Hello, I’m Phil, a hobby game developer who wants to share some experiences with the world. As I worked on many private hobby projects so far but didn’t really release anything, I decided to start a blog which will hopefully motivate me to finish and to share some games and experiences with the gamedev community.

The main idea is to create a new, simple game using a different kind of technique/engine every month . I will compare the engines by showing all the positive and negative aspects I had to deal with.

Another goal is to get an overview of the possibilities the engines provide, to know which would be the best fit for the ideas I (you) have. Since I haven’t worked with many of these engines thus far, it will be a new experience to me nearly everytime I make a new game.

This will also define the way I will write most of my blogposts: for developers who want to know how to get started in a particular gameengine, how basic things work and what possibilities the engine offers in general.

Hopefully there will be a project at the end for each engine to serve as an example for my readers. Of course my projects will be open source and I will use Git to share my code.

Engines

These are the engines I will focus on first:

• LibGDX
• Godot
• Defold
• Phaser
• Cocos2d-x
• Unity
• Unreal Engine

Yeah, thats a lot of engines. Some are very big, some really small. Since I’m doing it in my free time, and one month is really a small amout of time to develop a game, I will focus on simple 2D games (unfortunately no AAA games, sorry guys!) , as 3D assets are taking a lot of time. Nevertheless maybe there will be some small 3D assets in some games (maybe in some kind of 3D platformer) as that would be a new experience for me as well.

There are far more engines like MonoGame, CryEngine, Amazon Lumberyard, ShiVa Engine, Game Maker … but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Let’s see what the future brings.

More things to show

Apart from this possibly I will also show some examples on how I did my graphics. I like to use Inkscape and I really have a lot of fun making cartoon-style 2D graphics. As I’m really happy everytime I see people blogging about graphics and stuff, showing some examples and simple tricks, I think I should do that too. So there will also be something more to see than just code.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff, dude..

For those of you who think so, you are totally right! But I think I have enough experience programming in different kinds of languages and creating games with differend kinds of engines. So new stuff shouldn’t be that hard to learn. Failing is also a part of the process of developing. If a project fails I will tell you why, show you the problems I had and publish the code anyway.

Finally, I want to make clear what I will not cover in this Blog: I will not show the basics of each language (Java, Javascript, C#, C++, ..) as that would go beyond the scope of this blog. Furthermore I will not explain every single line of code. I will explain the basic concepts and the main parts of the code. Of course I will try to comment the code files as much as possible to make it understandable for beginners. If something is unclear feel free to write a comment. I will do my best to explain as much as possible.

I’m really excited to post the first updates on the first game! Secret hint: it will be a game made with LibGDX! Follow me on twitter to be noticed about updates (@game_month). Stay tuned!