I’ve all the time loved video games, ever since I first played them on a friend’s computer in the afternoon after elementary school. There’s something approximately magical about the fact that we can move images colse to and interact with virtual worlds, a living fantasy presented for us to interact with however we please. I’ve also all the time wanted to make games myself but, until recently, didn’t have the technical knowledge to do so. Now, I’m a second year software engineering student, so if I weren’t able to code a game without too many dramas there’d be something drastically wrong. But what about the tasteless person: the person for whom the term ‘memory leak’ conjures up images of their grandfather, ‘pipeline’ is where the water flows, and ‘blitting’ is unheard of? Well, everyone can get in on the game creation process, and you don’t even need to learn ‘real’ programming to do so.
So where do games start? With an idea. Games, like all fiction, need an idea to be successful. Sure, in the same way you can just sit down and write a story without foresight, you can jump on in and slap a game together. However, unless you get ridiculously lucky, the best works are regularly the ones that have been well plan out beforehand.
There are two methods of planning a project. You can start from a known technological standpoint and build your project on top of that or you can just go for the design, add as many features and ideas as you like, and then remove the ones that you can’t use when you’ve decided on the technology you’re going to implement the game with. In general, the second type is probably the best one to go with when designing games. When you’re first beginning out however, the first selection will save you many headaches.
So, for a first game you’re going to want a pretty easy idea. Don’t get me wrong, crazy-go-nuts game ideas are fantastic, and there should be more of them out there, but you’re not going to be able to generate a real world simulator with fifty billion virtual habitancy all interacting real time with your actions having a butterfly result on the future of the virtual universe when it’s just your first game. Really. Many habitancy try it; none that I know of have succeeded. Imitation is the best way to start out. easy games such as ‘Space Invaders’, ‘Tetris’, ‘Pacman’ or even ‘Pong’ are great places to start. All are largely easy to generate but have some potential challenges. ‘Pacman’ for example, requires path finding for the ghosts. I advise that you start even simpler than that for your very first attempt. ‘Space Invaders’ is a nice point to jump in. You can make a simple, perfect game without much endeavor and it’s approximately infinitely extensible.
If you’re stuck for an idea, pick a genre that you enjoy. Do you love adventure games such as ‘Monkey Island’, ‘Grim Fandango’, ‘Space Quest’, ‘King’s Quest’ etc.? create one of those. Are you into fighting games like ‘Street Fighter’, ‘Tekken’, ‘Soul Calibur’, ‘Mortal Kombat’ and so on? Come up with an idea for that. Do you like first person shooters such as ‘Quake’, ‘Half Life’ or ‘Doom’? I don’t advise it as a first project, but you can all the time give it a go. Feel free to be as generic as you like, this is a studying taste after all.
Now that you have your idea it’s time to flesh it out. Don’t worry about the technology or the fact that you may not know how to truly implement a game just yet, just grab yourself some paper and a pencil and go crazy with ideas. Divulge the main characters, game play, goals, interactions, story, and key mappings, whatever you can think of. Make sure you have adequate detail so that person can read straight through the notes and play straight through the game in their head with relative accuracy. Changing game create during the coding process is approximately all the time a bad idea. Once it’s set, it should remain set until the tweaking phase (I’ll go into this more 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 outcome.
At the end of this period of your game creation, you should have the following:
- A written shape of the game’s characters and maybe a sketch or two (be they space ships, 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 compete against)
- A written shape of the story (if there is one, this isn’t too vital for ‘Space Invaders’ or ‘Tetris’, but for ‘Uber Quest: An Adventure of Awesomeness’ it’s a truly good idea)
- A record of game play, written or storyboarded. Storyboards are optical representations of ideas. Draw your characters in actions, with arrows showing the flow of operation and short written descriptions detailing the events occurring in your image (because some of us aren’t fabulous artists and our images can be a little… open to interpretation…)
Now that you have a fleshed out idea, it’s time to work out how this will all get put together. If you’ve gotten to this point and are worried that you’re going to have to spend years studying involved 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 ready for game creation, a estimate of which are ready for free online. Some of them still need you to learn a ‘scripting language’ (a simplified programming language made for a exact task) but in normal this isn’t too involved or involved. I’ve compiled a brief list of some of these I have found at the end of the article. The free ones are listed first, organized by game genre.
Well, that should be adequate to get you started in the creation of your game. The most leading thing to remember once you’ve gotten this far is that you need to perfect your game. Many habitancy start a project and then lose interest and it fails, or they keep interesting on to one new project after another without finishing anything. Start small, build a working (if simple) game that is, above all else, complete. When you get to this stage you will all the time have a huge estimate of things that you wish to change, fix etc. But you’ll get a great feeling from knowing that it is, in its way, finished.
From this point, you can start the tweaking phase. Play your game a few times and ask others to do the same. Take note of what isn’t fun or could be best and turn things here. At this stage, it is more leading than ever to keep backups of former versions so that if a turn doesn’t work you can go back and try something dissimilar without losing any of your work. It is at this point that you can add all new features, enhance graphics and sounds, whatever you please, safe in the knowledge that you’re working on a solid foundation.
When you’re happy with your game, why not share it with the world? There are many cheap or free places out there for you to host your files on and then you can jump on link lists and forums and let everyone know about your creation. Well, I hope that this has been a helpful introduction into the art of creating games. It’s a great deal of fun, and can open whole new avenues of creative expression for you to explore. Jump in and have fun!
Links:
General Game Creation:
(Tools that allow easy creation of many dissimilar game types)
Game Maker: http://www.gamemaker.nl
MegaZeux: http://megazeux.sourceforge.net/
Adventure Games:
(Games such as 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 such as Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Diablo)
Ohrpg: http://www.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/
Rpg Toolit: http://www.toolkitzone.com/
Fighting Games:
(Games such as road Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur etc.)
Kof91: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kof91/
Mugen (unfortunately the site is largely in French): http://www.streetmugen.com/mugen-us.html
Side-Scrolling Games:
(Games such as the 2D Mario Games, Sonic the Hedgehog, duplicate Dragon etc.)
The Scrolling Game improvement Kit: http://gamedev.sourceforge.net/
There are many others ready as well. One particularly beneficial site for finding game creation tools is: http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html
Also of note, although not freeware, are the exquisite game creation tools ready by Clickteam at: [http://www.clickteam.com/English/]
Klik and Play and The Games installation in single are the programs to have a look at and download the free demos of.
If you truly want to do things right and program the game yourself, there are some exquisite programming resources ready at 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]
C++ Game Programming:
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/
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