You probably had or still have a great idea for a PC or mobile game(or some other platform), but don’t know where to start. You were reading about programming and programming languages. Here’s what you need to learn in order to make your idea a reality.
How are games made?
If you spent some time searching or learning about programming, you probably know at least some fundamentals. You type some input into a program and something happens.
That’s the same for game development. You hold a “W” key, character moves forward.
All of this programming is done in Game Engines.
A Game Engine is a software that’s used to simplify the process of programming a game. It’s much easier for a beginner to understand and speeds up the whole process overall, which is really important since the whole development usually takes a lot of time. You can position images and 3D or 2D objects on the screen without typing a single line of code. Those are just a few of benefits of game engines.
What game engines are there?
There is a various number of game engines, but here are some that I personally recommend.
• Unity3D – My absolute favourite. It’s free, it’s really easy for a beginner, and if you are little more experienced, developing games is really fast. It has great community and a lot of engagement on forums, so if you run into error you’ll probably solve it fast. It has great asset store too, with a lot of free or paid assets such as 3D objects, sounds, textures, animations and a lot more. I recommend this one for the beginner!
• Unreal Engine –Unreal Engine is also great alternative. A lot of popular games are developed using unreal. It can produce good, high quality graphics in a game, and it’s really good(maybe the best?) for developing 3D games.
• Game Maker – this one was popular for 2D games and it was free, but they changed it and put the prices very high for someone who’s just starting. For 2D games, I personally use Unity(again…) because I already know it, but if you want to focus only on 2D, there are a lot of alternatives which you can find by searching “2d game engine”, easy as that.
How to Start
There are a lot of tutorials on youtube, example: Unity Beginner Tutorial
BUT – I highly recommend watching and understanding basics of programming(more specifically C#) if you haven’t already. Look for a playlist of tutorials on C# and understand the basics. A lot of people might say that you will learn it along the way and with Unity you might not even need to program that much, but I can tell you that it’s a lie, and if you at least know the basics, it’s going to be A LOT easier for you.
After that, find some tutorials for the game engine you chose, and just start! After getting to know basics of the engine, try building small games, that’ll help you. You CAN NOT build the big RPG or Grand Theft Auto – that’s the fact. Companies producing these big games have whole teams working for long time before publishing finished version. It takes lot of people, lot of time and a lot of money, so my best advice is to start with something small.
Eventually, you’ll build bigger games!
Hope you eventually make your dream game and have success with it!