How do I even?

How do I even? What is a Game REALLY?

I've been making games for actually quite a while. Never finished a single one, mainly because I just did it as a hobby, never thought I'd pursue a career in it. Over the years, and in particular over the past couple months I've fine tuned my sense of what makes a game, how a game works, and what a game actually is. How did I do this? I learned C++ and made a ridiculously shitty text-based RPG.

I'll make a commentary video featuring some live coding and discussion in more detail about what I mean, but I want to get this down on paper (...I mean on screen...) before I lose track of what I'm feeling right now.

What is a game?

A video game, no matter the genre, is just a bunch of math. That's all it is. It's a series of droning lines of code that basically compare a few values and output another value. Then that value tells something to happen or not happen - whether that be compare other values, draw something to the screen, whatever. It's just math logic.

If you can get your head around that, you can start to tackle game programming. Game design is a different topic, because design incorporates the graphical user interface aspect of the game, or the storyline (as in a text-based game). How the game works, however, is what I'm talking about, from a programming point of view.

How does a game work?

At heart, a game has NOTHING to do with sprites, graphics, 3d models, worlds, terrain, colors, none of that stuff. At the heart of a game, what you're actually doing is pressing a button or clicking something - providing a user input - and then the program does some fancy math and generates an output which causes something to happen.

Art is just something for the player to look at. When you think about it like this, it's easy to understand how people can say, "Graphics don't make a game, gameplay does.". That's 100% correct, and it's this mindset that has allowed me to continue working on projects such as FishScape even though they may look bad - the graphics might leave a bit to be desired, but none of that shit matters! The programming and functionality is still there, I can change the graphics any time I want!

What does it mean?

As I'm writing this, I kinda don't know what the hell I'm writing this for. I feel like it's important though... Look, if you're wondering about how you go about making games, or how you program, just remember that you're in complete control of the project. You're the programmer. You decide what happens, why it happens, when it happens, and how it happens.

I used to be sucked into the black hole of "meh this isn't going to be a good game" because I was always focused on creating a perfect project from the beginning. The beauty of game design is that you can improve your design whenever you want to, so no matter how bad you THINK your project is, just finish the damn thing. You'll be more proud of it at the end than you think, and then you can go back and rebuild it, port it, update the graphics, re-write scripts to make them cleaner and more concise and compile faster...the possibilities are endless.

Under the hood, all games are exactly the same, yours is no better and no worse than any other game out there. They do the same thing, and as long as you put your heart into what you develop, you will never create a bad product. "Love what you dev, dev what you love" as the saying goes.

So get back into Unity, GameMaker, RPG Maker, Unreal, whatever your engine, and finish your game.

I feel like this post is a bit cluttered, maybe unfinished...I'll maybe do a video like I said at the beginning and talk a bit more in detail about some things. I hope this inspires someone to keep going with their project.