I made Games with Python for 10 Years...

I'll often be asked about the learning route I've taken to get my game development skills to the point where they are today in celebration of my 10 years of game development experience I'll take you on the journey from my very first steps with python about a decade ago to beating thousands of other entries and winning medals in the ludum deer with P game this year I may not have learned in the most efficient manner but I'm happy with where I am today so I'll share what I was learning with each project and the mistakes I've made hopefully this should provide some valuable insight into how you could approach improving your own game development skills While most of my projects are with python and py game there may be a couple gdau projects mixed in as well let's rewind the clock all the way back to 2013 I was 12 years old and starting to get tired of Legos I was super into Minecraft but I was only allowed to play 30 minutes of video games per day out of boredom I decided to learn to code and maybe make my own game so I could play more than 30 minutes on one September evening I downloaded the python interpreter and found a tutorial to start learning I didn't think I was smart enough to make games with Graphics at that point but in October I decided to give pame a try I quickly got attached to it after finding a few example scripts and I've been using it ever since I hadn't figured out what lists were yet all of my code was in one file there wasn't a shred of objector to programming and I didn't follow any tutorials which was a mistake but by December I had my first proper game super launchers it's like Super Smash Bros but bad in 2014 I made significant updates to Super launchers it still wasn't great but it at least looked better I followed it up with a graphical version of of a text based Rog like I was making before learning P game called Gladiator Arena I was just using the basic put an image on the screen and move it tricks but I did have a knack for modeling the logic behind relatively complex mechanics then I stumbled upon the vampire survivors gameplay when I made Battlegrounds yes this was before pubg was the thing the mechanics are probably self-explanatory I followed It Up by making cookie clier and Flappy bird clones to test my skills I still didn't know what lists were for so I had several separate pipes that I accessed by name and teleported instead of using a list shortly after Flappy Bird I finally figured out what lists were for and I made free fall a meteor dodging game with that my first full year of game development was complete without ever touching objectoriented programming 2015 was the year where I really started to make unique games unfortunately I I only have the games that I actually released from this year because I switched to a new computer that I accidentally wiped when I was installing 10 different Linux dros to support the steam machine when I was releasing drwn down Abyss in 2019 I started with the creatively named sandbox RPG it was topown Minecraft with more RPG mechanics this is when I learned to break my games down into tiles and took a crack at riding a physics system much like super launchers it was still a bit scuffed and occasionally involved teleporting unexpectedly I followed it up with force a physics game about pushing things around with force fields that had some really broken physics some of the artwork was starting to look nice though the final notable project from 2015 was an underground game that I forgot the name of there was a small underground town that you collected resources for but I've lost almost everything from that project it was my first proper step into pixel art overall my motivation was pretty low that year I took several breaks without making anything for long periods of time I had passed the initial rapid rate of improvement and was slowing down but my game still looked like beginner projects in 2016 I started going by the name the fluffy potato and I made an infinite Runner game with references to some Warriors fanfiction I wrote on wpad around the time that was actually somewhat popular o deron's gameplay actually holds up pretty decently nowadays surprisingly after Deron I learned about the ludum Dare and decided to try and compete in my very first game gy ludum dare 35 I had to make a game from scratch in 48 hours unfortunately I ended up sick but I decided to push through and participate anyways I made Rocky a strange Tower Defense survival thing involving transformation that's just an overall mess of mechanics as the rankings at the end of the gy indicated it wasn't a very good game even though it didn't do very well this was a massive turning point in game development for me because I discovered I could get good feedback on my games and really put my skills to the test it's really hard to be motivated to make games when nobody wants to play them and you rarely get any feedback but game jams let you exchange feedback with other developers whether you're new to game development or you've been making games for years I think game jams are one of the best ways to improve as a game developer I also discovered Daniel Linson and RX I from that first game Jam who ended up being huge Inspirations for my art style down the road after Rocky I reiterated on the ideas from sandbox RPG and made its open world counterpart Zania this was my biggest project from the time and would be my biggest project until super potato bra in 2018 I still wasn't using object-oriented programming but I had figured out how to use dictionaries hashmaps for you non-python people I didn't understand why lookups were so fast they seemed like magic but I didn't look into it and quickly put them to work to create the infinite worlds of Zenia for those who don't know dictionaries are the solution