Writing a book on Defold

Yes, everything I posted about before is still intended to be released. I’ll be making a full game tutorial on an infinite jumper pretty soon. After that the plans are a tutorial for a pixel art tile based rpg, and action rpg platformer as far as the interesting full game projects go. The other ones are more focused on technical aspects of certain projects like multiplayer networking. Anything specific you want to see? I could make a focused, mini-remix of most any kind of gameplay mechanic. Over time I’ll be releasing many small cookbook style tutorials focusing on implementing specific subjects. Many are in a state of progress right now.

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Uploaded another chunk on audio. I’m planning a fully featured audio manager as a cookbook tutorial recipe later.

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Working on a few different simple physics examples going through the features. Here is one of them showing applying forces in a direction. This simple example could be developed into a game. Imagine a large maze with a camera that follows the player, moving objects, spikes, and you must control the movement of a character in this kind of tethered rubber band way while avoiding obstacles and collecting points.

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This weekend I’ve been working on some small physics examples, expanding the text on writing your own solvers for the built in physics, and working on two small physics based games which I’ll then write guides on once they are finished. Going to work on that more most of tomorrow and hopefully have some cool things to show.

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Thank you for the hard work! Glad to see more contents being added in every week :slight_smile:

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I’m glad to be able to show my support with my wallet and preorder your book! You’ve inspired me to get cracking on making all those games that keep insisting on getting out of my head to the world :slight_smile:

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Looking forward to the completed book :slight_smile: keep plugging away at it.

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Update on what’s happening:

I apologize about being slow. Have a bunch to do, and trying to responsibly juggle everything. Next chunk will be the physics chapter. I slightly got sidetracked with making additional physics examples… and have produced two complete, but still small games (actually three - a testament to the productivity enabled by Defold, but the third is not physics based). The basic ideas could be remixed to produce a number of original, compelling games. I’ll be uploading guides for making each of them, and at least one of them want to have hosted in the tutorial section here. Right now in my normal work we’re about a week away from finishing a big project and I will be focusing on that about until the end of this month, and then will get these next few things up! Lots more I want to do!

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Heya Pkeod, how’s the progress coming along if you don’t mind me asking.

Still need to add PlayFab features to one of the game examples, and then will upload another chunk update. Regular work game is still being polished more… optimizing for mobile so it runs well on more devices.

Now that the PlayFab SDK files for Defold were made available today, I’ve been testing the various features, and will be implementing the ones the game needs soon. Player ID creation, and syncing game data with the online service automatically, entering player IDs in multiple clients so that players can play their game on for example their PC and phone on the same game save file. A big and important reason to have a service like this built into your game is if you have any IAP, you need a way for player’s to recover their games if they lose their devices or they fail, keeping it safe online means more happier customers and other users.

It’s a really nice service good to pair with Defold for productivity, and it’s easy to use! There’s still room and reason for making your own game services, but if the scope of your project can work within something like PlayFab you absolutely should use it first. You can (pretty sure) export your player data to your own service later if you need to.

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Interesting! Will there also be a physical copy?

Once the full text is finished, I will ask a few of the normal publishers if they would like to print a physical form. No guarantees about physical copy.

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This sounds nice, I’ll buy it for sure. About examples- one thing I often lack in tutorials and books about game development ( I’ve tried a lot of them during my years) is turnbased/boardgame examples. It would be nice to put one of them in since that’s a different type of game mechanic.

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Any specific kind of game you are thinking of?

Remember Redhook’s Revenge in DOS? Something like that?

Ah, good ol days… Not thinking of anything specific actually, anything that’s not an actiongame with an infinte game loop is interesting I think, wether it be old strategy games from Koei, Monopoly or good old Pirate games.

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I was thinking about it yesterday, most of the game tutorials as said focus on Mario/Flappy Bird - like games. In my world every game should introduce and explain a new concept or game mechanic.
Like turnbased, multiplayer, calling external API’s, saving high scores, timers etc.
So instead of presenting three different kind of platformer/shooters it would be nice to throw in a boardgame, a point 'n click adventure, maybe a card game and other suitable tutorials.

My five cents.

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I agree that full game samples are important. I dislike in game dev learning / starter kits that samples are not well polished, no real playable games that are fun.

I’m working on a bunch of different full (fully playable and trying to be fun with all menus but still minimal) game examples right now. Some of them fit what you want, there is a variety. I’ll post about here when they are ready.

Will for sure add some board game / turn based sim type games to my to do list. I’ve been thinking about doing hotseat base Go (no computer) and Chinese checkers. I bet it would be possible to use the PlayFab service to make turn based games without having to host any extra server stuff yourself. I’ll need to check it out later. There are cheap ways to do it (which are more exploitable) and more secure ways which are less easy for users to cheat, which is important if you want a game to be ran as a service that isn’t griefable/cheated.

Looked at some of the Koei games for SNES and there are some really neat mechanics which are hardly seen in modern popular games. http://snesguide.com/publishers/koei/ Only looked at let’s plays, but will play them later, and posting here as a reminder…

Card game and adventure game are on my todo list already. I’d like to do a dice board game like Redhook’s Revenge too… when I was a kid those kinds of games were one of the first I designed on paper and played with my friends. Basically Snakes and Ladders kind of thing but with more flavor and meta gameplay to make it interesting.

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You certainly have thought about it a lot, I’m sure this will be a great book, it will take time to write about all the different aspects and technics of course but it will be great if you manage to stick to your plan. If you need some help with anything just let me know, I’m a Defold rookie in every way possible but would gladly help with testing and other stuff should you need it (when I’m not buried in Enterprise integration patterns of course… sigh).

KOEI was a favorite on my old amiga, spent my best years mastering “Bandit kings of ancient china”, those glorious days…

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Just grabbed a pre order, looks like you are putting a ton of work into it, hope you can get it published.

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