I’ve always loved video games, ever since I first played them on a friend’s computer in the afternoon after elementary school. There is something almost magical about the fact that we can move images around and interact with virtual worlds, a living fantasy presented to us to interact with however we choose. I also always wanted to make games myself but, until recently, I didn’t have the technical knowledge to do so. Now, I’m a sophomore software engineering student, so if I couldn’t code a game without too much drama, something would be drastically wrong. But what about the everyday person: the person for whom the term ‘memory leak’ conjures up images of their grandfather, ‘pipe’ is where the water flows, and ‘blitting’ is unheard of? Well, everyone can participate in the game creation process, and you don’t even need to learn ‘real’ programming to do it.
So where do the games begin? with an idea Games, like all fiction, require an idea to be successful. Sure, in the same way that you can just sit down and write a story without forethought, you can jump in and play together. However, unless you are very lucky, the best jobs are usually the ones that have been well thought out beforehand.
There are two methods for planning a project. You can start from a known technology standpoint and build your project on top of that or you can just go with the design, add as many features and ideas as you like and then remove the ones you can’t use when you’ve decided on the technology you’re going to implement the project with. play. In general, the second type is probably the best for designing games. However, when you are just starting out, the first option will save you a lot of headaches.
So for a first game you’ll want a fairly simple idea. Don’t get me wrong, crazy and crazed game ideas are fantastic, and there should be more out there, but you won’t be able to create a real-world simulator with fifty billion virtual people interacting in real ways. time with your actions having a butterfly effect on the future of the virtual universe when it’s only your first game. In fact. Many people try it; none that I know of have been successful. Imitation is the best way to start. Simple games like ‘Space Invaders’, ‘Tetris’, ‘Pacman’ or even ‘Pong’ are great places to start. They are all largely simple to create but have some inherent challenges. ‘Pacman’, for example, requires finding your way around ghosts. I recommend that you start even simpler than that for your first try. ‘Space Invaders’ is a good starting point. You can make a simple and complete game without much effort and it is almost infinitely expandable.
If you don’t have an idea, choose a genre you enjoy. Do you love adventure games like ‘Monkey Island’, ‘Grim Fandango’, ‘Space Quest’, ‘King’s Quest’, etc? Design one of those. Do you like fighting games like ‘Street Fighter’, ‘Tekken’, ‘Soul Calibur’, ‘Mortal Kombat’, etc? Think of an idea for that. Do you like first person shooters like ‘Quake’, ‘Half Life’ or ‘Doom’? I do not recommend it as a first project, but you can always try it. Feel free to be as generic as you like, after all, this is a learning experience.
Now that you have your idea, it’s time to develop it. Don’t worry about technology or the fact that you may not know how to implement a game yet, just grab a pen and paper and go crazy with ideas. Describe the main characters, gameplay, goals, interactions, story, and key assignments, anything you can think of. Make sure you have enough detail that someone can read the notes and play the game in your head with relative accuracy. Changing the game design during the coding process is almost always a bad idea. Once it’s configured, it must stay configured until the tuning phase (more on this later) or you’re likely to enter ‘development hell’, where the project goes on and on; more and more work is done with less and less result.
At the end of this period of creating your game, you should have the following:
– A written outline of the game characters and possibly one or two sketches (be it spaceships, yellow circles, cars, or the prince of the dark kingdom of Falgour, you need to know who or what the player will be and who they will be racing against)
– A written summary of the story (if there is, it’s not too important for ‘Space Invaders’ or ‘Tetris’, but for ‘Uber Quest: An Adventure of Awesomeness’ it’s a very good idea)
– A description of the game, written or storyboarded. Storyboards are visual representations of ideas. Draw your characters in action, with arrows showing the flow of the action and short written descriptions detailing the events happening in your image (because some of us aren’t great artists and our images can be a little… open to interpretation…)
Now that you have an idea developed, it’s time to figure out how this will all come together. If you’ve reached this point and are worried that you’ll have to spend years learning complex programming languages in order to implement your idea, fear not! Others have already done the hard yards for you. There are many RAD (Rapid Application Development) tools available for creating games, some of which are freely available online. Some of them still require you to learn a “scripting language” (a simplified programming language made for a specific task), but in general this is not too complicated or complicated. I have compiled a short list of some of these that I have found at the end of the article. The free ones are listed first, organized by game genre.
Well, that should be enough for you to start creating your game. The most important thing to remember once you’ve made it this far is that you need to complete your game. Many people start a project and then lose interest and fail, or keep going on one new project after another without getting anything done. Start small, build a functional (yet simple) game that is, above all else, complete. When you get to this stage, you will always have a plethora of things you want to change, fix, etc. but you will have a great feeling knowing that it is, in its own way, finished.
From this point, the adjustment phase can begin. Play your game several times and ask others to do the same. Take note of what isn’t fun or could be better and change things here. At this stage, it’s more important than ever to keep backups of previous versions so that if a change doesn’t work, you can go back and try something different without losing any of your work. It is at this point that you can add all the new features, improve the graphics and sounds, whatever you want, knowing that you are working on a solid foundation.
When you’re satisfied with your game, why not share it with the world? There are many cheap or free places for you to host your files and then you can jump into link lists and forums and let everyone know about your creation. Well, I hope this has been a useful introduction to the art of making games. It’s a lot of fun and can open up new avenues of creative expression to explore. Jump and have fun!
Links:
General game creation:
(Tools that allow the easy creation of many different types of games)
Gamemaker: http://www.gamemaker.nl
MegaZeux: http://megazeux.sourceforge.net/
Adventure games:
(Games like Monkey Island, King’s Quest, Space Quest, etc.)
Adventure Game Studio: [http://www.bigbluecup.com]
AGAST: http://www.allitis.com/agast/
3D Adventure Studio: http://3das.noeska.com/
ADRIFT (for text adventures): http://www.adrift.org.uk/
Role Playing Games (RPGs):
(Games like Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Diablo)
OHRPG: http://www.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/
RPG Tool: http://www.toolkitzone.com/
Fight games:
(Games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur, etc.)
KOF91: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kof91/
MUGEN (sadly, the site is largely in French): http://www.streetmugen.com/mugen-us.html
Side scrolling games:
(Games like 2D Mario Games, Sonic the Hedgehog, Double Dragon, etc.)
The scrolling game dev kit: http://gamedev.sourceforge.net/
There are many others available as well. A particularly useful site for finding game creation tools is: http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html
Also worth noting, though not free, are the excellent game creation tools available from Clickteam at: [http://www.clickteam.com/English/]
Klik and Play and The Games Factory in particular are the programs to check out and download the free demos.
If you really want to get it right and code the game yourself, there are great programming resources available in the following locations:
Java game programming:
http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1262.asp
http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/Java_Game_Programming/
Visual Basic game programming:
[http://markbutler.8m.com/vb-tutorial.htm]
Game programming in C++:
http://www3.telus.net/alexander_russell/course_dx/introduction_dx.htm
http://www.rit.edu/~jpw9607/tutorial.htm
General information:
http://www.gamedev.net/
http://www.gamasutra.com/