Welcome to the Weekly Discussion! This is a place where you can do general chat in the community for things that might not deserve their own post
So I have a “Game Base” for 3D games that I’ve been working on. It’s using Godot 4.X Mono. I usually use it when I start a new project, and then I merge any improvements back into the game base once I’ve finished the project. I’ve also had a rather generous soul go through and do some PRs of code cleanup.
I guess what I would love to know is, how do people in this community feel about Game Bases? Would you use someone else’s?
Personally, I greatly prefer to use my own because then I know every inch of it. But I can see the value in using someone else’s if I needed/wanted to work on a project different from my usual style (i.e. a 2D puzzle game)
Idk, I feel like for the basic games I make it would be more effort to understand someone else’s game base than it would be to just do it myself. However for things like branching dialog management I would find an addon to handle that, and for things like point-and-click games it might be nice to use a game base, either my own or possibly someone else’s.
I do like reusing components between games, like a first person player or things like that. I should probably find a way to organize them so they’re easy to use in different projects rather than copy-pasting straight from my older games.
I’m a week late on this… but just wanted to comment in support of this style! I think it’s worth having a strong pattern of code re-use across projects - your tools should get better as you get better game dev!
I’ve built games for several game jams in the last ~8 months in the same project: https://github.com/russmatney/dino
The goal is to lower the overhead of trying out new ideas, and make it easy to put reusable library code into libraries (addons), and game-specific code in the games themselves. It’s a fertile ground for letting games and addons develop and grow organically - as more games are implemented, the addons get another consumer to test the apis they offer. Maybe one day an addon will be ready to be pulled into it’s own project, if it would make it easier for other folks to use it.
(Tho, my addons have grown fairly cross-dependent, so now I’m starting to think of all of Dino as more of a personal framework… we’ll see where it goes…)
It’s typically alot to ask others to come into your own project and work with it (at any level, really), but if you are productive in there, you must be doing something right, so just keep going!
Has anyone here come from other engines? I spent many years in unity, but I haven’t touched it in probably 5 or 6 years. I am looking to get back into game dev, but also realize there is probably going to be a learning curve even if I go back to unity so I figure now is the time to make a change if I want to change it up.
Yeah I started using godot after mainly using unity after getting fed up with the compile + export times while trying to do game jams. Ended up needing to block out a two hour window at the end to account for exporting the game for 30 minutes and then possibly doing that again after fixing some bugs that only appear in browser
I appreciate the feedback!
