do you love programming and video games? want to hate them instead? you should try game dev! instead of confidently solving interesting problems with code you’ll be haphazardly gluing together a bunch of systems that are too complex for you to ever understand! it’s like trying to fix a nuclear sub while blindfolded! if you’ve ever wanted to hate computers and yourself you should definitely try game dev

@kasdeya or you can do what I do and solve a bunch of interesting problems and have a game that isn't playable for twenty years

I have so much respect for the people who are willing to put themselves through this hell in order to make a game for random people like me to play. I do not understand what kind of insanity would possess someone to inflict this on themself but I appreciate their sacrifice

@ben okay honestly I would much prefer that lol - and I admire your dedication omg

@kasdeya gamedev zoomies is almost like a medical condition, I can't really stop it it just happens

if I'm not gamedeving for too long I get very depressed (I wish I was kidding)

and all the pain you mention is there but the feeling you get when someone plays your game and tells you they enjoyed it makes it all worth it

“instead of confidently solving interesting problems with code you’ll be haphazardly gluing together a bunch of systems that are too complex for you to ever understand” is also a perfect description of why I hate any form of system administration or containerization

@celestia it’s amazing that you feel that way! and I’m really glad that there are folks like you out there who are able to overall enjoy making games tbh. I could never do it - even just trying to learn Unity fucked me up pretty good and I’m still recovering lol

@kasdeya For the past few months I've had this idea of turning a novel I wrote into a nonlinear/CYOA visual novel. It seems like the Done Thing for this is Ren'py ... but I'm not a huge fan of Python. I do have some libgdx experience, but it feels like it would be painful to build an entire game in Java.

So I was like "well, what if I wrote the bulk of the game in TypeScript, and then wrote a transpiler to libgdx-flavored Java ... ?" and I knew I just needed to stop and walk away.

(But the idea still rolls around in my head, whispering to me.)

(And yes, I know there are tools like Excalibur to do TS game dev, but I ... have not been impressed with what I've found.)

@kasdeya I can relate a lot to that, and your rant makes a lot of sense when you bring up unity, I've done a bunch of "big engine" development and, yeah, it wasn't for me

what I settled in is working on smaller games where I can be in charge and understand all the parts... it wouldn't work if my goal was commercial success, but I'm just doing this because it makes me happy so I don't really care

@celestia ohh that makes a ton of sense! before I started learning Unity I was playing with a fantasy console called Pyxel and I actually had a lot of fun with that - because I was kinda making a lot of my own game engine parts and treating Pyxel as more of a “draw stuff to the screen” system lol

what technologies do you use for your games? I’m kinda curious now. maybe once I get over my Unity-induced… burnout? then I can experiment with simpler game dev stuff again

@kasdeya fantasy consoles are so cool :3 I've done a veeery bit of pico8, and half unrelatedly I also had a go at making a short game for my partner in gameboy studio which was quite fun

for my latest project I've been using SDL and OpenGL, which is very low level but gives me the control I want. I'd say if I had to recommend something that's close in spirit but a lot less messy to build and get started with I'd recommend raylib, it's a tiny C library with bindings for most languages with utilities for things like drawing text and sprites, playing sounds and music, and similar things every game needs... and for the rest, it pretty much stays out of the way, which is very similar to what I'm working with ^^

@kasdeya and whatever you end up using, I can also very much recommend dear imgui! it has bindings for most languages and frameworks, including raylib

it's a great tool for building little debug and visualization tools, which is often something you'll end up missing from big engines like unity

I've found it doesn't take that much work to create the development guis I need for myself... the key here being for myself, you save a ton of time when you don't have to worry about getting the ux perfect or the alignment of that widget just right, it's more of a "get it done in a quick and dirty way" kind of library and I love it for that!

I think this post by noel berry (one of the devs behind celeste) is a great read and I pretty much share the same views, even if I use slightly different tech https://noelberry.ca/posts/making_games_in_2025/

@celestia ooh raylib sounds like exactly what I’d want! and it even has Python bindings. thanks for mentioning it!

@celestia ooh thank you for the advice, and for the Noel Berry post! it’s great to know about imgui, and also this post has me pretty hopeful that I can make games in an environment that doesn’t absolutely suck, and that that isn’t even a terrible idea lol