My blog about game development and all the stuff that goes with it
If you want to deal with game development in this day and age, you are confronted with a luxury problem right from the start. While in the early days of video game development, the sound and graphics output used for almost every game was developed or reworked in-house, nowadays you can choose from a variety of possible tools.
I have “published” two computer games so far.
The first game was a 2D jump’n’run that told the story of my (now) wife and me, which we used as wedding invitations. I had written the game in Java without using any foreign libraries. The levels and game characters consisted of non-animated sprites, there was background music, and the different levels were stored in text files whose contents were interpreted as sprites etc. at runtime.
The second game was a small learning/thinking game for mental arithmetic, which I named Little Math Academy and published in the Google Play Store in 2015. In contrast to the Jump’n’Run, I simplified my life a bit and didn’t write everything myself, but used libGDX instead. Thanks to libGDX, I no longer had to think up and implement everything myself, but could essentially focus on programming the actual game mechanics. Taking a full game engine for such a game seemed unnecessarily complicated to me at the time.