Ignored all the best advises and made this game the wrong way
I just released my game on Steam, and had no idea how to market it. From what I read online, one way is to write dev blog posts, or articles about the development process. So here it is… I don’t really know what to talk about, but I’ll try to write a big article about my game. Hopefully it’s interesting to you.
By the way, first and foremost, you can check out the game here:
It’s really good! I wish I could just stop there, but I guess I’ll discuss about the development, and how I’m pretty much kinda doing it the wrong way.
Building a game engine from scratch
Generally, you’d want to use a pretty solid game engine to build a game, especially one for production. Some common engines out there are Unity, Unreal, Godot, Game maker, RPG maker. There’s even Pico-8.
The wrong way to make a game is to start by building a game engine entirely from scratch, and this is pretty much what it is. This is not a one-off mistake either, I must have scrapped a dozen engines throughout my game dev career before landing on this one (which I’m in the process of scrapping as well).
In the past, I’ve gotten used to build games in Flash. It was a pretty solid engine for me. I also tried to build an engine within the Flash engine, but that’s another story. But anyway, at some point, Flash got out of style, to the point when making Flash games wasn’t cool anymore. I had to pivot to something else, and the closest choice was Unity. As much as I appreciate the power it provides, I just couldn’t stand its bulkiness, and that I have to wrap my mind around working in a 3D environment.
So I just failed back on something I’m familiar with: JavaScript. I first started with Three.js, and got some pretty neat projects out of it, but even that didn’t stick. I found some small performance issue that bugged me, and happily ditched it to work on my own engine, which is far less powerful. But it was good enough to make World of Turtle.
The advantages and disadvantages of this approach
We’re actually going to skip the disadvantages. I acknowledge that there’s a lot of them. One I can think of is the waste of time. But frankly, I had to completely block them out of my mind in order to pursue my crazy project of building my own game engine. Here’s what I think it brought me:
- Building an engine can be enjoyable for some
Not sure why, but I quite enjoy building a new game engine. I feel a bit in my own world, and that I have control over everything. I keep telling myself that I’ll be making tons of game with that engine and it’s going to be so easy. Of course, that’s a bit delusional because I keep scraping those engines after making a couple games.
- This makes the games somewhat unique
By using an engine that operates differently that other engine, I can make something that looks and feels a bit different from everything out there. I’ve seen engines like the Bitsy engine. All games made with the bitsy engine are highly recognizable, it’s a bit of a signature. I think I’m hoping for something like that with my own engine.
- Maybe there’s something at the end of the tunnel.
I’m actually hoping I can discover some new way of building games, that makes development far more fun and enjoyable. Despite having scrapped engines left and right, I am still making progress towards that goal. Lately, my game development process had become less painful, once I actually complete the engine.
I also believe that the right way to produce games is to make a clear separation between content and functionality. My latest engines are working towards that, by making the definition of a game entirely in JSON format.
So, building my own game engine isn’t as crazy as it seems?
Well I sort of convinced myself that it is, but yet I can’t stop doing it. I’m sure I’m still going to hear from others that it’s a fruitless endeavor andI’m sure they’re right. But I guess I enjoy it enough so it’s not so bad.
I’m taking the road less travelled. It’s lonely but comfortable. And if it turns out there’s something really interesting to be found along the way… well, I guess it can only be discovered by someone who blocked all those advises to not build their own game engine!
Ok, time to promote my game
Make sure to check out World of Turtle on Steam. Since it’s all javascript base, it happens to also be playable in a web browser on sites like Newgrounds, Itch.io, Gamejolt.
Since it’s an engine, there are actually some other smaller games I made with it. Feel free to also check them out:
- Zitar: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/867965
- Duel: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/832162
- The impossible room: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/823348
