I got my first taste of game dev making mods for easy to modify games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim or maps for games like Half-Life. For years I was looking into trying to hammer Fallout or Skyrim into the shape of the sort of game I actually wanted to make and eventually moved on to actual engines. UE4's Blueprints scripting made it really easy for me to get my toes wet without having to do any actual writing of code and I've since moved on to using Godot and coding in the very easy to learn GDScript. I feel like modding existing games is a great way to decide if you want to pursue game development further.
Huge thanks for sharing - this is extremely important and you've successfully synthesize why modding / using pre-existing games to experiment with game content gives you an actual path to game development + better understanding game design. I'm especially glad to hear how your transition to blueprints in Unreal Engine 4 was easy. Pinning so others can take note.
@@EdwardLabarcaDev make a follow up. This is worth emphasizing. Whole genres came out of modding and it's been forgotten. Tower Defense and Mobas both came out of the WC3 editor alone. Not to mention all the half life mods, or that half life itself was modded from the Quake 2 engine(iirc). Good development rarely starts from zero.
@@AdobadoFantastico I wouldn't say Half-Life was 'modded' from Quake any more than I would say Blood or Shadow Warrior were 'modded' from Duke Nukem. They were instead built on their respective base engines the same way many games use one of the Unreal Engine versions. Half-Life actually uses such a heavily modified version of the Quake engine that it became its own engine that Valve ended up calling GoldSrc.
@@amstrad00 although I myself appreciate pedantry I think you're missing the forest for the trees here, my dude. My point is many of the best *start* from another game and this goes back to the even the days when much was written from the ground up. Half Life started as a mod. If you think that's underselling it, then you just don't know what modding was back then. This was on the tail end of Direct3D even being a thing, 18 months prior people were still writing their own procedures to get the graphics card to fill the textures into the triangles. The initial launch of Unreal Engine literally couldn't use a graphics card and was limited to software rendering on t he cpu. Valve rewrote the whole engine because making anything substantially different would de facto rewrite the entire codebase. Adding *anything* would basically make it a different engine because the landscape for engine tech was so barebones. "Moddable" at the start of Half Life's development simply meant, "here's the source code, there are some comments, good luck". Modding *after* Half Life still required low level computer interaction for even packing in a map or some custom textures. Making a map was a multistep conversion process involving multiple programs between a map editor like Hammer/J.A.C.K./QuArK and goldsource/quake2. Unreal was the only one back then with an integrated map editor that could change levels on the fly and it was a long ass time before that gave way to the absolutely incredible facilitation of modding as we know it today.
As a reminder: Game engines started off as just plain games, the first one to be openly available to use being Doom shareware, which has provided us with MILIONS of WADs that take the engine in new pathways. This engine then evolved to Quake, which is also a commonly developed engine, which ALSO evolved into GoldSrc, and got replaced by Source, then Source 2, though it had a split between S1 and S2 for the Titanfall series, which then evolved into the engine used in Apex Legends. Contrary to what Epic Games is trying to make you think, the Unreal engine started as a game series too! You have to pretty much don the ol skull and crossbones to play the series at this point, but this engine is iconic. Just remember, game engines spark in the most peculiar of locations. So long as there's a modding scene available, you can get crazy stuff to happen. Fallout, Minecraft, Half Life, and more received and remain to receive Total Conversion Mods, which essentially treat the games as an engine, examples include Gmod, Chinese Minecraft, Fallout London, Counter Strike, Defense of the Ancients. These are all TCMs that completely modify the landscape of these games in new directions, and it is insane. Even games that released AGES ago are magically obtaining insane mods, such as what happened with the Mario 64 source code leak, which now lets us play the series natively on PC for once, and people are making crazy stuff just by using it as an engine!
You brought up a plethora of peak examples and really hit it home with just how important modding is. Your insights are extremely appreciated here and thank you for taking the time to detail the history of famous game engines/mods. Absolutely amazing input, thanks for sharing!
Now that I think about it, playing Super Scribblenauts and Mario Maker probably helped a lot in training me on level design. Not that I'm any good at it yet, but it got most of the utter garbage out.