to 90% of performance issues in game development from this point I had figured out how to make much more technically impressive games with py game and the restrictions of python before I knew it it was time for ludum dare 36 there were no ratings this time due to the beginning of the transfer to the new ludum dare website but I participated anyways and made artifact Hunter this time I actually got some pretty positive reactions while unrelated to the reactions it was the first time I put music into one of my games I had just learned about beatbox doco and made the game's music with it when October rolled around the ludum deer had a special event that they don't do anymore the goal was to take any Game Dev project and make money off of it somehow I polished artifact Hunter added more content and even took my first crack on multiplayer although it only worked with extremely low latency see because the connection was synchronous and blocking I released it and got an astounding two sales I still have the records of that first payout from I.O and the payout ID indicates that it was one of the first 3,000 payouts ever done by it iio while most people would consider two sales a failure I was 15 and just trying to win the ludum D October challenge which I did and I was very happy with after artifact Hunter I made raise the roof for ludum deer 37 it was a weird game where you had to keep the roof from collapsing by shooting at it and farming stuff it was a strange game and didn't do too well because the mechanics weren't well explained my final project from 2016 was Pokémon Violet yes this is something like the third time doing something suspiciously indicative of the future I just wanted to make a Pokemon knockoff I got as far as the world walking around menus and semi-functional battles overall 2016 was the year I finally settled into pixel art and got into the groove of game Gams to keep me improving it's the year that set me on the track to get where I am now in 2017 similar to How I Learned most of pame and I don't recommend learning this way I stumbled upon an example script for a platformer with simple reliable tile physics that one script had the algorithm that I still use and teach for child physics to this day I unfortunately have no idea where I found it or who made it and I don't have a copy I use this physics knowledge in my ludum dare 38 game solitary Freedom it's a simple Sliding Puzzle game that surprise surprise didn't do too well when I got my rankings for that gem for luden de 39 I made Precious Cargo a game where you must protect a crystal from Pirates on a flying ship this is probably the first game where you can look at it and say that's a defy Potato game around that time some developers were unhappy with the ludum deer's buggy website and management so possibly for this reason the Ala Jam was made and popularized it was another 48 hour game gy with nearly identical rules and a better website that I decided to join I made alchemic Archer a game where you fight slimes with potion tipped arrows that you make from items in the environment surprisingly I ended up winning third place in graphics there were only 58 games but winning my first medal was an amazing step up from my previous projects afterwards I tried to participate in a mini event that the Alam was hosting and started creating what would later turn into gleam shroom 5 years down the road but I dropped out because I was too busy with stuff in real life around that time I also took another try at multiplayer Game Dev this time with threading so that it would you know actually work it did work which I was very happy with but I got bored of it fast eventually December rolled around and it was time for another ludum dare after coming off of a graphics medal in the Ala Jam I decided to try and aim for a high graphic score in the ludum Dare with the Crush Sky it was a weird floaty Precision platformer but it had a boss and it looked pretty good I also learned about recursion to create box pushing physics and finally after 4 years started splitting up my code so it wasn't all in just one file I ended up placing 28th out of over 1,000 in graphics which I thought was awesome 2017 was also the year I touched open jail for the first time experimentally and started learning about objectoriented programming not that would really use it all right it's time for 2018 this was the year that I became that pie game guy for multiple reasons I kicked off the year with a non-game gy project hungry where I learned about pearlin noise and World Generation I followed it up with lollipop Ninja for the second Al Jam a game about a ninja with a sweet tooth and social anxiety I won first place in graphics and the game actually got traction on it iio outside of people from the game Jam playing it some some people even speedran it I also made PX editor my pixel art software that I used for my animations until I bought a Sprite I was animating an MS paint before that that year I decided to participate in the python specific game gam called pie week I had a bad experience with people gaming the anonymous voting system and leaving mean comments and bad ratings across the board but I used Busa kol for the first time and made guardian of the tree a game with an atmosphere I was very happy with and still am to this day P week has supposedly addressed the issues from that event so I may participate again someday but that's the only one I've done so far another ludum dare was up next where I made Quick Draw TCG a car game bullet hell platform or Rog light this would turn into drawn down Abyss later but I still like the music up to this point I was mostly just doing basic things that you could say py game was meant to do however I took my first step towards pushing pame to a un usual areas by writing my own realtime raycaster I