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GameDev on Steam Deck

I've got the 64GB og steam deck, After almost a year of using it i had to start using the deck as a development machine as well not just for gaming. I wasn't sure how it would pan out, theoretically everything should be possible but i had couple of major blockers ..

  • I was running out of internal storage
  • I needed to make sure that the engines i use work on SD.
    • Cocos Creator (Windows / Mac)
    • Godot Engine (Windows / Mac / Linux)
    • Unreal Engine (Windows / Mac / Linux)
    • Unity Engine (Windows / Mac / Linux??)

The Internal Storage:
Since this was a 64 GB version, i kept running into the disk space issues, i had to take the leap and upgrade the ssd. Fortunately i was able to find one on amazon which decently priced. I followed the IFixit's guide to upgrade the ssd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSvdsic4_dk

This was crucial if i wanted to use the deck without thinking too much about what i was going to install on OS. So if you are like me and are really afraid of breaking something while upgrading the SSD, you dont' have to worry.. if i was able to do it, im' sure most of you should be able to do it without any issues. The IFixt video is super clear and helpful.

Cocos Creator:

rich text editor image

I needed "Cocos Creator" which is only available for Mac and Windows to run on this setup as i had some games i had to keep working on.

Long story short, i was able to get the cocos creator to work on linux with proton experimental and works "okish" to get the work done. It wasn't as fast as on my previous windows machine but this was good enough for me keep working on without pouring a bunch of money to buy a new laptop/ pc.

Add to Steam was super useful to get the whole thing going. Was able to quickly add the setup.exe for the dashboard of cocos creator and install it, the problem was i wasn't able to download the editor through dashboard utility, i had to download the cocos creator editor on a friends machine and copy the files to steamdeck and got that linked up and it works great.

Caveat: its' unable to launch visual studio code directly from the editor, This is painful and i didn't want to install the windows version of VSCode so i open the project file directly in VSCode for editing instead of seamlessly opening from the Engine Editor.

Godot Engine:

I installed it from the Steam Store, and the dumb thing it installed the windows version on the Deck. I was surprised by this as Godot Supports linux. The quick solution was to uninstall from Steam and get the binary from their website

Once you do this you are good to go with Godot Engine on the Deck.

Unreal Engine:

I wasn't sure what to expect in the UE world as its' AAA and needs a lot of resources to work etc, but i was surprised at how easy it was to install it by following the guide on the Unreal's documentation around this.

Few downloads later i was able to launch the editor and was good to go.. one catch.. VSCode wasn't getting detected. I installed VSCode from the discover store using flatpak, for some reason the command "code" wasn't available in the path. To solve this i created a shell script that launches VSCode from flatpak and added the location of this file to $PATH and vola, i was able to seamlessly edit the c++ code in VSCode and get the Game Updated.

#!/bin/sh
flatpak run com.visualstudio.code

  • Add these above contents to a file named "code" and run "chmod +x code"
  • Add the above file location to $PATH in ~/.bashrc file.

The editor feels a little sluggish but thats' true in general for UE, it loads pretty fast compared to what ive' seen on other machines so thats a positive.


Unity Engine:

I don't know if unity has a linux version and frankly after their recent shit i'm not even interested in finding out. So may be this is for some other brave soul to explore and post here.

PS: Sorry for the long post but i was a little hesitant to jump with my both feet in for using the Deck as a development Machine, This post hopefully shows that you can jump in and it works well to get your gamedev journey going. :)

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