GameDev: I’m finally developing video games again after 20 years

3 March 2025 |

Gaming
, 

Tech

Somewhere in England in the early 2000s, a spotty teenager put a CD into his computer and installed a game maker application. I can’t even remember what that program was called at this point, but it let me put together simple games – Pong-esque football, a cricket game that looked like a Football Manager match, and semi-interactive screensavers – that I showed off to my friends.

Armed with the imagination of a kid growing up in the golden era of video games, I often had more ambitious (and sometimes original) ideas, but they were hampered by a teenage lack of focus and the constraints of the platform itself. I didn’t know how to code, there was nobody around who could teach me, and I was limited to the scenes and sliders the tool allowed me to use.

At some point, I abandoned my ambition to become a game developer. I didn’t have the skills required and I had no way of acquiring them. The internet was blossoming and there was doubtless learning material out there, but I couldn’t make any sense of it without a grasp of the fundamentals of computer science.

Through a combination of luck and a knack for seizing opportunities when they present themselves, I eventually landed a career in technology. My job didn’t require that I learnt to code, but I did anyway out of sheer curiosity, determined to make the most of the people and resources that suddenly surrounded me.

This year, I had the sudden urge to get back into game development. The gaming industry is a mess, big-budget studios are failing, and there are people out there making good money with indie games I feel I could make, given the time and inspiration. So I searched around for the best way to get started.

I eventually settled on Pygame, which is a Python library with functions to handle things like windows, graphics, and sounds. I’ve used Python extensively in my work and know how to handle the underlying logic and manipulate the numbers, so it’s been equally fascinating and exciting to learn that that’s most of the job – rendering graphics to represent those numbers is just the icing on the cake.

The freedom I dreamt of as a teenager now extends in front of me. I am unbound by the constraints of an editor, and can essentially code any 2D game that I can dream of. There are sometimes many lines of code required for simple features, but it’s a price I’m willing to pay for access to so much potential, and I find a pleasure in optimising code, breaking out functions, and improving efficiency.

However, I do have a full-time job, and I’m not about to quit it to chance my arm at becoming the next indie unicorn. Therefore game development is a hobby limited to my free time, for now at least. That also means that my projects need to have a very controlled scope – I wouldn’t make it very far at all if I tried to build the next Grand Theft Auto in small bursts in the mornings and on weekends.

With that in mind, I’ve decided that my first game will be a simple space shooter inspired by some of the classics of my childhood, like Deluxe Galaga. The genre features a simple gameplay loop that can be iterated upon to no end with extra power-ups and enemy types, and therefore seems a good choice for a time-limited developer who needs to see regular results to stay motivated.

I’ll post updates both here and on X as I start to flesh out the game, and in the meantime I’m casting my mind back over the games I love, trying to pick out what made them special. At some point I might have time for a grander project, and when I do, I want to have a design prepared so I can hit the ground running.

Should I keep up the momentum and begin to build more complex games, I’d like to create the games I thought we’d be playing by 2025 when I was a kid – games that use today’s extra processing power for new systems and ideas, not just increasing graphical fidelity. I need to start small, of course, but I still dream that one day I might run a little studio, and I finally have the tools to get started.