The creation of a game from scratch on a live stream

[DanZaidan]

Hello everybody!

A little background: after 3.5 years developing a single game (my first commercial game) and releasing it to the PC and PS4, I realized I didn't actually know programming. I started off by just visually connecting nodes in Unreal and by the time the game demanded some C++ to integrate the console SDKs with the FMOD middleware and all sorts of crazy stuff, I desperately searched the internet, asked a ton of people and tried-and-error'ed my way into release. I decided to take a step back and learn programming for real.

I learned C and C++, game engine programming, low level and high level code. I really fell in love with it.

Professionally, I had an opportunity and ended up leaving the indie games industry; so I could do whatever project I wanted in my free time, no need to earn money with that.

Since I was really enjoying writing games from scratch, I decided to focus on that. After a couple of games (and inspired by other programming live streams) I decided to make an entire game, in C, from scratch, on a live stream.

It's been a great experience, although it is pretty hard and there is a certain pressure do to everything as fast as I can, to get tangible results. But that is a valuable skill to learn. I'm also improving my English skills, and my attention skills (I have two seconds to glance at chat to see if there is anything there while the program compiles, all the while not forgetting what I am doing).

The game is coming along pretty nicely. As of this writing, I have live streamed 16 times, and they last anywhere from 2.5h to 4h.

Here is the progress of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6U4m5_92E


The idea was to start with a simple Breakout clone, but expand on the gameplay idea: what if all other arcade games were based on Breakout?



You can watch the whole development process, learning not only the actual programming to get the game going starting off with a blank files and no libraries, but also some of the design decisions and the experimentation with the failed ideas (there were already a few).

Here is the link to my Youtube channel for you to watch the live streams:

https://www.youtube.com/DanZaidan

For the people short on time, I have created a Highlights video showing the main moments of the first few live streams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKWrGbSBZ_8

The game (and its entire source code) is available for free on itchio: danzaidan.itch.io



I hope you find this interesting.

Let me know if you enjoyed it, or have any questions.

Thanks,

Dan Zaidan

[Albatross]

Oooh, neat! I will say that the hard dependency on WinAPI is a bit off-putting to those of us not on Windows, but all well.

What are your plans for your game going forward?

-Albatross

[mbozzi]

I see you took some inspiration from Casey Muratori?

[DanZaidan]

@Albatross Thanks! Yeah, I'm using the Win32 API for the platform layer but the structure makes it really easy to follow along on other platforms. All you have to do is your own platform file (like linux_platform.c) and have it prove the game with a texture buffer to draw on, input and call simulate_game(). Then you compile your own file. Let me know if you try to make your own platform layer to follow along :)

@mbozzi Absolutely! Casey's Handmade Hero (handmadehero.org) taught me A LOT and I'm super inspired! :) My version is supposed to have a way smaller scope, so the game can be released in something like 25 streams and also be more beginner-friendly, by requiring less hours of dedication, for instance, and showing a little more gameplay stuff.