Game Development

May 11, 2025

Module 1: Intro on Game Dev

So, I’m sure we’ve all played games at some point in our lives. From the classic Snake game to League of Legends, games are very popular. Those colourful worlds, interesting characters, all of that is actually made by lines and lines of code, working together behind the scenes to render those games to you.

At their core, games are structured forms of play that are designed for fun, challenge, and interaction. Whether you’re solving a puzzle, defeating a dragon, or building your dream city, games give us goals to chase and rules to follow, all while keeping us entertained. Here, we’ll talk about games, but in a different way. We’ll learn what makes these games run and how you can create your own world of wonders! Yes, we’re gonna talk about game development.

Game Dev – Creating Worlds From Scratch!

Game development is the entire process of making a game. Right from thinking of an idea to creating a finished product. There are many parts to it, like:

Designing – this is where you decide how the game works, the rules, story, and every detail that makes it exciting and unique.
Programming – here is the tedious part, writing huge pieces of code, optimizing them to run without any errors, creating movement, collision, etcetera.
Art and Animation – what is a game without visual aspects? This is where you’ll decide how your characters look, how they move, fight and all those.
Sound and Music – any good game needs proper sound and music. From how the leaves will rustle to the swings of swords, from the chaos of a mob to the serene melody at a safe point, all that must be chosen properly.
Testing – this is the final phase before you release your game. Here, you test for bugs, check for compatibility issues, and give your game to a small group of players for feedback.

Genres – Which one’s your fav?

Any form of art has categories and sub-categories – genres, if you will. Let’s go over a few main ones:

Action – these comprise of quick reflexes and fast gameplay. They usually combine a bunch of running, jumping, fighting and/or shooting, and dodging. Some good examples are the Call of Duty series, THE FINALS, Escape from Tarkov and Mortal Kombat.

Adventure – these focus on the plot, exploration and discovery. You usually play as a character journeying through a lore-rich world. Good games in this genre include Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Until Dawn, Detroit: Become Human, Death Stranding and others.

Puzzle – here, brainpower matters the most. These games challenge your thinking, and after beating the levels, you’re not hit with any dopamine rush, but a sweet, relaxing feeling. A few I’d recommend are Portal, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and Limbo.

Role-playing – these games allow you to live a story through a character’s POV. Usually, you get stronger through quests, battles and levelling up. This is my favourite genre and includes games like Elden Ring, the Witcher series, Baldur’s Gate 3, Skyrim and more.

Sports and Racing – these titles are for those who either can’t bear to stay away from their favourite outdoor activities, or love imagining how they would’ve performed if they were in their favourite player’s body. For example, FIFA, PES, Forza Horizon, and others.

Simulation and Sandbox – if you like creating or managing something, like a farm, city or even a life, this genre is for you. Perks are freedom to play your way, creativity, and long-term goals. Games include Minecraft, The Sims series, the Civilization series, etcetera.

Horror and Survival – these are all about tension, atmosphere and staying alive in difficult situations. Usually, you are running from somebody or something. Coupled with great ambient sounds and background music, horror games are best played at night with all lights off. Famous games are the Resident Evil series, the Outlast series, the SILENT HILL series, and more.

Platformers – in platformers, you gotta jump across platforms and avoid obstacles to reach the end. What makes them fun? Tight controls, satisfying level design, and classic gameplay. Some I’d recommend are Super Mario Bros., Celeste, and Ori and the Blind Forest.

No game consists of just one genre, though. They’re all a mix of different genres and subgenres. Like, my favourite game, Elden Ring, is an action souls-like open-world RPG. It combines great lore with equally great combat and difficulty, and that’s what all developers should be focused on recreating. Not the game, of course, but this mix. You should be ready to experiment with different genres, like combining horror with, say, sports. Add action, and you’ll have created a nice mess that could very well become the next banger if nurtured carefully. Let’s go through the mechanics of some games, so that you understand how to make something good. We’ll start with Elden Ring.

