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by ChristopherDrum
1839 days ago
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Celeste and Slipways both started life as small indie projects in the Pico-8 development environment. Personally, I find it much easier to get my head around gaming ideas in that system because everything is constrained. There aren't a million APIs to learn. The artwork is restricted to 128x128 pixels and 16 colors. Sound is similarly limited in 8-bit-esque ways. There is a kind of freedom in the system's restrictions that is hard to articulate, and its great for doing "sketches" (so to speak). If an idea you tinker with in Pico-8 feels like something you want to expand, then maybe move on to the more "robust" engines. As @zzo38computer said, "it depends on what kind of game you will want to make." If, by any chance, you purchased the Racial Bundle from itch.io last year, then you have a license to Pico-8. It isn't free, but it's super cheap and supports a great indie developer, and comes with a huge amount of community support. |
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But if you're coming from a web background you might have better luck with something like Phaser 3 and Typescript. You get to keep a lot of the same structure and toolset that you're likely used to in modern web development, while still able to make good looking 2D games (not just be limited to 8-bit looking games) that you can put online and send a link to friends so they can play and enjoy it.
For games I'm not putting on the web, my main framework of choice nowadays is Monogame. It's C#/.net based like Unity, but open source. It doesn't have quite as large of a community as Unity, but it's still in active development and some major indie games have been developed using it. It doesn't have a drag and drop editor like Unity, and I'm running into a few recent issues with 3D in other platforms (that look like they might be addressed in a development build already, I haven't dug too deep into it yet)
But the framework is battle-tested from the Microsoft XNA days and there's no proprietary editors with ugly messy scene code that doesn't merge well (at least from what I remember working in Unity a while back). I can just focus on the code.
But maybe not great starting off point. I still recommend taking a look at Phaser 3.