Wilker

Wilker, 6 miesięcy temu

the indie space still has a ton of stuff. you lose the benefit of always having accessibility features and easy ui navigation depending on the game (although a ton of indie games have better modding and accessibility support than a lot of high budget games as of recently, just in case they come to be interested), but you still get to see a ton of different stuff.

• Celeste
• OneShot
• Rythm Doctor
• Terraria (has android ver.)
• A Dance Of Fire And Ice (has android ver.)
• MiniMetro (has android ver.)
• ShatteredPixelDungeon (has android ver.)
• StuntRally
• Mindustry (has android ver.)
• HyperRogue (has android ver.)
• SuperMeatBoy
• Don’t Starve
• Undertale/Deltarune (have unofficial android ver.)
• Sky Rogue
• SuperTuxKart (has android ver.)

most of these without coming close to Nintendo’s approach to fan works, so i’d say you’re not going to lose much if you know the right places.

if you want games for Android, Mitch is a third-party access to itch.io, a game store where you can by the game and get the game straight into a zip file or what-have-you. no DRM, no questions asked. about half the games i mentioned are in there without the predatory behavior most of the time.

Wilker, 6 miesięcy temu

i’d probably pick MiniMetro and simple rythm games like ADOFAI or Rythm Doctor to begin with, simple shapes and an obvious thing to learn to do.

MineTest (has android ver.) and StuntRally are pretty close to reach if you’re willing to be patient and teach them to explore an open space on their own or of their own (one is basically a sandbox engine like Garry’s Mod, the other has a map editor alongside the several open maps). takes a while to understand the UI of each but it’s possible to use.

Celeste is notoriously difficult regardless of age, as a platformer about climbing a mountain, but i’m sure they can grasp it (no pun intended).

non-game programs are also an option. i remember having my mom teach me to use MSPowerPoint which made me break and build a ton of things later on by the time i was 7, it was a mess, but i made that mess :3
try an art program like Pencil2D, Krita or InkScape, maybe something unrelated like LibreOffice Impress or KDE Marble, or a music program like MilkyTracker (has android ver.) and take your time to teach them to make a tune or a flipbook or navigate a map, i’m sure they’ll have fun with something like it too.

Wilker, rok temu

the tracking of pirated copies is even more fucked up. is that their way of imposing that “piracy = stealing”?

Wilker, rok temu

the “just don’t do it” argument ignores the problem. it’s like replying “just don’t buy Apple products” to people complaining about right to repair. the key part is that regular people won’t know beforehand until they need to notice. by that point, it’s profitable enough to show other companies like Samsung and Motorolla that restrictions are profitable, so jumping around brands will also never work when the intention is to have your phone for a long time.

back in the context of game dev, add that to the part where not only people don’t anticipate the retroactive changes of a license they have to rely on when choosing an engine, but there’s the added weight of having to learn an entirely new library and oftentimes even an entire new programming language, so you have to commit to it if you want to make a commercial product or else you risk losing literal years of development just from rewriting the same thing over and over.

not to say that there’s a reason why a lot of people chose Unity. Godot may be in development since 2014 but they are still relatively new in popularity. not only they have less total instructions resources from the community due to it obviously being smaller than Unity’s, but people also look for already known games as one of the first factors when choosing something, which is something Godot is still catching up on. knowing legal jargon to even comprehend the difference between free and proprietary is the least of their worries when someone wants to jump into game development and build stuff with it.

Wilker, rok temu

it’s typically just a kind of pixel art with monospaced fonts¹. any characters you see that’s not typically shown on your keyboard (e.g a filled square) can be found in a character selection program in your OS. anything else related to texts, templating and line breaks you can probably find a program somewhere on places like crates.io or gitlab or write something of your own without much trouble.

¹ a monospaced font is a font where every letter and character has the same spacing from each other, and are the easiest to do ascii art. (ascii is just one character table, but you can also gather unicode chars all you want)