Elden Ring is developed by FromSoftware, known for its challenging combat and deep lore. Unlike its predecessors, this game offers a massive open world, the Lands Between. You can explore at your own pace, discover hidden dungeons, optional bosses, and breathtaking scenery. You can build your character any way you like – warrior, rogue, sorcerer, healer, or a mix of everything. The game’s attribute system (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, etc.) gives you full control over how your character evolves. There’s a horse you can summon, Torrent, for faster movement.

The combat is unforgiving as usual, dependent on timing and managing your stamina. You can block, dodge, parry, or counterattack. The addition of Ashes of War lets you customize weapons with unique abilities, giving more depth to how you fight. You can also summon spirits to help you fight in certain areas, like mob gatherings and boss arenas. Furthermore, the world changes based on time, weather, and your decisions. Secret areas, NPC quests, and alternate endings encourage multiple playthroughs.

Next, we have THE FINALS. It is a fast-paced, team-based FPS (First-Person Shooter) with a reality show twist. Developed by Embark Studios, it’s not just about shooting – it’s about chaos, creativity, and destruction. The most common mode is Cashout – where teams of three compete to collect money and deposit it in designated vault stations. One of the game’s most defining features is dynamic destruction. Entire buildings can be blown up, floors can be collapsed, and no cover is ever truly safe. This changes how you think about positioning, flanking, and defending.

You can choose from three body types – light (fast and stealthy), medium (balanced, with support tools) and heavy (tankier with high power). From zipline launchers and grappling hooks to goo guns, the game is packed with creative gadgets. You can break windows, launch through ceilings, or trap enemies in debris – combat is as much about learning the environment as it is about aim. Movement is very fluid, with vaulting, sliding and climbing. This encourages you to play aggressively. On top of that, everything happens in a flashy virtual game show. There’s commentary, crowd reactions, and even visual sponsorships, giving it a unique identity among competitive shooters.

Let’s talk about Minecraft now. I’m sure you’ve all heard about it. It is the ultimate sandbox game, letting you build, explore, and survive in a blocky, procedurally generated world. Developed by Mojang, every Minecraft world is randomly generated. From snowy mountains to lush jungles, each terrain is made up of biomes. In these worlds, everything is made of blocks that you can mine, craft and place together to make anything your imagination permits, from houses to cities to even planets and universes. Speaking of things you can craft, there are bows, pickaxes, swords, shovels, potions and more.

There are two modes – survival and creative. Survival is where you kill mobs, mine, collect items, and defeat the ender dragon to win. Creative is where you already have all the blocks, so you focus on making whatever you wish. Combat is simple, yet strategic. You use swords, bows, shields, and potions. The thing which makes this game stand out though is redstone. You can build working machines, traps, and logic circuits – from automatic farms to secret doors, from calculators to entire basic computers. It adds a layer of engineering that appeals to coders. All that and the mods make this game truly enjoyable.

Let’s spice things up a little bit, with Resident Evil, one of the best survival horror series in gaming. The early games defined a new genre, with limited ammo, small spaces, fixed camera angles, and resource management. Every bullet counted, and healing items are rare, forcing you to consider every encounter carefully. The series also includes environmental puzzles, like locked doors needing emblems, cryptic notes, item combinations, and backtracking through eerie mansions or labs. From classic zombies to mutated bioweapons like the Tyrant, Nemesis, or the terrifying Regenerators, Resident Evil games mix slow-moving horrors with aggressive, unpredictable threats.

The inventory is limited too, so you have to think about which items you absolutely need. You have to choose between health, weapons, and puzzle items. This adds to the survival element. Modern titles, like Resident Evil 4 and its successors, made combat more fluid and enhanced the intelligence of the enemy AI. From shadowy corporations like Umbrella to morally grey characters, the lore is rich and interconnected. The series thrives on mood – dark corridors, sudden music stings, and unsettling quiet moments that make you jump at shadows.

The next game is a gem in the platformer genre, Celeste. Developed by Maddy Makes Games, is a pixel-perfect platformer where you play as Madeline, a young woman climbing the Celeste Mountain. The game is built around pretty simple movement, jump, mid-air dash, wall climb and wall jump. But the way these have to be used is the key here. Levels are designed to test your mastery of timing, rhythm, and creativity. Each chapter introduces new mechanics, like wind, moving platforms, and even gravity-reversing bubbles. Though the learning curve is smooth, it is also unforgiving, focussing mainly on trial and error.