Hey - great comment and I'm super glad to hear this perspective! Anywhere is a great place to start as long as your intention is to learn, truly understand what works, and get in the habit of applying what you've learned to become better at X-skill. Level design can be commonly learned pretty well with platformers as you've just mentioned - and I would even argue that Mario Maker is a great start for considering 2D level-design choices due to the sheer amount of "readily avaiable and testable options" you can find in the create/editor mode of the game.
Cool video! Speaking from experience, it is also good to consider how well suited the game is for prototyping your specific idea. For example, if you need to do tons of work arounds to get your systems to work in the game you're using as an engine, it might be better to prototype in an actual engine.
@@ThinkWithGames I agree and get exactly where you’re coming from. If anything l’d recommend your approach the most. I would like to say it’s important to identify what your “game idea” would be when using an alt. engine as a first time developer. Regardless, your advice is solid and l’ll make sure to push your message more boldly going forward.
For me, Minecraft and Garry's Mod were the games I used to prototype and play with ideas early on. Minecraft is great for primitive level design; it's a sandbox and building stuff is really easy. Garry's Mod is great for testing out gameplay ideas; thanks to the modding community it takes very little effort to transform how the game plays, making it great for doing rough drafts of experimental gameplay ideas without having to write any code yourself. Both are at the same level in my toolkit as my game engine.
I got my first taste of game dev making mods for easy to modify games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim or maps for games like Half-Life. For years I was looking into trying to hammer Fallout or Skyrim into the shape of the sort of game I actually wanted to make and eventually moved on to actual engines. UE4's Blueprints scripting made it really easy for me to get my toes wet without having to do any actual writing of code and I've since moved on to using Godot and coding in the very easy to learn GDScript. I feel like modding existing games is a great way to decide if you want to pursue game development further.
Huge thanks for sharing - this is extremely important and you've successfully synthesize why modding / using pre-existing games to experiment with game content gives you an actual path to game development + better understanding game design. I'm especially glad to hear how your transition to blueprints in Unreal Engine 4 was easy. Pinning so others can take note.
There is an entirely open source clone of minecraft called minetest, that is designed to be easy to mod.
@@Houshalter This should’ve been mentioned in the video lol - huge thanks for bring this insight to me. I didn’t know such tool existed!
@@EdwardLabarcaDev make a follow up. This is worth emphasizing. Whole genres came out of modding and it's been forgotten. Tower Defense and Mobas both came out of the WC3 editor alone. Not to mention all the half life mods, or that half life itself was modded from the Quake 2 engine(iirc). Good development rarely starts from zero.
@@AdobadoFantastico 🫡🫡🫡 On it, King. Thank you for bringing these great points!
@@AdobadoFantastico I wouldn't say Half-Life was 'modded' from Quake any more than I would say Blood or Shadow Warrior were 'modded' from Duke Nukem. They were instead built on their respective base engines the same way many games use one of the Unreal Engine versions. Half-Life actually uses such a heavily modified version of the Quake engine that it became its own engine that Valve ended up calling GoldSrc.
@@amstrad00 although I myself appreciate pedantry I think you're missing the forest for the trees here, my dude.
My point is many of the best *start* from another game and this goes back to the even the days when much was written from the ground up. Half Life started as a mod. If you think that's underselling it, then you just don't know what modding was back then.
This was on the tail end of Direct3D even being a thing, 18 months prior people were still writing their own procedures to get the graphics card to fill the textures into the triangles. The initial launch of Unreal Engine literally couldn't use a graphics card and was limited to software rendering on t he cpu.
Valve rewrote the whole engine because making anything substantially different would de facto rewrite the entire codebase. Adding *anything* would basically make it a different engine because the landscape for engine tech was so barebones.
"Moddable" at the start of Half Life's development simply meant, "here's the source code, there are some comments, good luck".
Modding *after* Half Life still required low level computer interaction for even packing in a map or some custom textures. Making a map was a multistep conversion process involving multiple programs between a map editor like Hammer/J.A.C.K./QuArK and goldsource/quake2.
Unreal was the only one back then with an integrated map editor that could change levels on the fly and it was a long ass time before that gave way to the absolutely incredible facilitation of modding as we know it today.
