Slightly off topic, but does anyone have any resources / tips on how to build your own tower defense game with multiplayer? Been deving for a very long time, but game dev feels like a completely different beast.
I just dove into this the last few months working through a Udemy course on building a vampire survivors clone in Godot 4....highly recommend (here is the author talking about it https://youtu.be/Yd-sndQnWIo?si=yWU9WJ2roSVlMzDE). I was amazed by the tooling and had a blast doing it. I'm primarily a backend dev and this scratched a different itch. There appear to be some RTS courses but I can't vouch for them. I would find one that looks interesting and dive in. I typed out all the code and did the steps as he did and feel like I learned a ton. I am still looking to learn more about multiplayer in Godot 4, but I found a few YouTube videos and it doesn't look super complicated, especially if you are not concerned off the bat about cheaters. Additionally I have been following this project (Godot 4 MMO), the code is organized pretty well: https://jdungeon.org/ but very early in development
I feel like mindustry is a great example of just trying something.
If you were to ask this question in a game dev forum, people probably wouldn't recommend you to look at Java and yet mindustry uses Java and made it work.
I guess something along the lines of JavaScript with Websockets would also work really well and you wouldn't have to worry about building for different platforms. Research some options for JS game engines and get cracking (possibly with copilot, it's not too bad at getting one started).
I think it's entirely feasible for you to have a working prototype before the new year rolls around.
Game dev options are huge these days, but Java isn't a bad choice: mature platform, good VM, cross-platform. I would guess javascript is further behind in performance, but with Electron/Cordova, it's a valid cross-platform choice as well. Or one could explore lesser known tools like Haxe. And then there are monolith dev kits like Godot. Heck, even Lua is still around thanks to Roblox. There's so many options!
Web games used to suck, but wasm + webgpu seems like a great combination for reasonable performance while also allowing indie devs a way to avoid forking over 15-30% of their profits to middlemen.
And mindustry does it really well in Java. The game doesn't use much cpu, even on large maps and runs on windows, mac (including apple silicon). Graphics looks good too
The Bedrock edition of Minecraft (XBox, Microsoft store) is in C++. The original is still built with Java and called the Java Edition (unless I missed some big news the past few years)
I'm a game-dev outsider, but I've come to romanticise the idea of creating a tower defense game myself. Ever since Warcraft III it's been one of my favourite genres, but everything I've played in the intervening years seems to fall short of something that leaves me wanting more.
