and http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/offscreen † but both of which were a lot easier to write with the engine than they would have been without it, and for which I had to improve the engine, which also improved the Invaders game.

Now obviously QJ2D is not going to replace Godot or even LÖVE2D or TIC-80. It's a couple of days' worth of work, less than 200 lines of code; anyone could have done it. And nobody else is going to use it unless they have Greek letters on their keyboard. But not only did I learn a lot, it's also a substantial improvement for this kind of thing over the raw browser. I think I'll probably rewrite it differently for the next project, though...

I don't want to "work in games", but of course I enjoy writing games. I mean that's all computers are good for, really!

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† not really games