considered making a game with Ray casting but it took another 5 years for that to become a reality I experimented in other areas as well that year by working on an MMO type game I got much further than I did with my prior multiplayer projects and quit when I got to the GH I have to make content part after all that experimentation it was time for the third Al Jam I made whirling blades an isometric fighting Rogue light with a growing Arena the questionable Mouse controls and a couple other factors really held the game back it won the bronze medal for game play and I came closer than I've ever been to not winning a medal in the alaka Jam Even though the game had issues it looked like a lot of fun in the gifts so it was featured on PC Gamer rock paper shotgun and the front page V iio for some reason just for reference I only had 5,000 downloads between all of my games on .io at this point with what seemed like new found success I decided it was time to build a proper PC and stop using the laptop I had been using for the last few years since I could actually run OBS with the new pc I decided to start the pame platformer tutorial series that got my YouTube channel off the ground although it took a while to get proper Traction in this context you can clearly see how I made those tutorials just as I finally had a decent grasp of python and py game next up was the 42nd ludum dare where I made bullet fire armor a game where you farm bullet plants to shoot invasive slimes with a machine gun in true Floridian style while there weren't any major improvements here I had a discussion in the community for that jam that directly led to my next project see my VR video for more details on that discussion my next project was going to be my first proper paid game not like that October challenge thing in the past Super potato BR I put 100 hours into it in a couple months and released it hoping to to make $100 but to my surprise I ended up making almost $4,000 I still wasn't really using objectoriented programming it's funny how I suddenly had a much harder time finishing projects once I got into objectoriented programming later there's a saying that there are two types of game developers there are those that make games and there are those that write good code when you're doing what I was doing and bouncing between two game jams that run two to three times a year there's always something going on it was time for the fourth ala Jam this time I made Spike dungeon it's a game where you travel downward through a procedurally generated map avoid hazards eat and collect powerups as you go this is a game with a design that I'm still happy with even 5 years later it ended up being the game that won me my very first game Jam as the final project of 2018 I made a weird procedurally generated Rogue light while not Innovative the aesthetic led to my next paid game drawn down Abyss 2018 was probably my most productive year in game development by a long shot in 2019 I slowed down a bit I got into VR at the end of 2018 and I was busy getting to the top 100 and beat saber competing in tournaments and creating hit block my first game Jam entry of the year was spellcasters Forest a game made for the fifth ala Jam where the core mechanic was based on the Android pattern lock the player could cast abilities to fight monsters in the arena and fight bosses it was somewhat of an average game Jam entry for me my next game was for the six Al Jam bouncy shots is air hockey except you have to shoot the puck instead of hitting it directly because I'm American not Canadian as you can see I decided to throw artwork out the window for this one and depend fully on visual effects this is when I developed my Sparks and circle system that visually differentiates my games from most others much like low resolution pixel art sometimes adding restrictions and getting back to the basics breeds creativity even without drawing anything I still managed to get second in graphics I didn't do any ludum dares in 2019 so the next game was for yet another alak Jam I made Shadow Tower a super low effort game because I had a lot of other stuff going on that weekend however I finally switched from Busa to lmms and I learned a very valuable lesson people's impressions of one aspect of a game such as Graphics are heavily influenced by other aspects such as music in this case I won that event and still somehow got second Graphics I have to imagine I got lucky with the people who happened to rate the game because there's no way I should have won regardless the interplay between game aspects is an idea that has a huge impact on how I make games today and led to something special later on after Shadow Tower I finished up development for my second steam game drawn down Abyss as I mentioned it's based off of two of my earlier games you descend down a cave system while trying to survive by using cards that give you special abilities it's a deck builder Rog light bullet help PL platformer based on the original risk of rain the feedback was pretty much wait this genre soup somehow works it had a similar amount of time spent and profits of super potato BR I think the idea definitely has potential but I really needed to execute on it with more content and polish to wrap up the year I finally tried out gdau VR for the first time finally bought a Sprite to replace the pixel art software I wrote and graduated high school with a 2-year college degree 2020 was an eventful year in a completely different way than the previous ones in February 2020 I made Arrow blaster for the eth Ala gy you jump around through a vertically looping map and shoot turrets it's not a complicated idea but I feel I executed well on the idea oddly enough when beginners take inspiration from my games more often than not it's aob Blaster I've seen people imitate the art style the