You’ll die a lot in Celeste. The game instantly respawns you at the start of the screen, encouraging players to learn through repetition without frustration. This prevents death from feeling like a punishment. Throughout the levels, you also find strawberries for bragging rights, and optional challenge rooms for those who feel like pros. Then, there are the hard versions for the players who just can’t get enough of this game. The game also features a theme based on mental health. Madeline’s inner struggles are reflected in the game’s mechanics and story moments – creating an emotional connection rarely seen in platformers.

Let’s wrap things up with one last game – FIFA. Developed by EA Sports, it is one of the most popular sports video game franchises ever. It brings the world’s most beloved game, football, to your screens through realistic graphics, gameplay and team dynamics. At its heart, FIFA is about controlling a team of 11 players to score more goals than your opponent. You can pass, shoot, dribble, tackle, cross, and even perform skill moves – all with fluid animations and responsive controls. There are multiple game modes, like Kick-Off (quick matches), Career Mode (single-player, against AI), and more.

Each player has attributes that affect performance, like Pace, Shooting, Passing, etcetera. There’s also something called team chemistry that boosts your player’s stats if they have teammates from the same club, country or league. This makes team-building just as important as playing skilfully. You can choose formations, adjust tactics, or even issue instructions, which makes the games feel like a chess match. Furthermore, the recent titles also use advanced AI to simulate real-world behaviours. Players make realistic runs, goalkeepers react dynamically, and ball physics ensure each shot or pass feels unique.

What was my point in writing about these games? So that you understand what makes these games stand out, gain inspiration and think about how you can make the next big game. Big in its vision, not size, of course. Game development can be tedious, especially when writing huge lines of code, but when you see your finished product being played by others, all that trouble will be worth it. With that, let’s begin this course of game dev. After reading this, I’d like you to do something. Comment down below what is your favourite game, and why.

March 9, 2025

Game Dev Reference #2: Building a Snake Game in Python

Sloth Game Development

Last time, I had built a Tetris game in Python, and now I’m back with another classic… Snake. The movement turned out kind of funny, so make sure to check it out after reading this blog. I included the link at the end of this. This was just my second time making a game, so I know there can be lots of improvements. If you have any suggestions to make the animation look better or add something like power-ups, comment them below and I’ll update the code.

Sup gamers, Sloth here, and if you haven’t guessed already, today I’m gonna talk about my experience making a snake game in Python. So, a week after my Tetris blog, Reaper was back with another project for me. At first, he told me to think of a game and I chose a text RPG. You know, like the Epic RPG in Discord. Of course, mine would focus more on different abilities and weapon types and all, so I figured it will go more than a thousand lines. I think Reaper realized I was gonna procrastinate like anything during this. Why else would he tell me to make something incredibly easy like Snake?… Well, that was what I’d thought before I found it was more complicated than I’d given it credit for.

Game Dev Reference #2: Building a Snake Game in Python

Let’s start with the logic first. I would need to create a game window, then display the snake and food. Of course, the snake can be a line of blocks and the food a circle. I would have to update the screen continuously so the snake moves in the direction of the last key input without stopping. The directions would be left, right, up and down. I also needed to make sure that the snake couldn’t turn right when it was moving left and such. I could store the body positions of the snake in a tuple list. Then, I gotta make the tail and the rest of the body follow the head. That should do it for the movement. Next, I should grow a new segment at its tail whenever it collides with the food. Such collisions should also make the food respawn randomly in any part of the screen that is not inhabited by the snake’s body. Oh, and the score will increase by ten.

