A YouTuber is planning to develop games right from the Steam Deck, as the portable gaming interface is also a fully working PC.
Now, Taranasus plans to not only create games using just a Steam Deck, mouse and keyboard, but teach others how, too. It’s already been extensively covered that the Steam Deck is functional as a main PC, and perfectly acceptable to make games from it without any modding or tinkering required. Taranasus wants to create and run a game on the Steam Deck without ever touching another PC.
Taranasus elaborates further that for many people their Steam Deck might be their “only computer” and that shouldn’t be a barrier to creating games for those that want to do so with limited equipment. The only prerequisites are owning the Steam Deck, but ideally adding an external Bluetooth keyboard and mouse would make the process much easier, since the Steam Deck only has one USB port.
He then proceeds to install the Unity Hub and game engine, and is surprised to see that it runs seamlessly, stating in fact that it’s going “annoyingly well”. He then creates a very basic “game”, and a standalone for Linux before adding it as an external game to his Steam library, whereupon it shows and works perfectly on the first try. “It took me a total of 40 minutes from booting up into Steam desktop mode to launching the game from the Steam interface,” he concludes.
Speaking to whether people should be doing this, they said: “Yeah, you should, it works and it works well. It reminds me of the very early days of personal computers.” With the Steam Deck being the “ZX spectrum of this generation, allowing more people to get into game and software development from an early age.” The Steam Deck could open doors to people who would otherwise never have entertained the idea of game development.
Taranasus concludes his video by offering a tutorial on how to complete the process, but only if people want it. He says he’d “really like to make one, but it is 40 minutes long,” and would like to know the demand beforehand.