As a reminder: Game engines started off as just plain games, the first one to be openly available to use being Doom shareware, which has provided us with MILIONS of WADs that take the engine in new pathways. This engine then evolved to Quake, which is also a commonly developed engine, which ALSO evolved into GoldSrc, and got replaced by Source, then Source 2, though it had a split between S1 and S2 for the Titanfall series, which then evolved into the engine used in Apex Legends.
Contrary to what Epic Games is trying to make you think, the Unreal engine started as a game series too! You have to pretty much don the ol skull and crossbones to play the series at this point, but this engine is iconic.
Just remember, game engines spark in the most peculiar of locations. So long as there's a modding scene available, you can get crazy stuff to happen. Fallout, Minecraft, Half Life, and more received and remain to receive Total Conversion Mods, which essentially treat the games as an engine, examples include Gmod, Chinese Minecraft, Fallout London, Counter Strike, Defense of the Ancients. These are all TCMs that completely modify the landscape of these games in new directions, and it is insane.
Even games that released AGES ago are magically obtaining insane mods, such as what happened with the Mario 64 source code leak, which now lets us play the series natively on PC for once, and people are making crazy stuff just by using it as an engine!
You brought up a plethora of peak examples and really hit it home with just how important modding is. Your insights are extremely appreciated here and thank you for taking the time to detail the history of famous game engines/mods. Absolutely amazing input, thanks for sharing!
@@EdwardLabarcaDevGOAT response to a GOAT comment
I used the stones to destroy the stones, it nearly.. killed me.
lmao
Now that I think about it, playing Super Scribblenauts and Mario Maker probably helped a lot in training me on level design. Not that I'm any good at it yet, but it got most of the utter garbage out.
Hey - great comment and I'm super glad to hear this perspective! Anywhere is a great place to start as long as your intention is to learn, truly understand what works, and get in the habit of applying what you've learned to become better at X-skill. Level design can be commonly learned pretty well with platformers as you've just mentioned - and I would even argue that Mario Maker is a great start for considering 2D level-design choices due to the sheer amount of "readily avaiable and testable options" you can find in the create/editor mode of the game.
Its so cool how you prototype games in lbp. I think i actually remember playing your Kirby level before
@@LBPLevelBoy You have no idea how much this means to me. Like, you honestly made my day by saying this. Thank you for playing!
Cool video! Speaking from experience, it is also good to consider how well suited the game is for prototyping your specific idea. For example, if you need to do tons of work arounds to get your systems to work in the game you're using as an engine, it might be better to prototype in an actual engine.
@@ThinkWithGames I agree and get exactly where you’re coming from. If anything l’d recommend your approach the most. I would like to say it’s important to identify what your “game idea” would be when using an alt. engine as a first time developer. Regardless, your advice is solid and l’ll make sure to push your message more boldly going forward.
For me, Minecraft and Garry's Mod were the games I used to prototype and play with ideas early on. Minecraft is great for primitive level design; it's a sandbox and building stuff is really easy. Garry's Mod is great for testing out gameplay ideas; thanks to the modding community it takes very little effort to transform how the game plays, making it great for doing rough drafts of experimental gameplay ideas without having to write any code yourself. Both are at the same level in my toolkit as my game engine.
Drafting is important and if you have an ease-of-acess drafting tool, why not use it? Great comment - thanks for providing this info!
Great tips on how to start developing with anything. The tool doesn't matter as long as you're able to achieve the prototype you want.
👆👆👆👆
MEGA MAN LEGENDS MENTIONED RAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (good video, my man!)
For anyone reading this comment PLEASE check out WarmLoafOfBread’s channel. He’s the peak example of recreating games at a 1:1 identity. 🎉
HL2 mods moment
@@NoVIcE_Source 100% HL2 mods are goated and this needs to be re-mentioned.
huh. now I just need an open source rail shooter game to mod. uhhhhh.
lemme know if you find any
amazing video I learn so much
your support means the world to me. 🫡
Nice
🙌
Labarcak?
@@LVL58Designs Lev? 👀👀👀 We have to catch up soon hahaha
@@EdwardLabarcaDev Yeah we do! XD
@@EdwardLabarcaDev Heck yeah man! We shall!
yall schizos