mechanics and sometimes both this was also when I finally hit 1,000 subscribers on YouTube all of my previous success with super potato bra and drawn down Abyss was done without a serious social media presence and to this day I still haven't released a steam game with the marketing power of a YouTube channel so I have no idea what would happen in the beginning of March I got my first software development job working on Rockets the kind used to get people to the ISS and put satellites in space not the blow stuff up kind as we all know the same month just one week later bid hit I started working remote but aside from that it didn't affect my lifestyle much however there was a big boom in the devlog YouTube genre during Co with Danny and the others that I got on early with my unnamed devlog project where I push P gamees limits with grass water foliage and cloth simulations in a real-time game while that project was put indefinitely on hold its Spirit lives on both in the ReUse of its code base and the ideas for current projects now it's time to get back to the regular game Jam cycle and take a look at my ninth alak Jam entry Linus this is a game idea that honestly should have been a mobile game you bounce a ball upwards by drawing platforms that bounce it with physics the success of bouncing shots made me want to try the whole no drawing thing again and I got quite a good result I think a few people did actually Port the game to mobile some directly and some just copying the idea but I don't know where those went for the 10th Al Jam I decide to step outside my comfort zone and learn gdau during the jam there's a time lapse if you want to see me reading through documentation while making a game which I think is quite interesting it didn't do nearly as well as my pie game entries but it was my first serious step outside of P game which is important it taught me that I don't really have an interest in making 2D games with anything other than P game but I also saw gdau as a serious option for any 3D or VR projects I wanted to work on to finish off the year I headed back to the ludum Dare which I hadn't done in ages I developed shifting Edge for the 47th ludum dare which is just whirling blades but with angry bushes the world's most violent Gardener and the bad parts of the controls made worse as you could guess it didn't do too well even though it looked nice just before the end of the year I also hit 10,000 subscribers on YouTube that's 1,000 to 10,000 in a year the power of B 2020 was the year I started my computer science degree and gained the shackles of college you can really tell from the amount of games they put out recently I'm recording this video just shortly after finishing my degree though which I'll make a video about soon moving on to 2021 aside from making that one video that made a bunch of people angry it was probably the most uneventful year for me I made this weird archery game with a restricted color palette that I never finished but was revived in a collaboration you'll be seeing very soon for the 11th ala Jam I made wondering so a weird platformer that mixes in more traditional bullet hell mechanics this is actually my most downloaded game at the moment but the Innovative thing here was that I made wondering Soul while live streaming the whole thing I ended up hitting almost 200 concurrent viewers which was awesome jumping to the next ala Jam I made cave in for the 12th ala Jam if you've been counting I participated in every ala jam up to this point but sadly this streak would be broken very soon Caven is a simple arcade game based on a Minecraft mini game when I was uh ony yeah it's definitely the Run of my game gam entries in The Last 5 Years now so this was the first year I was working on that one game that people keep asking me about vagrant it's aob Blaster except it's an RPG and it ended up looking quite good in my opinion I finally fully stepped into an objectoriented approach for the games codebase after eight years of experience this is also the first project where I have truly split up my code into more than just a couple files as one more fun fact it's on the banner of r/p game to top off the year I created my grass framework that gives me the graphical Edge in pretty much every game Jam nowadays it can handle 10,000 Blades of physically interactive grass on the screen at once and billions if you count the offscreen blades with that run of a year out of the way I can get on to 2022 my ninth year of Game Dev to kick off the year with a bang I made gleam shroom based on that unfinished game all those years ago for the 14th alak Jam gleam shroom was the first time I seriously used the multiplication blend flag in pame and it resulted in some really nice looking lighting this was honestly where I hit my modern plateau and my artistic ability I haven't improved much since but I have some plans for 2024 that might finally be a significant upgrade also some YouTuber played a lightly modified version of gleam shroom that someone modified as a fan game or something which was the first time a big YouTuber played one of my games to follow gleam shom up I just took the assets and threw together a functional MMO type game and actually did my first International play test of a multiplayer game it taught me a lot of things about both networking framework architecture since I was writing my own and high latency game div networking in general in April I made explon for the 50th ludum dare I felt like my last ludum dare entry went unnecessarily poorly so I wanted to give it another shot it's a game where you play a frog dinosaur thing that will get angry and explode unless he gets enough lollipops to eat if you haven't noticed that's where my current profile picture comes from Expo ended up placing seventh in graphics placing top 10 in any category was always