Now, there are two versions of the classic snake game. One is where if the snake hits a border of the screen, it dies. It seemed kinda basic, so I went with the other one. That is, if the snake collides with one side of the border, it comes out of the opposite side. So, if the snake hits the left side of the screen, it’s head and then the rest of its body appear to go inside the left end and come out of the right. As if there was a portal or something. Next, I had to give it haphephobia or the fear of being touched, sometimes even by oneself (yeah, I googled it while writing this). Basically, the game restarts when it touches itself. Technically, this keeps the game running infinitely, unless you close the window. Basically, it translates to me being too lazy to write a restart window. By the time the reel will be out, I’ll have added one though.

The modules I needed were pygame (for creating the screen, detecting key presses, changing the screen after a certain time period), math (for adding a slight curve to the movement, since nobody likes a snake that moves straight) and random (for the food). Since I started making games (I know I made only two, but hear me out), I’ve been really impressed by pygame. It has so many options, you can customize it in so many different ways. But of course, I know big 3D games can’t be designed with it. Such a shame! First, I set up the game window. I made it 600 by 400 pixels, with each block having 20 pixels. I set up the clock and fps to ten. Remember this, for this was my major mistake.

Then, I drew the snake. It had a circular green head, two black eyes, a tongue that flickered every few seconds and three blocks at the beginning. The first mistake I made was I had drawn the tongue outside the circular head using pygame.draw.line(), and since pygame.draw.circle() doesn’t clear pixels, this made the head look like a square when the tongue flickered. I changed the code accordingly, and I could see the snake of three blocks standing idly. Not gonna lie, I felt like a god, creating a creature, giving movement to it. It was the same as when I would create new worlds in my stories. I guess, that’s why it’s called development.

For the movement, I added a variable called direction, and then I added another one called change_to. This was for storing the direction the snake would move when an arrow key was pressed. Then I added some conditions which prevented the snake from going reverse of how it had been moving previously. The way I gave it movement was, I added a new snake head at the next box after each frame then moved the rest of the body in that direction. Like this, I made the movement continuous.

Next was food, and the snake’s growth. The food was an yellow circle (not creative, I know). The logic here was that if the coordinates of the snake’s head matched the coordinates of the food, the food disappeared and the program added another green square to the snake’s body along with its forward movement. Or that’s how it seemed. See, the way the movement worked, every frame, the head would be replaced by a new head next to it in the direction of the snake. Then, the previous head will be replaced by a green square and we’ll check if the snake has eaten the food. If not, we remove the last segment of its body, and it will appear to have moved one square forward. Genius, I know.

Lastly, I added the collision system to end the game when it bites itself. I also added a score display. So far, so good. But when I ran the program, the snake just kept on moving right without registering any key input. Now, after some tinkering with code, I discovered the mistake was with the fps. Remember I had set it to ten? I increased it to thirty to make it worked. But that created another problem. The snake was moving too fast. So, I added a delay system to make the snake move every three frames. And there you have it, an infinitely running snake game.

Now, I have added the code to GitHub too so you can copy it and run it in your computers by clicking here. Also, don’t forget to comment if you’d like to see any new games in the future. Moral of the blog? My second game, and I’m feeling more confident than ever. So long, peeps. Happy procrastinating!

February 9, 2025

Game Dev Reference #1: My First Steps, Designing a Simple Tetris Game in Python

Sloth Game Development

Say, have you guys missed me? I haven’t been posting as many blogs as in the past. I do have a good reason (excuse). I’ve been interested in coding recently. Why? Well, I want to become a… game developer! Shocking, right? So, anyway, this blog is the start of a new series, one where I record how I slowly enter the game dev world AND MAKE IT MINE, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Sup gamers, Sloth here, and if you haven’t guessed already, today I’ll be partly explaining and partly advising how to not procrastinate, but fully bragging about my newly-learnt skill: Coding. The last two months or so, I’ve been coding now and then, so Reaper gave me a project out of nowhere. Make a basic game in Python. Now, you may know about game development. It involves creating a game from scratch and maintaining it. Now there are many stages to it. You first come up with a game plot, the characters, how it will be played, and more. Then, you create the game environments, characters and other visual assets. These are usually done by game engines and 3D software. After that, comes sound. This includes background music, character dialogues, fighting noises, if any, and others. Next, you write the code that brings all these together and create something that’s worthy of being called a game. Of course, you need to test your game and ensure its free of bugs and glitches. Finally, you release it to the platforms you want, and start promoting it.

