The Thinkpad T430s came out late 2012, making it almost 10 years old now. When I bought my T430s it came with no hard drive and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. I’ve since upgraded the laptop so it has 16GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. Currently the laptop is running Xubuntu 22.04 along with some customizations and a some software I plan to include on 22.04 installs at the Computer Recycling Project. I thought it might be interesting to start talking about how a refurbished laptop like this could be useful from a practical standpoint.
My current plan is to use the laptop to develop and publish a game to Steam using the installed version of Xubuntu, any tools I can get through the software centre, and the Godot game engine. I have NO experience developing with Godot (other than spending 30 minutes one day looking at a video that made it look interesting), and little experience with game development (I did create a cross-platform, Windows/Linux game based on Asteroids using GameMaker Studio on Windows). Part of the point is to show that with a little financial investment (the laptop), and FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software), it’s possible to create something that is at least marginally commercially viable. I want people to realize the potential of using free software to put a few dollars into their pocket. I don’t expect to get rich, in fact I’d consider making the $100 back that I have to pay Steam for a developer account a success initially, but if it makes more I’ll report it. And if it makes less I’ll report that too.
Of course it isn’t necessary to have 16GB of RAM or even an SSD to get started. Our most basic laptops at the Computer Recycling project usually come with only 4GB of RAM and a spinning rust hard drive. It should be possible with a basic laptop to create a decent game.
While I love free software I don’t enjoy using Blender. For this reason I’m going to be sticking to making a 2D game, at least that’s the plan at this point. Plans change, and it’s possible I might end up making 3D games, but at this point my expectation is to make a 2D game.
I should point out that I have installed the Unity game engine on Xubuntu before, and found that I had to make some hot key changes to Xubuntu in order to accommodate some of the hot key functions of Unity. I’m not a fan of Unity because every tutorial out there seems to focus way to much on the UI elements and way too little on writing code or game logic, but this might just be the tutorials/books I’ve looked at. I probably will look at Unity again sometime, but for now I’m focusing on Godot because I know how important the FLOSS side of Godot is.
I’ve already laid out a plan for learning in Google Docs (I know, not very FLOSS-friendly, but handy at this point) that includes the name of some tutorials, time to learn, and URLs. This is the plan so far. More updates to come.