Posted by huck (etc.) on Sep 06, 2025
hi guys! my past few months since my last update post i made have been almost nothing but developing and playing a space station 14 server. i will talk about this in a later post (hopefully), i am just tired and it's not the focus of this post.
instead, on september 4th, 2025, one of the most hyped-up and long awaited video games in history finally released after years of waiting for the developers to "get around to it": get killed by circles, my game where you dodge circles and eat smaller ones!
it is not much, but it is open source, and i made it in about 6 hours using godot with c#. feel free to check it out!
lately i've been thinking about game developers known for being really effective and prolific at what they do, artists like pippin barr. i've also been thinking about the flash game scene again. i've been revisiting neopets flash games i've played in my childhood in particular, which, when you think about it, didn't really have a lot of substance to them! in fact, "get killed by circles" is pretty much a recreation of a neopets flash game. i rewatched part of jmtb02's "The Flash Games Postmortem". i bitched a little about the plight of game development on social media, as one does:
Elevating the flash game era on a pedestal as an idyllic creative scene only because I envy their ability to spend 1 week working on a video game and release a fully finished end result
i, like many people i know, have always dreamt of Making Video Games. it's kind of funny because every time someone wants to make a game they'll view it as this task of monumental effort that they also have to make a really grand project in, which moves Game Development from something that is very difficult to something that is impossible.
however, i already am a game developer! just not a solo game developer - i worked (very slightly) on Toontown: Corporate Clash for a couple years, and of course, i have been having a lot of fun developing for a Space Station 14 server lately. as i'm writing this, i have 80 merged pull requests in that server - each one represents a mechanic/bugfix/tweak, or a small collection of them. i think that's been a pretty great experience. it's a lot harder to develop an entire game than it is to add to an existing one, but both are valid forms of game development. and of course, it's a lot easier to develop a game when you have prior development experience!
the thing that finally pushed me to make a game, however, was this awesome video by Terry Ross on making girly games!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFmfT5Pb1hA
i liked this video a lot - i have a lot of respect for someone who makes resources for niche audiences whose ideas and concerns may be overlooked or ignored by other people. i also like this a lot better than other "how to start making games" tutorials i've seen, for a variety of reasons. one of which is the big emphasis of "learn how to make games first before you make the game you want to make" - i feel like gamedev tutorials do not emphasize this enough! i also love that it outlines the design considerations of specific genres that would be of interest to the video's viewers.
i figured (during a bit of heightened emotion) that there really is no time like the present, and making anything is always worthwhile even if it's kind of underwhelming. so i did! i made a game! hopefully the first of more to come.
like i said, it's open source. i decided to do it in C# because space station 14 also uses C#, so it's a lot easier for me to work in a language i'm familiar with than to also learn GDscript on top of learning how to make a video game in general. i imagine there's less godot-C# game examples out there than there are GDscript, so the source code of this game might be of interest to people that go that route.
the part i didn't like about it however was the fact that, like, even the most minimal games using C# are huge. the game i made is over 150MB extracted on both windows and linux, because it has to package all the C# libraries as well, and i find this frankly unacceptable! i've heard that games made with just godot and GDscript are a lot smaller (especially if you tear out parts of the engine you don't need), so this might be the approach i take going forward. or finding an engine that compiles smaller. who knows...