So, as you can see, it’s a lot of work. Was I doing all this? Nah, I was said to create a game of Tetris, nothing else. And if you follow our YouTube and Instagram accounts, you’ve already seen how fast I was typing. Since this was a personal project, I didn’t give any comments or gaps, and the code was 122 lines. And it took me around 2 hours, heh. My genius is frightening.

Let’s start from the beginning. The coding I was doing was not related to game development so I had to research and learn many things. Here’s the way I thought of solving the problem. First, I create a game board to display the tetrominoes. I create a grid, where each cell will either be empty or contain a block. This information can be stored in a 2D grid, with 0’s corresponding to empty cells and 1’s to filled ones. Then, I design the tetrominoes. This will be easy as the shapes only have like four blocks each. There are seven shapes: I, O, T, L, J, S and Z, and their rotation can be handled by 2D matrices.

Next comes the movement. I need to move down the pieces every few milliseconds. They should also be able to move horizontally and rotate, provided they don’t collide. Which brings us to another important aspect. I need to check if a piece hits the bottom, overlaps with another block, or goes outside the grid. Also, if a piece hits the floor, or if there’s another piece under it, we need to lock it in place. And if a row is filled, it gets cleared and everything below it shifts down. The game-over condition will be if a new piece spawns and immediately collides with another piece.

Game Dev Reference #1: My First Steps, Designing a Simple Tetris Game in Python

I figured I needed four modules for this: pygame (for graphics, input handling and the game loop), random (for piece selection), time (for controlling the game speed), and sys (for smoothly exiting). So, I started by creating a 600×600 window for the game, filled it with black, and ran it at 30 fps so that your potato PC could run it. Next, I created a 20×20 grid, each cell being 30×30 pixels and bordered by grey lines. Yes, I made it square instead of a rectangle. Not only does this add a unique touch, but it also makes the game harder, befitting of a soulsborne player. I used the pygame.draw.rect() command to draw it. I stored this in a function draw_grid().

Then, I defined seven tetromino shapes as lists, assigned colours to them, and stored them in a dictionary for easy access. With that out of the way, I decided to spawn a random tetromino at the top of the grid. For that, I created a class Tetromino that creates a new piece with a random shape and colour. I defined a constructor to initialize a piece when it is created. It picks a random shape, gets the matrix for it, picks the colour and stores its position. And, I made a draw() function to draw the shape on the screen. It loops through the shape’s matrix and draws a solid rectangle wherever it encounters a 1. Next, I had to add movement. So, I added a timer and used pygame.time.get_ticks() to control speed.

I also added a move_down() function to control the vertical movement. The logic behind this was updating the y coordinate. Then, I added a move_horizontal() function that helped you move a shape left and right. To prevent it from going outside the grid, I used if 0<=new_x<=COLS-len(self.shape[0]). And, pygame.KEYDOWN() detected arrow presses.

Next, I added a rotate() function for rotating the pieces whenever I pressed the up arrow key. I used zip(*matrix[::-1]) to rotate the matrix.

Then, I added a grid to track placed blocks and added a check_collision() function to make sure blocks don’t overlap. I also updated the move_down() and rotate() functions to check for collisions, and created lock_piece() to lock the pieces in place as they reach the bottom. After that, it was time for clearing full rows, so I added clear_rows() to clear filled rows and move the blocks above it down by one space. Then, I inserted those cleared rows at the top.

I also added a score variable and a draw_score() to display it with the blit() command. Finally, I added a game over screen that stops the loop and displays when a piece gets locked at the top. After that, you can press R to play again.

That was the breakdown of the code I’ve written. I couldn’t explain all the lines, or the blog would be too long and… let’s face it, boring. I’ll upload the program to GitHub so that you can download it by clicking here. Have fun playing it, coz it’s harder than your typical Tetris game. Moral of the blog? THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING. I’LL TAKE OVER THE GAMING INDUSTRY ONE DAY. So long, peeps. Happy procrastinating!