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Comment by erik | Hacker News Reader

This article focuses mostly on design and the principles of rapidly prototyping a game, and I would say very little has changed in those areas over the years.

Something that has changed is the available tools for rapid game development. Ludum Dare is a regularly occurring game jam (next one starts Aug 26), and their tools page is a good resource: http://ludumdare.com/compo/tools/

Somewhat unrelated, but a lot has also changed in the commercial market for indie games since this was written. On one hand, it has gotten much easier to commercially distribute indie games. But on the other hand, there is much, much more competition in this space now.

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I second that. A dev I spoke to basically said that the indie dev scene before (distribution-wise) was really tough because the only way to distribute games on a mass scale was through big box stores (with actual physical copies). A lot of these stores rarely, if ever, dealt with smaller studios (let alone one-man shops) so you would have to make deals with publishers (like EA) just to get your games on those shelves. Those publishers then took a large cut of all the revenue.

If your game was somehow a success, you had to keep making bigger games with a bigger team just so you can make that game 'relevant' to the big box stores. It's a never-ending cycle of needing to keep growing, expanding, and eventually that financial pressure swallows up indie studios. Nowadays, you have digital distribution channels like Steam or itch.io which make it significantly 'easier' to reach customers. Plus, there's less pressure to grow unless you want to. Like erik said though, there's definitely more competition nowadays.

I will say this though as someone who writes about games, a unique hook (ie in mechanics, story, tech, or maybe all of them) goes a long way in getting press to write about you. I suppose that's the way it is with other fields though.

As a writer, I love discovering and covering new indie games. I want to write about you but if you scroll through a lot of these games, it feels like stuff we've seen again and again. The one game that changes the formula even for a little or presents it in a novel way (ie Undertale or Her Story), you get people really interested and talking about it.

Nice list, thanks for posting it!

Prototyping in unity is not as fast as flash back in the day (for me at this time anyways). Can anyone compare GameMaker: Studio or another modern product that is good for fast prototyping?

GameMaker is usually the go to recommendation for rapid prototyping, and game development at a higher level of abstraction than Unity.

I've lately been hearing some positive buzz around Godot, particularly for 2D games. But I also get the impression that there is a learning curve. https://godotengine.org/

If you want to bring your flash skills into the modern world, Haxe might be worth looking at: http://haxe.org/ particularly with a framework like OpenFL. http://www.openfl.org/

Here is a good article on the post flash gamedev world: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/LarsDoucet/20150915/252693/Wh...

I haven't tried any of the above. But I've heard good things about all of them.

I didn't get involved in flash dev back in the day, but last year I switched my primary game dev product to GameMaker: Studio. The ease of rapid prototyping was the largest factor. I believed in it so much I bought the whole professional bundle.

My thoughts after half a year or so are as follows:

- it's very flexible, between the drag n drop functionality and plain writing scripts or inline code for object events. You can mix and match, too.

- the syntax is also pretty flexible, c-ish or javascript-ish.

- the IDE has a lot of nice integrated features, like being able to whip up sprites directly in there. Good for rapid prototypes and removing context switching.

- the most challenging part has been learning the command set. The old "I know what I want to do, just not the magic words to make it happen". Online tutorials seem to cover a lot of the same ground, and the help is good but verbose enough that searching for simple terms related to what you want to do can return more results than is feasible to weed through.

- for me, the most difficult portion is in debugging code, especially if it's and asset I haven't written (there's a marketplace where I've purchased things to learn from or speed up prototyping). There's no good way to view all the code from objects/events in one place, so trying to find where a variable is getting set can be a bit of hunting. I find myself using Agent Ransack to find all instances of a given text within my project. This can be mitigated somewhat by coding style, consistency, and naming conventions, but I find as a project grows in complexity it becomes more of an issue. For a simple example, I had a pong prototype where I was increasing the puck speed every time it bounced off a paddle. But should the code for that be on the puck's collision event with a paddle, or a paddle's collision event with a puck?

Overall, I'm very happy with my choice. I think in the first week of owning it I was able to recreate (at least to a prorotype level, if not more) almost all of my previous game projects. Literally years of work in various languages.

As a final remark, I had stayed away from GameMaker in the past due to the name. Sounded like it was more of a toy than a usable environment. I wont't make that mistake again :) Check out their website to see some of the games made in it. You might be surprised, I know I was.

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