How to start your Gaming Development Career

Image credits to kotaku.com

Game Development is so massively exploded as of now. Even a 5 yr old child can create games. From a Big Studio to small ones like indies. More and more people being hook to game development than ever. And, this is a good thing, so everyone can design ,create, and share their own unique and good game designs.

In this topic, I'm gonna teach you and show you how to start your career as a game developer. If you don't have any experience in coding and etc, this is the best place for you. In my years of experience, i will summarize the things you will need to start your career. Tutorials on how to program, softwares we need, skills we need, fundamentals, and more. And also, we will tackle not just about coding but designing as well. So lets get startedddddddd.

image credit to codingsec.net

• Aim small, Miss small

Do you have any idea of game design? But, before we go jump to creating game, I know we are all excited here. We need to think that, game creation needs skills (e.g. coding), designing and developing games needs time, practice and most of all perseverance. Our first game won't good as we are playing right now. For our first project we will create to what game developers called "prototype": this is the main logic of our game. No fancy screen changing, nor online features, we just have to see how are game play. This allows us to focus to improvement of the foundation of our game as later it will have a huge amount of code as we build our game. it will be difficult for us to track down some errors. 

May I just add some very important reminder as we create our first game, the "feature creep". This issue with the scope of the game: "I want this, I want like that, this shoul do this". since this will be our very first game, we will likely to put too much feature into our game. To many feature, too many mechanics to play and so on. This will create a trap to us later as we make the scope the game bigger. But it is ok as long as you fix it or minimizing or making the scope small as this is our first game.

So, we're getting close to creating our first game. we would like to create a game with only and only one mechanic. Think of like a simple "pong" and not "Dota 2". It will be a prototype, it may or will help you sometime to build your the next big thing in the future if you pursue. Just write pure simple mechanic that wont require physics, extreme math, online stuff or even 3D art.

• Things we need

Image credit to www.yfncg.com

We now have our game idea, minimize to simple yet functioning game. So? How do we create it? There are things or tools we will be needing to make our idea come to life. As I mentioned erlier, There are so many of them, it also depends on what platform our game will be created (but we will create it on windows). This tutorial is for individuals who absolutely no skills specially in computer, programming or what so ever and want to learn to improve their ability or even to pursue their dream to be a game developer that think they cannot do it and it is beyond their ability. If you read my previous blog, i, myself, started from nothing. as in i have no idea how the the animation works, how the controls works and how the screen switching works. At the end of the tutorial, i promise you will learn every fundamentals we need, so you can explore the world of game development yourself.

One of the tools we need ofcourse is a Game Engine. Game Engine, Generally though, the concept of a game engine is fairly simple: it exists to abstract the (sometime platform-dependent) details of doing common game-related tasks, like rendering, physics, and input, so that developers (artists, designers, scripters and, yes, even other programmers) can focus on the details that make their games unique (src http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/529/what_is_a_game_.php). The following engine may require coding skills, but i will add also that may doesnt require you. And also note that, some may cost you.

Image credits to adweek

Visit yoyogames

1. Game Maker - This is one of the most used by indie.
A drag and drop interface with code. it has its own coding language or like an scripting that works, only works in Game Maker. GM offers a free version that only exports to exexcutable files. And, the paid version (standart, Pro, and Master) they all differ in prices I pressumed.

Game Maker have a lot of tutorials. It is very useful that might help us that comes as a packaged with the tutorial. I, recommend that you first explore and navigate throught it. Know how things works, navigate it, run around things and experiment.

If you prefer more coding than drag and drop, this is one of the most used game engine.

Image credit to libsdl.com

2. SDL - Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve's award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games.

SDL officially supports Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, iOS, and Android. Support for other platforms may be found in the source code.

SDL is written in C, works natively with C++, and there are bindings available for several other languages, including C# and Python.

SDL 2.0 is distributed under the zlib license. This license allows you to use SDL freely in any software.

source libsdl


This are the few game that created using SDL:

Image credit to  Steam

Image credit to Steam

• Pew Pew Pew

Assets
This is one the most important things that will give life to our game. Assets - art, music, sound and other stuff that will make our game looks good and more polished. most of the game use good arts and musics to attract people to play their game. But, not all good arts and music make their game good. Not all of us, have given a talent on creating their own art. Some developers pay artist to create them what art they were need. But, this is not a big problem. OpenGameArt.org is a site were we can get assets for free. But remember this, if you use someone thing that was created by someone, do credit on them. Support our fellow artist to keep them creating more and provide us more.

you can also visit kotaku.com as this is my reference.

To be continued...