Finally... > Life Advice

I wanna make a game

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delphonso:
I - like probably all of us - have had a million and one ideas for games that I'd like to play.

Now, I'm in a generally stable position, with adequate free time. I want to put this time to good use and learn to make some games from scratch. I've had the slightest of brushes with programming languages and am fond of the C family.

So, where do I start - really?

Parsely:
1. outline game idea
2. research
3. implement
4. test: it's bugged so return to 2, else continue
5. you made a game, celebrate!
6. post-completion: final release and/or patching, or abandonment

Detailed:
Google tutorials for the most basic game you could make (tetris, a shmup, pac man, pong, etc.) in your language of choice and follow along! This will help give you the confidence that you can construct a simple game and these fundamentals will make you just good enough to try implementing your own game, and only implementing will let you understand how tough your idea is to realize.

Then you should start organizing your ideas and try to think of an easy idea you'd like to implement, this is really important because most game ideas people have are very complex for a single person to implement. Once you have it in plain english write some relevant pseudocode, this is where you'll realize how much stuff you don't know (like how to make a tilemap) and you can start googling topics to research and putting those in your notes.

If you've never made a game before I say for now don't worry about all the complicated stuff like release, marketing, financing, patching, or support. Just focus on being creative and having fun!

You could even make a thread in creative projects and blog about it and just throw every small question you have at the wall, could be fun!

nenjin:
There are many moving parts to any game.

And new game creators often want to do too much with too small of a skill set.

Start small, and start with your programming, because you don't have a game without that and it's objectively the hardest part to work through.

I'd start with Python and try writing a text adventure game with some actual game logic, like Hit Points and attack rolls. If you can pull that off, you can graduate to something more elaborate. There are many tutorials online with good templates you can implement, understand, modify and then fill in the blanks.

We've got a few budding game developers around here too. Like the dude who is making the Innkeeper game in Other Games, he's built that project from scratch over the last couple years. Maybe ask them where they started and what they started with.

delphonso:
Thanks, you two. To give some additional information and background - I took a crack at this before (ignoring the many times I've fooled around with game making resources like RPG maker) trying to go down the Python route. I learned an adequate amount of Python skills and put together a simple text adventure. I then opened PyGame, for which I could only find tutorials of previous versions of Python, meaning the syntax and examples weren't able to be used. I lost motivation and bailed.

I learned some C++, which I liked, and then some C# out of curiousity. Life got a bit hectic and I've been out of it for a while. I think this is actually a good spot to be in since I - reasonably could start working with any of those three languages and head down a path.

Roguelikes are up my alley - both for their simple visuals, and because of my experience with tabletop gaming. I've designed game systems in my freetime that use percentile dice or multiple d6's and - I think - I have a decent grasp of balance.

The problem I'm running into is the gap. Printing text, handling booleans, arithmatic are things I can grasp and implement in clumsy programs. But things - like you mentioned - like tilemaps seem far beyond me. Googling wasn't successful with Python on this, but maybe the C family would be easier. I'm not sure.

nenjin:
Yeah, graphics are one of the big hurdles to overcome.

If you don't know how, your only option is to research, practice and prototype. I wouldn't even try to think of it as a game right now, think of it as "I need to print stuff to the screen, even if it's just the @ symbol."

But I'd be surprised if there aren't C# tutorials online that are geared towards displaying graphics for games. But this is why I suggest maybe starting in a lower level language than C. You may find more resources directly related to what you're trying to do.

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