/r/TheMakingOfGames

Photograph via snooOG

This subreddit is about the creation of our favourite games. Whether it's 'the making of', a presentation, podcast, concept art, or other 'behind the scenes' content, this is the place!

This subreddit is about the creation of our favourite games. Whether it's 'the making of', a presentation, podcast, concept art, or other 'behind the scenes' content, this is the place!

Alphabetical listing of all submissions

GENERAL SPOILER WARNING!

Assume all content contains spoilers.

SUBMISSION RULES

  1. Please adhere to the format. E.g. "[Pacman] - Lecture"

  2. No off-topic promotional material. Do not post announcements, trailers, questionnaires or other material that does not cover any process of how some aspect of the game was made. However, on-topic self-promotion is encouraged :)

  3. This is not r/devblogs. On-topic content describes HOW and/or WHY some feature of a game was made. Not just THAT it was made.

  4. This is not r/gamedev. Do not post tutorials that explain game dev in general and are not focused on how some SPECIFIC game was made.

  5. Please label unusual content. Most content is expected to be short videos. Please give long videos [1 hr 30 min]-style labels. Please label [audio] recordings and [text] / [PDF] articles. Also, noting [CC] for closed captioning would be appreciated by our hearing impaired audience.

RELATED SUBREDDITS:

Video Game History - Discussions, articles, interviews and documentaries related to Video Game History

GameDev - Discussion of game development including programming, art, audio, and business.

Video Game Science - Anything from UI design, game engine physics, how components were made, and anything else science-y in video games.

GameDesign - For topics related to the design of rule sets for interactive entertainment systems including video games, board games, and tabletop RPGs.

TheMakingOf - The movie version of this subreddit. Behind the scenes footage, interviews and making of documentaries for films.

Games - Gaming content and discussion.

GamerNews - Video game news.

IndieGaming - A focus on indie games.

DidYouKnowGaming - Game trivia.

GamePR - Gaming public relations and news.

/r/TheMakingOfGames

25,437 Subscribers

4

DevGAMM Game Conference is coming to Gdańsk, Poland, on February 27-28, 2025.

1 Comment
2025/01/31
11:16 UTC

2

The Tragic History of Dead to Rights 2 Nobody Knows About

0 Comments
2025/01/30
19:10 UTC

12

GMTK Game Jam 2024 - YouTuber JimmyGameDev shows the process of developing his game jam entry that won GMTK 2024 [25 min]

1 Comment
2025/01/23
17:55 UTC

1

Dead to Rights History: The Birth of a Cult Classic

0 Comments
2025/01/23
15:12 UTC

24

Starship Troopers: Extermination - Offworld developers' talk on how they implemented piles of corpses that the player can walk on, instead of the corpses disappearing like in most games [41 min]

1 Comment
2025/01/09
14:09 UTC

4

Photos From Fallout Development (1994-1997)

0 Comments
2025/01/03
17:17 UTC

10

Kill.Switch: The Untold History Behind the Game That Inspired Gears of War

0 Comments
2024/12/30
00:49 UTC

3

A Conversation with Yves Borckmans (Jedi Knight / Mysteries of the Sith / Starcraft: Ghost / DFUSE)

0 Comments
2024/12/29
19:25 UTC

9

Edmund McMillen - Creator of Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac is interviewed on the Thomas Brush podcast about indie game development in 2025 [1 hr 22 min]

2 Comments
2024/12/22
20:54 UTC

3

A Conversation with Greg Hammond (Loom / The Secret of Monkey Island / X-Wing / Night Shift)

0 Comments
2024/12/22
20:11 UTC

3

Interview with Louis Castle - Stories behind the Lion King, Blade Runner, Command and Conquer, and Monopoly [2 h]

0 Comments
2024/12/20
14:03 UTC

3

Tom and Tony Cannon - Interview with the two brothers who created the Evo fighting tournament, GGPO rollback middleware, and the upcoming Riot Games fighting title 2XKO [55 min]

1 Comment
2024/12/19
16:31 UTC

4

PlayStation 5 - Digital Foundry interview of Mark Cerny and Insomniac's Director of Technology Mike Fitzgerald on the Pro model [28 min]

1 Comment
2024/12/18
23:38 UTC

0

PlayStation 5 - technical talk on the details of the Pro model by Mark Cerny [37 min]

0 Comments
2024/12/18
23:36 UTC

11

How I invented a new type of word game and built and web based game for it.

Play it here https://wordglyph.xyz

Wordglyph is a word guessing game where you build letters stick by sticks to find the hidden word using the least amount of sticks.

