Making Your First Game: Basics – How To Start Your Game Development – Extra Credits
- Scope, focus on just making something you can actually create. Don’t focus on something to big like God of War or League of Legends or you will just end up getting frustrated and quit.
- Keep it simple.
- Don’t go into making a game with a specific idea. Learn what you can do, watch a few tutorials. Then start working on something you are pretty sure you could build.
- Watch lots of tutorials, study them, watch them, there are lots of tutorials about basically everything. Then if you can’t figure something out ask somebody or go on a forum, there are a lot of people who are willing to help.
- Don’t be afraid of coding. You’d be surprised at how little coding you actually need to get something done. It’s small enough that anyone can handle it. Just make sure you keep it small, you will learn as you go.
- Focus on your skills. For example if you are a really great artist but you are scared of coding, then focus on art and do just as much coding as you can. You will get better as you go.
- Don’t worry if you are terrible at art or graphics, there are a lot of games that get away with this, for example, Minecraft.
- And last, don’t give up.
Making Your Fist Game: Practical Rules – Setting (and keeping) Goals – Extra Credits
- Don’t plan a project that you think will take more than a month. You will learn from that game and will probably be better off starting a new one from scratch, instead of continuing your first game.
- It’s going to take you more than a month. For your first game you are not going to have much of a reverence of time. A lot of people make their best estimate and then add 50% to it. Because surprises always come up in game development.
- If you end up going over a month don’t panic. But if you go over three months than you probably scoped to large and should make your next game smaller.
- Don’t worry to much about the design of your first game. Don’t take weeks making stuff that you don’t even know if you can add to the game. Just get to building something as quickly as you can. The experience is much more valuable than the end result of the game.
- Set milestones. If you plan for your game to take a month, then plan a milestone each week. Take those large milestone tasks and split them up even further. Any task that you think will take more than a week should probably be broken down further. Have small tasks, and as you mark them off the list, you will really feel like you are getting somewhere.
- Send your self producer emails. What you did last week, and what you plan to do this week. Then compare the email with last week’s. This is to make sure you are not falling short of the production schedule. And this will help you organize your time each week.
- Review your game at least once a week. If school, work, or something is stopping you from viewing your game, then at least set an half hour to look at your game once a week. It’s really hard to let two weeks slide or more. Than when you come back to your game, you have no idea where you left off, and or, what you were doing. This is the point in which a lot of people quit. Don’t let that happen.
- Don’t worry about production value. A lot of people are worried about how their game sounds or looks. If your game plays amazing, then you will have time to polish it later. Unless you are trying to add one of those polished touches to the game just to learn how to do it, none of it matters for your first game. Keep in mind their are a lot of great games that are just moving squares.
- Don’t try to spend more than an hour doing anything yourself. If you find yourself stuck on a problem. Take a stab at it because it will help you learn. But you shouldn’t be spending more than an hour on any individual problem in your game. Given that it is your first game, everything you are trying to do, probably has a great tutorial for it. Use those resources.
- Make people play your game. You will learn a lot just from watching people play what you have created. Don’t be shy about your game if you are comparing it to other large games out there. But the path to really making games great games is the realization of people actually playing your early work, or games.
Making Your First Game: Minimum Viable Product – Scope Small, Start Right – Extra Credits
- There is a term in game development called, minimum viable product. Which revers to the smallest thing you can possible make that will still give you useful information/data when released. That should be your goal. When you are playing your minimum viable product, you will discover all sorts of things you did not account for when you were just designing your game in your head. You will find out what is really engaging instead of hoping it is engaging. And you will learn what will add the most to the experience of the game you are creating.
- Find the absolute minimum set of features that won’t affect core development. If you could could cut a feature and still ship you game, then it is probably not part of your minimum viable product. For example, Super Mario Bros. What do we need to do to test whether the fundamental game play of Mario Bros is engaging? What is the minimum we can build and test before deciding what we have is worth expanding on. The minimum viable product is for Mario is probably one level where you can move, jump, and fall into pits. If just that much is engaging and fun, then you can add all the other features later and make it even better. If running around and jumping over things simply doesn’t feel good, than Super Mario would never work even if you added all the other features. The core game needs to be good first.
- If you add to much content and somebody plays your game, they won’t be able to tell you what exactly needs improvement. Like the core of the game is what actually needs improvement, but they think about the content.
- List of game genres from ordered by how hard they are to created to create a minimum viable product for. This is also talking about digital games, not board games. From simplest to most difficult.
- Racing Games
- Top Down Shooter
- 2D Platformer
- Color Matching Puzzle Game
- 2D Puzzle Platformer
- 3D Platformer
- First Person Shooter
- JRPG
- Fighting Game
- Action Adventure
- Western RPG
- RTS