Worried that your game is going to run slow because you don’t know the most efficient way to code things? Me too! But this can be a lethal mindset. It HAS killed at least one of my projects in the past. It’s good to want efficient code. It’s good to say to yourself, “If I do this really badly now, I’m going to have to come back and fix it later, so I should do it properly now.” But it’s bad to have optimization be such a concern that you paralyze yourself. Additionally, optimization may or may not matter so much depending on the kind of game you’re making. My…

Before beginning, we need to address two key things: motivation and momentum. Motivation is all about believing that you can do this. I’m not a professional programmer. The only time I took a formal course on programming was in high school. Who am I to try and make a real video game? The thing is, technology has come a long way. The tools we can use – like Unity – solve so many underlying problems, leaving you free to solve the more interesting ones. In all the years I’ve been fooling around, I have yet to come across a programming problem I wasn’t able to eventually solve – albeit I’m…

This question is both really complex and really simple. There are a ton of engines with lots of specializations, and it certainly pays to do some homework to see if an engine can even handle the kind of game you want to make. So find a few engines that can handle what you want. Now comes the easy part. If you already have programming knowledge, pick an engine that uses a language you’re comfortable with. If you don’t have programming knowledge, consider picking whichever engine automates coding the most or can let you get up and running as quick as possible. For example, I used RPG Maker a fair bit…

This sounds like an obvious question… Of course you have to know what kind of game you want to create before you can create it! But this goes a bit deeper. Think about what FEATURES you want your game to have. It’s easy to say “I want to create a roguelike”, but that’s a genre that ranges from classic things like Nethack, to music-based stuff like Crypt of the Necrodancer, to side-scrolling platformers like Rogue Legacy. These all have quite different feature sets and vastly different gameplay. If you’re not sure what kind of game you want to create, an old standby is to re-create something that already exists. Not…

This is the first and most important question you have to answer for yourself. I’m not going to preach what makes a good answer and what makes a bad answer – what motivates you probably isn’t the same as what motivates me. Just make sure you understand your own motivations clearly and have realistic expectations. For example, here’s the answer for myself: “I want to make a game because I want to share something cool with people I care about. I want to leave a legacy that’s more than just ‘he sat on a couch and played a lot of games’. I have a NEED to create, and this is…

I’ve been interested in game design and creation for years. I’ve made a dozen attempts at creating a video game over the years. Each time I get a little farther in the process before I get bored, feel I could do a lot better if I just started over, or want to spend time on another hobby. This blog is my journey for the attempt that’s finally going to result in a game that gets completed and published. But that’s not the entire point of this blog. A large part of it is to teach others what I’ve learned about the process of making a game. There are a million…