The origin of the idea came around 14 years ago. I wondered if it was possible to come up with a board game like chess but with words. The best concept I had was creating an alphabet made of segments. Each player thinks of a word. Then each player would take a turn to try to create their word stick by stick. But they eventually end up blocking each other, forcing them to come up with another word. The one with the longest word eventually wins by stumping the other player. I made the board game version and it was fun to play so then I coded it to play on FB where you could play against other people and play against the computer. Back then Flash was the thing to use. Thank goodness it died. It sucked. But also back then FB authentication kept changing, seriously like every week, which drove me crazy, constantly breaking the game. The game was not getting traction so I shut it down. Honestly, looking back it was way to complicated. Here was the video I made 14 years ago aloft how to play it. https://youtu.be/C4WbLYLTEDk?si=s0Hfn6e1Dg0lm8hf

Then when Wordle got popular I thought about my game again wondering how I could make it a single player word guessing game. But I didnt act on the idea cause I was involved several other projects. Then about a month ago there was suddenly time and I started.

At first, I tried to use AI to bootstrap the game from pictures of the board game. It couldn't do it. I tried to describe the game in detail but it failed to make the matrices. So I had to get the basic matrices working myself. I started super simple. Literally a rectangular box clicking on and off. Then I made css to angle it. And then made an array of them. Then I came up with an array of the different sticks and numbered them and assigning them to each letter postion.

Once I had basic set up of the 10 segments angled in a box I showed AI my code and then it finally understood what I was doing and it helped out. Claude was certainly better than openai. I will also say that currently there is no way someone who does not know how to code could have made this game just with AI. So many times I'd have to figure out the issue and tell AI why and then it'd say "I see the issue now." It would get stuck in a pit of logic mess. Often times it would try to solve a bug in a convoluted way. And I'd see what really was going on and say why not just do this and it would always reply "Your right the simpler approach is much better!"

I started with just a desktop version to test. The first version of the game wasn't phone friendly. So I had to figure out a better design. And then I came up with the big matrix controlling the small ones. The next challenge was scoring. The original scoring wasn't working well. It was very hard to score "high" (less sticks is better) because of all the random guesses were crushing the score, especially that first letter. The better I got at playing the game the more unused sticks I would have. And I thought you should get credit for that. And then it dawned on me that the unused sticks should erase the guesses and suddenly it all balanced out and felt right!

The next issue was the word list. I started with only 500 words that I asked chat to come up with. It did a great job. But then when I wanted to create all the common 6-letter words it failed. It just would not create a large list of words. At one point it literally created a csv file full of 6-letter gibberish.

At that point I realized I had to read thru all 23k 6-letter words. I already had the list of all the Scrabble dictionaries combined from when I did the project 14 years ago.

It took a week for me and some family members to go thru all the 23k words taking out obscure words. Interestingly, there are only about 4k out of the 23k that are common words.

I also made a custom font of the alphabet so I could just use CSS to change colors and have my ranking system in the wordglyph font.

The final thing I had to consider was hosting. I picked cloudflare pages because it's free unlimited static pages served! And you get 100k request per day of a worker thread. In my case a worker thread is retrieving the word. The only reason I used a worker thread is because I didn't want to server all the words in the page.

Making sure it worked on all devices was a challenge. A couple people told me it wouldn't load on their older iphone's in Safari. And I couldn't figure it out until I realized that AI used a .? pattern in one line from JavaScript Engine ES8+. I changed that to older es6 and it worked on their phones.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

3 Comments
2024/12/14
20:40 UTC

10

NES Ghosts 'n Goblins, 60 fps, and Micronics' Bloated Sprite Engine - Behind the Code

0 Comments
2024/12/13
19:27 UTC

2

How consoles get “made”…or sometimes DONT

0 Comments
2024/12/13
13:36 UTC

8

The Unknown History of Altered Beast Remake

0 Comments
2024/12/08
20:50 UTC

5

A Conversation with Vince Lee (Star Wars: Rebel Assault / Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire)

0 Comments
2024/12/08
19:40 UTC

33

RollerCoaster Tycoon was the last of its kind. | Ahoy

2 Comments
2024/12/06
18:43 UTC

22

The making of Terraria mobile (12M+ sold; I was the product lead 10 years ago)

0 Comments
2024/12/06
18:09 UTC

17

Monster Hunter Wilds Motion Capture at Capcom's Studio

0 Comments
2024/12/06
00:28 UTC

10

How I created Quizmoji, a daily puzzle game, in an afternoon

My family has a big group text where we send each other daily results for NYT Wordle and Connections. It’s a nice way to come together a little bit every day. Earlier this year I was on paternity leave from work and had an inspiration for a similar game while playing these daily puzzles. I know Wordle clones are a dime a dozen, but it’s not exactly a clone. The game is called Quizmoji. It’s a game where you get crossword style clues that are answered with clever combinations of emojis. I tested the game concept by mocking up puzzles in Google Docs and sending them to the family group chat. People seemed to like it. I made a handful of these puzzles but then had to resume my day job and lost focus on it.

