Journey Through Coding Growth: From Roots to Branches 🌳

When you start on your game development journey, you are bound to make mistakes, some small, others..not so small.

I will explain this through a tree analogy, the roots, stem, branches and leaves, form the foundations to the more subtle features. I will also talk about AI’s role in this process and how to harness it to your advantage correctly.

The Root – Basics

At the root, or heart of your game is…the gameplay / genre. If you are making an open-world RPG, you need to have roleplay mechanics and excellent combat, if you have none of those, your game is cooked (useless). Because people who play games generally know what to expect from a game in that genre. So make your game seamless and smooth and make sure to cater to the expectations of the audience that will be playing your games. But to make your games have an edge or uniqueness. Like Baldur’s Gate 3, which takes the ideas of DND while solving and gamifying the traditional tabletop adventure game. Making complex interactions like ability checks be seamlessly satisfying yet simple, compared to stopping the game world to roll or re-roll a check that can be tedious or outright frustrating. In simple terms, your game idea or gameplay must be fun and intuitive, as to not infuriate your players.

I wouldn’t recommend applying AI to pick your game/genre direction, as ChatGPT has no creative talent, it can’t understand emotions, but you can. The best way to pick your game idea and genre is by the number of community content you can find or use. Unity has a huge community on YouTube, and you can make whatever you want through its 100+ hours of tutorials. Don’t just copy it into your project and call it a day, but figure out a way to put your own spin on it. For example, there is a Unity platformer tutorial. After you have watched and followed the guide, try to change the gravity’s strength, change the max jump height, maybe you don’t like how you can only travel 10 units horizontally yet 50 units vertically. You CAN change it up, without worrying about how to wield AI to make a good game. 0% AI is needed for this part.

The Stem – Early to Mid Development

The stem of your game development is time management. Needing to handle programming, debugging, optimising and adding new and fresh features takes time. So you would want to not pre-emptively optimise, (premature optimisation, same thing) as there are more important things to do than making a broken feature run faster or more efficiently. Only focus on 2 things at the start, getting new features out and debugging. On the subject of new features, be wary of adding or working on TOO MANY things. Imagine you are building a roguelike and you just want to spam new spells and do cool things or have special effects. JUST add 3-5 and call it a day, if you are working alone, as the more code you write, the more likely to contain bugs or glitches. Just be reasonable with the scope of your project and the features of your game. 

Midway through your game development, you would need to focus more on debugging.

Speaking of debugging, most people (even me) use print(), to check individual blocks of code or the output of a function/method. It can be very time consuming, so use your IDE’s (wherever u code) debugger and breakpoints features to quickly target and find the output and results of a given piece of code. If you use Python, I highly recommend icecream, the icecream python package offers more functionality than your traditional print statement.

• It formats dictionaries to more readable and clean
• Output has syntax highlighting
• And most important of all, instead of typing in print(), you use ic(), which is 60% faster to type.

Okay, now that you have your time management down, you may think about using your friend ChatGPT, or Claude’s 3.5 Sonnet. In my personal experience, Sonnet was superior to ChatGPT except it only offered 30 prompts per day compared to ChatGPT’s 50 prompts per 3 hours. Regardless of which one you use, you need to be careful about what you ask your AI assistant to craft. I suggest using it heavily for:

• Singular or small syntax correction
• Exploring how to implement a new feature or data structure
• Uncovering bugs and issues with your existing code
• Learning and recreating the code from the AI’s thought process (ask it, how it works)

And my favourite, if you are stuck or can not understand a topic, ask it to explain the concept “as if I am 5 years old”. It will work like a charm breaking complex concepts into ‘bite size’ information that is very simple to understand.

The Branches – Endgame Development

The branches, this part of the tree analogy is about the streamlining of the development process. Basically, you have a good idea of what you want to do in the game and you have most of the features laid out. You may not have the full story down (if you are doing a story based game). However, you would have most of the things that were originally planned or you had an interest in testing or experimenting. Through this, you have explored thoroughly what works and what does not. Now what you want to do is maybe add a few more features but not too many. An example of what is enough and what is too much, let’s say you added a new character ability every 5-7 days. Now you only do one ability for every 2-3 weeks of development (of course this can be higher or lower, depending on your development timeline). You want to cut down and see what abilities you might not want to use or are a waste. For example, some abilities might only be used once, putting into question why that is needed in the first place. You might want to nerf some things, well recognising that some abilities, that were cool in theory, are not fun or interesting. Based on that, you need to make changes. 

Meanwhile, you will need to be bug fixing and removing errors and issues from your code. If you are new and inexperienced in the language you are writing, you may gravitate towards employing AI’s help, but in this position, I advise that you seek out an expert or someone who is familiar with the specific programming language. This substantially improves debugging without introducing new issues later down the line, however, if you can’t access such talent or people, you can use AI to do this. But be cautious and do tests, to ensure that no problems emerge and the game doesn’t rear its ugly head. 

The Leaves – Final Touches

The last stage of your game development journey is polishing and getting a community. Like great details of leaves on a tree amplifying its beauty, making it emblematic. For this part, approach your game as if you are a new player, and see what some choke points or weaknesses in your level design or enemies or characters. It is about reaching, PERFECTION, well as close as you can get to that. You can build a small community to gather play testers and get recognition for your ongoing project. There are many ways to do this:

• Make devlog style videos on YouTube.

Getting people to see and interact with your ideas through references and making memes, assures your game and community is viewed by thousands or millions of people around the world.

• Doing live streams on Twitch (or Youtube)

The benefit of doing live streams is that people like to donate to streamers, and you don’t need to stream for long hours. If you don’t want the money, you can just do a developer stream with a donation campaign for a good cause and get attention towards the game that you have poured your blood, sweat and tears into constructing. 

• Giving early access through Patron or Ko-fi

If you need a stream of income to support your game development, I would like to introduce to you, giving early access or extra features through membership on Patreon, Ko-fi or YouTube Membership. Making games is hard work, and if your game flops, well, let’s just not talk about that. But with monthly support, you can offload some of the financial stress of game development, and the best part is that you get a very dedicated fanbase.

• Make a discord server.

Probably the best way to get playtesters, donations through membership and get a wide group of audience, discord has more than 300 million users. You can do events, recruit staff (for free, like moderators/admins), converse with your average players and generally have a great time.

Some resources to check out

While you are adding the final touches, you will need to improve the game’s performance and initiate the optimisation. There are many tutorials on how to do this on most popular game engines:
Unity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtE_7OCp6_I

Godot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhyE6EzrjmI

Unreal 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUxZxQwL3W4

Gamemaker Studio 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlK5zM0xEpo

Thank you for giving me your time and attention, I hope that I have given interesting insight for all aspiring game developers. 

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