Getting Started With Making Games
Game development is one of those ideas that brews in your mind, until you finally get the opportunity and courage to release the tension. There isn’t a better time than right now to finally sit down and start the beginnings of game development. One of the main culprits of game development is that coding is scary to learn and that you wont be able to adapt to it. Luckily for you there are tools that help you not have to touch raw code.
In particular, Unreal Engine has a very powerful blueprinting system that has been used in multiple AAA games, and a handful of indies titles throughout the years. It’s extremely powerful and I personally recommend it, as I used to prototype with the tool. Not only does it allow for rapid prototyping, it has the performance to be used as a primary language within the engine: it also has an option to turn the blueprint code to native c++ automatically for performance gains.
For 2 dimension games I would personally recommend Unity or Godot (an open source engine) as those are some of the best 2D engines on the market. For 3-dimensional games I would recommend Unreal Engine because of it’s impressive tool set and industry lead in having some of the most impressive 3d rendering capabilities.
Finding tools that may work for you depends on the type of game. There’s nothing wrong with starting with something simple like Game Maker, or Unity; if anything it’s encouraged. There is a 99% chance that you will fail, but there is a 100% chance that your failure will be beneficial to making a better final product.
The issue with many developers, seasoned or not, is that they are scared of wasting time or having failures in their product’s production. I would convey the belief that R&D can be done within the game you are producing, and would be delighted to see this become a mainstream ideology. It’s safe to say that plotting out detail for detail before implementing a feature ruins creativity. Obviously you should have an idea before just going on an implementation spree, to see the effect of the feature on your game. Just don’t get to caught up in the idea of it only having a singular impact into the game you are creating.
Lastly, In the indie game development community there is this morality complex that if you are releasing a game to solely make profit then you are coming into the industry the wrong way. I wholeheartedly disagree with this statement. If you are passionate about the idea you are making; having a goal of being able to make a monetary value from your valuable works — why is that frowned upon? If you do not have a plan to sacrifice quality for money then having the hope of selling your product should be encouraged and be used to make a better end product. The problem lies within an entire different idea which I like to call the Product to Monetary Complex, which will be covered in a differing article as it’s quite extensive.
You can, and you should make the game idea you have been playing with in your mind. Download the tools and do it. The only person who can create that product is you.