Here’s how the game works: Each day, a new puzzle is displayed to the user. There are 5 clues and a tray of 10 emojis. Each clue is answered by exactly 2 emojis. For example, if the clue is “When days seem to go by quickly” the answer might be ⏲️✈️ or “Time flies.” I try to handcraft each puzzle so that there are interesting elements of misdirection or interesting themes.

A couple weeks ago I was reinvigorated by the idea, and set my sights on actually getting the game out into the world, and four hours later I had a playable local build. It’s not a complex game, since it’s a casual daily puzzle. Even though I know enough .css, .js, and html to get by, I had ChatGPT o1-Preview crank out the rough structure of everything.

Ideally the puzzle should ultimately be stored in some sort of separate database so that I can manage the puzzle data without making deployments to the website, but for expediency I decided to store them as JSON in a file with the website code. The silver lining is that this minimizes the possibility of retrieval errors and keeps the overall architecture very simple. So the final structure of the game is an html page to hold containers for the game elements and modals, a .css file with all the styling, a JavaScript file for the game logic, and a JavaScript file to house the puzzle data.

However, I knew when I set out that there was a big hurdle to overcome with this game concept. Emojis have their own display characters on different operating systems. In the first implementation, I just had the emoji unicodes stored in the game puzzle data, which got displayed according to the user’s OS. This was less than ideal. The game doesn’t use emojis super literally, and relies on a tight knowledge of the exact appearance of each emoji. So I set out on how to best ensure a consistent user experience regardless of device. The solution I landed on was to import a high quality emoji library as PNG images into the project. Then I could reference these images directly instead of the unicode characters. It adds some bulk to the project, but does ensure a consistent experience.

I did all the development inside VS Code, and used the Live Server plugin, which is a great little tool for testing because it automatically refreshes the screen whenever you make changes to your files.

Once I had added some additional final touches like adding a Wordle-style sharing function, a stats popup, and a How-To-Play modal, I was finally ready to release the game. I had built the puzzles I made earlier in the year for my family into the JSON format that could be read by the game’s Javascript. 

Next I had to figure out deployment. I was already tracking the game on my Github, which I found out integrates nicely with Netlify. At risk of sounding like an ad for Netlify, it was insanely easy to deploy the game to the web with them. I made a production branch for the game in Github, and linked that branch to my project on the Netlify side. Now whenever I push a commit to my production branch, it automatically deploys to the web. The build is usually done in like 15 seconds. Setting up the project in Netlify and purchasing and hooking up the custom domain I wanted with them took like 20 minutes total, and just like that I was up and running.

The next big tasks are marketing and analytics. Netlify has a basic analytics plan that costs $9/m USD, which isn’t ideal since the game isn’t making me money. So I implemented Google Analytics which is as easy as creating an account and copying a code snippet into the site’s header. 

Now that everything is set up and live, I’m creating and deploying two new puzzles per day. This is a sustainable workload that will ensure there is always a new puzzle available every day and build up a backlog of puzzles. Outside of small bug fixes and feature improvements now, this is where the real ongoing work is at. Unfortunately. It’s not just a game I can release into the world and forget about. I’ll have to stay involved with it and create content to keep it alive. So even though the first playable build only took 4 hours of AI-assisted coding time to create, I’ll have to invest brainpower every day into creating good puzzles and hope there are enough people out there in the world who like the game for it to be worth it. I’ve found that while ChatGPT was decent at helping create the website code, it is terrible at creating good creative puzzles, so that all must be done manually.

One of the biggest challenges has been making the game look good on different screen sizes. It’s still not great in some dimensions, but visible and playable. I’ll probably continue to refine the .css media queries over time to maximize the user experience on different devices. But for now, the MVP is good enough!

I hope you enjoyed my dev story here about creating Quizmoji! Feel free to check out the game at www.quizmoji.com and let me know what you think!

3 Comments
2024/12/04
17:01 UTC

0

Jonathan Blow - On the bleak downturn of the gaming industry in 2024 [1 hr 40 min]

16 Comments
2024/11/25
16:37 UTC

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