

Ask HN: To make games, what tools do I use? - timhaegblom

I am a developer with 5 years of programming experience and I now want to start programming games. What I&#x27;m asking is what the best way to get started is. I&#x27;ve used Haskell, Scheme, Ruby and JavaScript before, but I can probably learn some new languages if required.
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jmatthews
I'm a Unity fan-boy. Deploys to almost every modern platform and uses a "code-
once" approach so porting from Android to IPhone to PC to Linux is largely
straightforward.

It lets you code in a subset of javascript or c# 3.0 and favors composition
over inheritance. Just an incredible tool for productivity and the learning
curve is pretty gentle. It also has a large community and a bunch of plug and
play assets available in a built in marketplace. Be sure and check it out.

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timhaegblom
Unity looks nice. It's a shame I'm on Linux. Maybe it's worth it to dual-boot.

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jmatthews
Was about to say it deploys to Linux but I assume the editor doesn't run on
Linux. Having a couple of decades alternating between serious game development
and just dabbling I can't stress enough how big the delta between Unity and
competing products is. A great indicator is all of the new kickstarter
projects from big names in the business switching to Unity. Richard Garriot,
The new wasteland game, etc...

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anywherenotes
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Corona. I did a couple of games natively on
Android, and now trying to make one in Corona, and it seems to be an easier
route.

One big negative (if it applies) is it's 2D, whereas Unity is 3D.

It also doesn't support as many devices, for example doesn't support windows
mobile, but still majority of users will be android/iOS.

I'm mentioning it only here to see if there's another thing I'm overlooking,
and should switch to something else.

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mscottmcbee
Unity3D is the current hot tool. You can use C# or an ECMAscript flavor called
Unity Script. There's also quite a list of growing HTML5 game engines. Beyond
that, there's really nothing stopping you from finding an opengl binding for
the language you love and writing something simple.

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timhaegblom
HTML5 looks nice. I want to make a game where users can mod it easily and
maybe download mods (scripts) from a server to store them locally. Is that
possible with HTML5?

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mscottmcbee
About two weeks ago I started to explore a concept with a friend where people
wrote the AI to a fleet of ships in browser using JS, which then got executed.
It seems to work alright, but I'm no expert when it comes to JS, so I'm not
sure what would need to be done to sandbox it and make sure the user-generated
scripts didn't do anything nasty.

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curiousphil
Our studio has been using Unity for the past year or so for iOS/Android game
dev and we love it. For web games we've been using ImpactJS fairly heavily and
really liking what it offers.

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iends
If you want to make mobile games Java/Obj-C.

Anything else, probably C++, or if you want to go the Unity route, C#.

