Starting game development in JavaScript with no experience
23 comments
·August 19, 2025Ctrlmonster
QuantumNomad_
You didn’t include a link but I assume it’s this one.
As it matches the name and has a discord channel with about 2000 members.
bob1029
> Stick to 2D, Since 3D is More Complicated
This isn't necessarily the case if you are looking at total cost of ownership.
3D provides things like perspective projection, which enables intuitive experiences and notions of "world space" that are fundamentally meaningful and map well with our physical reality. You can do a lot of damage with 3d primitives, an FPS camera, a skybox and some clever lighting.
jagged-chisel
And how did this illustrate that 3-D is not “More Complicated”?
prisenco
2D games can require a lot of assets. And most programmers are not artists.
JoeyJoJoJr
Also, 2D assets are much more difficult to change later if you decide you need to change the aspect ratio or scaling later on. While a tile map is comparatively technically simple, the initial choice of tile size carries a rather critical importance to how the game development process unfolds. If you want or need to change it later it is likely going to be a fair amount of work, and that friction can hinder a lot of experimentation. Compare this to a 3d camera, that affords you the ability to completely change perspective with a few lines of code, it’s evident that a 2d game is not necessarily simpler to develop in practice.
imachine1980_
Game like a short hike use rendering pipelines instead of accuracy in the models for example
null
thrown-0825
better tooling around 3D in my opinion
darth_aardvark
That's really cool! Sounds complicated though.
forrestthewoods
What in the Sam hell is this comment? I know that HackerNews is utterly ignorant when it comes to game dev. But this might take the cake.
reactordev
This is like those learn how to draw tutorials with the owl…
minimaxir
There are very few game development tutorials which aren't how-to-draw-an-owl and I'm not fully sure why.
SrslyJosh
"Game development", "javascript", and "no experience" is quite the combination.
chrisco255
If you have little experience programming, JS/TS is arguably one of the best choices for making a game. You have a built-in rendering engine in the form of the browser and it's universally accessible by nearly any device. There's no permission needed for distribution: just create a web page with a live demo and share the link. It's a great way to learn about game loops, pathfinding algos, state management, physics and world building and there's tons of free tools. A couple of my undergrad projects were JS games and they were very fun to work on. Clearly not the right choice for AAA game dev or a full length indie game, but definitely solid choice for learning.
IcyWindows
I wish the software/libraries mentioned had links to them, but the only links are to more videos from the author.
65
I'd say any beginner should start with P5.js first before going into larger game dev frameworks. You can make simple games and the API is very approachable.
ramesh31
>However, as opposed to using an engine like Unity, Godot, Unreal, using a frameworks still allows to you architect your codebase with a greater degree of freedom and prevents you from spending too much time learning how specific game engine workflows and UIs work.
If your goal is to make a game, these are exactly the things you should be learning, not reinventing your own architecture. If you just want to learn about engine internals, then sure go for it. But games (even very simple ones) are an incredible amount of effort that has nothing to do with programming. If you actually want to make one you should be working at the absolute highest level of abstraction possible so that you can start doing the real work; building the mechanics, creating the art, designing levels, writing the story, music, sound effects, etc. etc. Many of the succesful indie games these days are made almost completely via "no-code" visual tooling. It's basically a meme at this point for programmers to want to make a game and just end up wasting their time writing a naive engine.
yoyohello13
Exactly right. That’s why the joke “There are 100 game engines written in Rust… and 5 games” is so funny. Programming nerds love the engine stuff more than the art stuff. I know I fall in to this category.
3vidence
After bouncing off of Unity the first few times, I finally decided to commit to it after trying out some of the JS game frameworks (like Phaser)
Absolutely worth it, have made lots of games in Unity just for myself that feel pretty polished, there are just so many systems to make a game work.
The advice around game engines kind of seems like "to learn how to write programs first create the compiler.
Not to say all games should be made in engines but it certainly helps.
Fyi if you're interested in making games on the web / with web tooling join the Web Game Dev Discord (we're over 2k devs in there).