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 that is presented to us to interact with as we please. 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 common 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 so.

So where do the games start? 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 any 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 point of view and build your project on top of that or you can just go for the design, add as many features and ideas as you want and then remove the ones you can’t use when you have decided on the technology with which you are going to implement the project. play. In general, the second type is probably the best for game design. However, when you are just starting out, the first option will save you a lot of heartache.

So for a first game you’ll want a fairly simple idea. Don’t get me wrong, crazy and wacky game ideas are fantastic, and there should be more out there, but you’re not going to be able to create a real world simulator with fifty billion virtual people actually interacting. time with your actions having a butterfly effect in the future of the virtual universe when it’s just your first game. In fact. Lots of 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 the way for ghosts. I recommend you start even simpler than that for your first try. ‘Space Invaders’ is a good starting point. You can make a complete simple game without much effort and it’s 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 don’t recommend it as a first project, but you can always give it a try. Feel free to be as generic as you want, after all, this is a learning experience.

Now that you have your idea, it’s time to develop it. Don’t worry about the technology or the fact that you may not know how to implement a game yet, just grab a pen and paper and go wild with ideas. Describe the main characters, gameplay, objectives, interactions, story, and key assignments, anything you can think of. Make sure you have enough detail so 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 set up, it must stay set up until the fine-tuning phase (more on this later) or you’ll likely enter ‘development hell’, where the project just goes on and on; more and more work is done with less and less result.

By the end of this period of creating your game, you should have the following:

– A written outline of the game’s characters and possibly a sketch or two (whether it’s 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’ll be racing against)

– A written summary of the story (if there is one, 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 brief written descriptions detailing the events taking place in your image (because some of us aren’t fantastic artists and our images can be a bit… open to interpretation…)

Now that you have an idea worked out, it’s time to figure out how this will all come together. If you’ve gotten to this point and you’re 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 game creation, 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 isn’t 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 gotten this far is to complete your game. Many people start a project and then lose interest and fail, or keep pushing through one new project after another without finishing anything. 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 large number of things that 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, you can start the adjustment phase. 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 up here. At this stage, it’s more important than ever to keep backup copies 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 happy with your game, why not share it with the world? There are plenty of cheap or free places for you to host your files and then you can jump on link lists and forums and let everyone know about your creation. Well, I hope this has been a useful introduction to the art of creating games. It’s a lot of fun and can open up new avenues of creative expression to explore. Jump in and have fun!

Links:

Overall Game Creation:

(Tools that allow easy creation of many different types of games)

Game Maker: 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 (unfortunately 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 Development 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, although they are 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 some great programming resources available 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]

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/