a big and seemingly achievable goal for me shortly after I got into shaders with openg and started mixing openg with pame for postprocessing to create the rendering pipeline that I use for my games nowadays initially I did this with piop GL but I found out about modern GL and I've been using it ever since this was also the year that the popularity of vagrant peaked which happened after I added shaders while on summer break I worked on this isometric game meant to be a successor in terms of mechanics not world to draw down Abyss I ended up dropping it before making any devlogs or anything though the game jams in 2022 didn't really line up with my availability so I made Hue flowing a game with a game Jam type scope and my new Shader pipeline to top off the year you're a ninja that jumps around and paints the world into existence with the magic of shaders who is an actually solid game in my opinion unlike most of my projects I just feel that everything fit together very nicely it ended up being featured on Buried Treasure which was super nice to see and we finally made it to my 10th year of game development 2023 to start off the year I created pigpen a p game framework I've been using all year in some capacity to make games it has built in support for fancy things like foliage grass water physics particles and even things like gray casted lighting running on shaders as an initial test for the water and lighting I started working on an unnamed fishing Rog light which never really showed up on my channel before I knew it the next ludum deer had rolled around it was ludum Deere 53 and I put Pig Pen to the test for the very first time in a game gy by making Moon rabbit collection a simple game where you find lost items for bunnies on some strange Moon the aesthetic was inspired by a game called Lucid by rxi that inspired me a lot along long time ago this was also my very first time using FL Studio in a game jam and it made a huge difference I placed first in graphics including beating all the team entries out of thousands of games I credit that to the whole game aspect interplay thing I mentioned earlier because the music turned out quite well as well and resulted in a bronze medal in the mood category after participating in almost 30 game jams winning a category in the Lum deer was an awesome achievement that I didn't think I'd ever reach I think it's given me the confidence to really sink in some time on my first paid project in over 5 years for 2024 and finally start to move on from game jams I'll probably keep doing them every now and then but not as often as I used to in my summer break after my 8 week summer semester in University I really focused on learning 3D game development using G do for so I could make VR games which resulted in this archery game plan to be based on alchemic Archer that I plan on picking up again when I have more time for reference in case you're watching this video in the future I also hit 50,000 subscribers here on YouTube this year which is a huge milestone for me if you've been keeping up with my videos you've probably seen pix carts which is my 2D Mario Kart knockoff that's actually supporting online multiplayer I've gone through a few play tests already and it's been a ton of fun I'm hoping to release pix carts next year it runs on my new networking framework that I plan on keeping private for now it's quite convenient to work with and I made a video about it but I'm planning to rebuild it next year from the ground up with the experience I have now to create a userfriendly networking framework for p game the final project from this year that you guys would know about is the platformer tutorial project it's a simple game but it's made for a tutorial to replace the 5-year-old tutorial that got my channel to where it is if you're interested in learning pame and you already know python it's worth checking out there are two more projects from this year that I haven't really shown much yet first we have my new Avatar that I plan on using for regular streams next year I built it using pame modern GL and media pipe using lots of magical math I'll probably have a dedicated video on it soon since it's super interesting as my final project for 2023 I have a project that I haven't really shown because it's a project I was hired to work on that I don't own however the owner of the project has generously agreed to spons with this video so here it is this is of murder and moonshine your mobster in prohibition area New Orleans carrying out assassinations for control over moonshine production in the swamps it's an intense shooter platformer running on my pigpen framework and it's available for wish list on Steam with a scheduled release date of early 2024 there's a link in the description so you can go check it out I've been contributing to the project on and off on the side all year and I think the game play is turning out to be quite fun with that I've summarized over 50 of my magor projects in my first 10 years of game development mostly with py game it's been the journey that can primarily be described through one thing for those of you wondering how I learned game jams since I just graduated with my computer science degree this year and I'm finishing off of murder and moonshine I'm about to hit a massive change of pace in my life and I'm looking forward to some awesome game diff projects I have planned thanks for watching until the end and I hope you'll stick around see my future progress in the years to come

Channel: DaFluffyPotato

Views: 277,681

Keywords: DaFluffyPotato, python, pygame, gamedev, python gamedev, pygame gamedev, game development, programming, coding, python games, pygame games, ludum dare, ldjam, alakajam, moderngl, ms paint

Id: UNdTLfDNsI4

Length: 28min 52sec (1732 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 23 2023