Godot is a free open source game development engine. I was looking to code something for the visor, and they recently announced VisionOS support, with the request coming from a Vision Pro engineer at Apple. I was originally looking at learning Swift, but this is a welcome diversion.
The environment is pretty straightforward and the toolset is pretty powerful. You can export your project to different platforms, and even import code from different languages. I wouldn’t say it’s for beginners, but if you have some experience with code you should be able to figure things out. There’s not a lot of hand holding—you will need to figure things out on your own.
While it is neat and exciting and it got my creative juices flowing thinking of ideas, it does feel a little overwrought. When I had the idea that maybe I’d like to dip my toe in coding again, I pictured more whittling away at lines of code in vIM and then seeing what breaks or what works. Even while I was playing around in Xcode, I felt more like I was manipulating the code with the editor right there.
I did find an interesting tutorial for doing game development in Ruby, which made my heart sing. I’m afraid it’s been too long, though. While I did a lot with Ruby before, I haven’t configured my current laptop for dev work the way my old machine was. While the code looked beautiful, I think I might end up spending more time re-learning Ruby than working on a game.