Thoughts On a 12 Games in 12 Months Challenge
I'm considering a 12 games/12 months challenge making games on a Raspberry Pi 500+ to prove to myself you don't need a suped up workstation to do gamedev(this is totally not why I am justifying this purchase, no sir). However, the biggest problem I am currently running into is that there really isn't the support for engines like Unity/Unreal/Game Maker on ARM like there is for x86. This is one of the weirdest dichotomies in gamedev I am currently running into.
The unspoken fact that doesn't get talked about in games culture is that an overwhelming majority of games are now built for the more mobile friendly ARM architecture and their associated platforms. And to be fair to the big engine developers, it is super easy to port games to the ARM Device Ecosystem. However, even with the rise of Apples very well received ARM based M series chips as well as the less powerful but more power efficient Snapdragon Windows chips, there is a lack of support for making games on an ARM device.
I would like to use Godot, but based on things I have heard about them supporting Mac M Series ARM chips, I am not that optimistic it would run smoothly. The current solution seems to be to run the Android port on a Fork of Android OS, but I am going to be honest here, I don't really want to run this on an Android like OS. At the end of the day, I am still trying to do desktop game development.
This leaves me three options. The first is something I am super familiar with, good old JavaScript. I don't really think this is the route I want to go, for one I have done almost nothing but JS development for over a decade and need a break: the other is that I don't think making a game in JS would fit in what *I* feel is in spirit of the challenge. If I wanted to make these kind of games on an ARM system I would do it on my Fire Tablet. So currently I am debating between Pygame, which I know runs on Raspbian OS, and Love2D, which I think has very little issues running on it. I'll consider between these two while I currently hunt down a Pi 500+, truly the most dangerous game.