I have discovered the world’s best game programming language. And I am almost 100% sure that you will agree with me (at least in principle) once I am done with my little missive for today. Here’s some background: I announced last week that I was going to spend a “week” learning Unity. Upon absorbing all there is to know in tutorial land I would happily launch into game design and in a few days a fascinating little space shooter game (often know lovingly to fans as SHMUP‘s) would emerge for your gaming pleasure.

In this magical fairy land, I would have been able to take time to examine the ins and outs of this fantastic new tool, discover the coding and structure of a Unity project, and debug it enough so that it was playable by people who read my blog. Guess what? (Yes, I know you’ve already guessed long before I even asked.) I crashed and burned. Real Life decided it was not getting its fair share of my attention and proceeded to have its way with my schedule, sleep, and free time. I’m lucky to be here typing to you today relatively unscathed, but no more enlightened about how Unity works than I was last week – except for a little better knowledge of how the UI works. Pfft. No game. NADA.

So, what on earth does this description of game-designus-interruptus have to do with the worlds best game programming language? It’s simple, really. If I had REALLY just wanted to create a simple shump that you could play in your browser in 7+ days I would NOT have touched Unity at all. You see, I know javascript and it’s related technologies very well (this used to be called DHTML but that acronym seems to have fallen out of favor – only with no real replacement other than AJAX and junk, which really only capture a small part of what DHTML could do). With this amassed knowledge of JS, CSS, HTML, and DOM (funny, you pronounce the first 3 by their letters, but the last one is not “DEE OH EMM”, its just “DOM” – anyway…) I very easily could have pulled together a simple shooter that would most likely entertain you for at least 30 seconds or so. You might have even bothered to view source for a few minutes and think to yourself “HMM, I could have done that soooo much better without using a library or even images at all”. or “I could have done this in Ruby in about 10 minutes” or “in Java this would have been trivial”.

All done thinking to yourself? Welcome back. We’ve all be waiting patiently. Except for that guy in that back that had to go pee. We wont wait for him. The point I’m trying to make here is this. The WORLDS BEST GAME PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE is…

the one you already know.

If you really really want to start building games and share them with folks, you need to stop thinking that if only you learned this tool, or understood XAML better, or read that book on complex differential equations, or picked up Erlang over the weekend, that magically you’ll become this super amazing game developer. Instead, you should look at the tools you already know and have. Do you know javascript? Make javascript games. Do you know PHP? For goodness sake make PHP games. The point is so many people place artificial barriers to what they feel like they want to do (which in this case is make games) that they will never get there. If you had to learn how to fly a plane just to go get some french fries, do you think you’ll ever be eating those little hot salty snippets of heaven any time soon? (Looks like that guy is back, anyone else need to pee?)

So, if you REALLY want to make games, stop worrying if its in Ruby or Python or Game Maker or RPG Maker or Flash or even – heaven forbid – Silverlight. Short circuit the loop of “never get it done” and just go make a game. Do something pathetically simple like “click the button to get points”. Something you’d never even show your closest friend in the world. Get that FIRST game out of the way. Do it with the skills you already have. Sure, it will suck, but that’s not the point. It’s the gateway drug to the LSD experience you’ll be having months or years from now when you stuck with it, iterated like crazy, started over a hundred times, and finally created something you can be proud of. In the end, it really wont matter if you wrote it in javascript or C#. The point will be you created something cool that other people can play, and at the end of the day that is what makes you a game designer – not that you learned some hot new game engine in a week.

Or at least that’s what I’m convincing myself to believe. I hope my ramblings will help you decide to go make a game now. I want to see what you can do! I’m going to try again to make my shump, only in lame-o javascript and crappy CSS. Ewww.

Now then, anyone got some french fries? I’m hungry for some reason.

[credits:
@CRWTH - for inspiration for this article. He was the guy who had to go pee. Thanks there, buddy.
@IanSchrieber - has an amazing blog about game design. ]