how to make games

1. I Was Told to Write a Book on Game Development

Today I removed YouTube from the Soosooland platform footer.
Because once people go there, they don’t come back.
If they go to the Game Development Journal, they can see the way back to Soosooland.
But when they go to YouTube, there’s so much fun content that they forget to return to Soosooland.
And the path back to Soosooland becomes hard to find.

Recently, someone suggested I write a book about how to make games.
I’ve already been posting my game development journal on my blog, and I told them that making games isn’t something you can learn just by reading.
You can’t play soccer just by reading a book about it, right?

Still, I thought it might be helpful, so I’ll write something simple.
You just need to try making one, and there’s no need to be scared.
Because if you were building a house or making clothes, you’d need materials and money, but making computer games doesn’t cost anything for materials.
So you can try without any burden.

2. First, I Needed a Game Idea

To make a computer game, you first need an idea.
There’s nothing new in ideas.

Look at Wordle.
Wordle is similar to Hangman. You have to guess the secret word within 6 tries.
Wordle is also similar to the word baseball game. For those curious about the number baseball game, you can try it on Soosooland.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
It tells you whether the letters in the secret word exist, and whether they’re in different positions.
But what’s different about Wordle is that it uses colors instead of SBO (strikes, balls, outs).

Like this, when you mix two or three games and add something uniquely your own, a new game is born.

Band-Aid combined gauze and adhesive tape.
Post-it is paper with glue on it.
Smartphones added cameras to phones.

Once you have an idea, ask if something like that already exists.
I asked Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT.
You can develop your idea further during this questioning process.

3. I Designed the Game Screen

Next, design your game screen.
Write the game name, design the game screen, decide where to put the scoreboard…

One of the harder things when making games is adding NPCs.
You need to study how NPCs think.
For example, in a five-in-a-row game, if the NPC can place 5 stones in a row but your 3 stones are blocking it, you need to tell the NPC where to place its stone first.
If you don’t tell it, it just places stones randomly.

When you log into Claude, it can make a simple game like five-in-a-row within minutes even without upgrading to paid.
(And never buy Claude through resellers at inflated prices. That’s a scam.)
Even with the free version, it can make games like five-in-a-row, but when the code gets longer and you use it a lot, you can upgrade directly from Claude’s screen.

4. Claude Coded, I Tested, and Saved Everything on GitHub

After Claude gives you the code, download a program that can view it, insert the code, and run the game. If you don’t know how to do this, just ask and figure it out.
I used Coder, and people say there are better programs.
But I got used to it, so I didn’t switch.

Test your game and fix anything that doesn’t work well.
I find making games fun, but testing is annoying.
But when I have others test it, they don’t play the way I expected.
So they find bugs, and if users don’t understand how to play the game, I improve the game to make the gameplay more intuitively understandable.

5. It Didn’t Have to Be Perfect from the Start 

You don’t need to make it perfect from the start.There are probably several places where you can upload games, but GitHub is the only one I know. Last year, I uploaded and modified files on GitHub 6,649 times. GitHub keeps everything stored.
I registered the copyright as soon as the game worked, uploaded it to GitHub, and distributed it.
You can fix bugs and improve the game as they come up.
This is just my way, so you can do it however you want based on your personality.
Games like Banished took 10 years to make and release, and now they don’t update it anymore. Interestingly, game enthusiasts are updating it themselves. Anyway, spending 10 years making one game doesn’t work anymore. There are too many people making games. Everyone thinks similarly. I just think of Soosooland as being in beta and keep improving it.

6. There Were Joyful and Challenging Moments 

Claude asked me a few questions, so I’ll write more.
When I first distributed my games, I was proud and bragged to people around me that I made computer games.
When I registered the copyright, I was happy to have the originality of my games recognized.

The hardest bug was Trinkle. I had to draw triangles, but I drew squares, then drew diagonals to make two triangles… then drew another diagonal to make four triangles. I explained to Claude about naming all the points, and how each time you draw a line connecting points, the number of lines you can draw decreases… blah blah blah… And then it was solved.

Among NPCs, making the Numzzleup NPC smart was difficult. Actually, it was Claude who had a hard time, not me.
Normally numbers and operators alternate, but 2π is 2*π, and in √3, the square root is an operator but can be placed at the front, so setting up things like that was difficult. In Moeum Quiz (vowel quiz), getting the double final consonants attached correctly also took many revisions.

7. Now Soosooland Is Played Around the World

Now Soosooland’s games are being played overseas. Looking at where users live, San Jose has many. Suwon-si 33 people, San Jose 29 people, Seongnam-si 29 people, Incheon-si 28 people. San Jose is the center of Silicon Valley in California, USA, where Google, Apple, and Meta headquarters are located. However, it was revealed that they were bots, not people, so I was counting my chickens before they hatched. Did I fool you too?

The actual users are: 2 from Houston, Texas; 2 from Accra, the capital of Ghana; 2 from Buynaksk, Russia; 2 from Inegol, Turkey; 2 from Salt Lake City, Utah; 2 from Boise, the capital of Idaho; 3 from Hanoi, Vietnam; 1 from Marrakesh, Morocco; and 1 from Helsinki, Finland. Marrakesh is a famous tourist destination known as the Red City. I’d love to fly out and meet these users! 🌍 The seeds of Soosooland are spreading far and wide like dandelion fluff. Soosooland’s user base is steadily growing, and my hope is that Soosooland’s games will become classic games like Minesweeper or FreeCell.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I hope this helps people who want to make games, and if you have any questions, leave a comment and I’ll write more later.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

🪄 Dev log originally written in Korean | Translated with Claude

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