“Adventures in indie game development (on Linux!)” --
It's been a while since I've been doing game development, so I'm excited to announce (perhaps a bit prematurely) I'm working on a new game! I downloaded the new Godot 3.1. Having not used the 3.x branch much at all, I am really happy with all the improvements... Read »
Already a front-end (or back-end) web developer, and curious about writing your own video games? Maybe want to try a new hobby in indie game dev for PC or console, or publish some mobile games? I made the transition, and so can you! I hope this 10 minute read will... Read »
Perhaps you are working on an action game or action RPG where different abilities need different cooldowns, but here's a tiny snippet that can be a re-usable Cooldown utility to check for when abilities can be re-used. Also useful for "rate-limiting" in general, e.g. adding a maximum rate of... Read »
Drag and drop blocks onto the board to rack up points and advance to the next level in this addictive new spin on the classic game of tangrams. Two different modes cater to both casual and hardcore-puzzler game styles: Zen mode allows you to take your time to use the... Read »
A couple months ago I wrote about realizing "enough was enough" with my feature-creeped game. Along with working on other projects, I spent some time in the next couple months cutting out features and polishing existing ones, all working under a "late-May" deadline. Now, my new (much smaller) vision for... Read »
I'm all ready to start Ludum Dare 38! In case you don't know, it's a game dev competition / game jam to make an entire game in 48 hours. It'll be my first go at it, so I'm super pumped.... Read »
As it turns out, writing gesture detection is not an easy task. I gave it a shot anyway, and wrote a re-usable scene for the awesome free software Godot Game Engine. It all started when I decided to switch the focus of my work-in-progress game Sawdust to "mobile-first". To provide... Read »
It's been nearly 6 months now that I jumped head-first into game development, I've had a fantastic time so far. During these 6 months, in addition to teaching a program on web development, I've been working primarily two game concepts: One ambitious 3D game that is still top-secret , and another,... Read »
I've noticed I've written a total of 9 open source packages for the Godot engine! I'm pretty pleased with this number, nothing makes me happier than giving back to the world of free software. I created a page that I'll keep updated with links to all of the repos: http:... Read »
I put together a little camera script that should be useful for RPGs, platformers, and RTS games in the free software Godot Game Engine. It has a top-down (or angled) camera that has built in key-bindings for panning around using WASD keys. I wrote it to quickly prototype things like... Read »
Need to build a loading screen in Godot? I took the resource queue example from the Godot Documentation, and cleaned it up a bit and put it in its own repo. This allows for background loading, a progress bar type screen, etc. Maybe other people will find a use for... Read »
For the puzzle game Sawdust, I needed a powerful enough playlist and music mixing system so I could crossfade between tracks based on what's going on in the game, and so that I could make the soundtrack less repetitive by composing a collection of shorter ambient pieces that are played... Read »
Recently on /r/gamedev there was a nice article about achieving NIUM's isometric voxel-ish 3D effect using layers of sprites. It's a very simple and obvious technique, you should read it if have a minute: 2D 3D in GameMaker Studio. Well, I implemented it in Godot! A hastily put-together example... Read »
I wrote a little helper library to help you write unit tests for the logic in your Godot game's scripts. First things first: What is unit testing and why would you want it? A unit test is just some code that checks other code to make sure it does what... Read »
Over the last month I've been experimenting with an "agile" time-management method for my solo-game dev work. The verdict? Works like a charm! Recently, I switched from a full-time web dev position to being a full-time solo game dev. Now, this isn't my first time doing solo projects full-time, and... Read »
Want to write games on Linux? I do! Here's how to hit the ground running. This post is a (non-exhaustive) overview of the tools available on Linux, just to show that it is possible to use Linux at every step of the game development process. It's the first blog post... Read »
Michael Bethencourt (@mbgamedev) is a developer based in the SF Bay Area. He blogs about indie game development on his OS of choice, Linux.
I founded a cutting-edge coding academy. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, you can learn to code full-stack web development in Python and React.js, by taking one of my affordable, intensive courses.
Want to keep up with my tutorials, code snippets, and random musings on Linux game development? I post 2-4 times per month, so subscribe to catch 'em all!
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