Making video games: a personal experience

During the pandemic some things changed in our lives, and among those changes some of us decided to reinvent ourselves.

In my case, I already had experience teaching programming to children with Scratch, so I decided it could be a good idea to start exploring the world of mobile game creation. Some time before that I had seen that there was a free-software program called Godot that made game creation relatively simple, but I had left it aside because at that time I did not have enough time. With the pandemic changing the rhythm of everything, I decided to give it a real chance.

Before that I had looked at tools such as Unity and Unreal, and honestly they intimidated me because of the complexity of their interfaces. They felt enormous and too complicated. I did not have that feeling with Godot, so I decided to try it.

There is something about Godot that I love: the way it structures the game you are creating. In Godot everything is scenes and nodes. Imagine a car-racing game: the track is a scene, the car is a scene, the driver is a scene, and the wheels or the steering wheel can be nodes inside the car scene. That car scene can also appear inside several other scenes, so when you modify something in the car scene it changes in every scene that includes it.

That tree-like way of organising games, where everything is connected and where you can move back and forth through the structure to change things, feels very logical to me and fits the way I think. It was probably what helped me most when I was starting to make games with Godot.

Little by little, and with the help of a few tutorials, I built an app that taught younger children multiplication tables. At the time my son was learning them, and I could see that one of his difficulties was that he did not visually understand what multiplication tables were. It occurred to me that turning that into an app might be a good idea. That first program took me about three weeks to complete, and the satisfaction of seeing it working on a mobile phone after publishing it was what finally pushed me into the adventure of building games for mobile devices.

A year and a half later I had 7 games published on both the Apple Store and the Play Store, with 3 more ready to be released soon.

During that time I learned a lot and also made quite a few mistakes. In future articles I will explain in more depth what I learned and where I went wrong, in case my experience can help others.