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Making a Video Game
Ehmavisca
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My friends and I have decided that since we love video games so much, we should try our hands at one.
We have two programmers, taking classes in college, I would do conceptual art, but we only have one person who is good at 3ds Max.
I was wondering if you guys could give any basic tips on getting started, or point me in the direction of a good website?
My friend is going tonight to by a book about this subject.
Thanks for any help!
-Frank
We have two programmers, taking classes in college, I would do conceptual art, but we only have one person who is good at 3ds Max.
I was wondering if you guys could give any basic tips on getting started, or point me in the direction of a good website?
My friend is going tonight to by a book about this subject.
Thanks for any help!
-Frank
Ehmavisca on
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http://www.gamedev.net/
http://forums.cgsociety.org/
Start small. Start very small. Avoid 3D first up. Think Space Invaders. Think Tetris.
Most such projects fail because people are too ambitious and impatient first up then fall apart when it gets "hard" or somebody ends up having to do "boring stuff".
Start small, get a project under your belt, work out where to go from there.
Now, if you're starting from scratch completely (as I did) you'll be making your own game engine. The three hardest parts of this is GUI (graphical user interface), collision, and AI. Collision is a bitch. It doesn't sound that difficult at first (bounding boxes, big deal right?), but once you have a few thousand objects flying around you're gonna have to do some optimization to that puppy if you want a steady 60+ fps. There are lots of good resources on this kind of stuff at the gamedev forums.
My advice would be to have your programmers make a simple game engine that they can use to do some arcade games with like Tetris and Space Invaders. Try to have them make it so that you can use the same engine for the two different games.
By that time they'll see all the faults with the engine and then either rewrite it from scratch or fix it - my personal experience is that it's easier to rewrite than to fix.
Then make another small, typical arcade game. Maybe a bit more complex, or with a twist.
Then fix the engine again.
I really stress this because it is so important to have a good engine before anything else. So many times I thought I was well ahead on my way with programming the game and then I'd bump into a wall because of bad engine design. There are reasons that engines sell for a lot of money; it's hard to make good ones.
That said, a few of old ones are offered free now (Quake 3 is I believe), so you might want to check that out. Of course, you're programmers will learn a lot more if they make their own. I made three small arcade games, but I iterated through a game engine many times - it was getting really neat. I think it was 7,000 lines long or so.
But for the love of god, stay in 2D.
Also, a not bad place to start if you want 3D would be to make a mod for Half-Life 2/UT200x (7 is coming soon!). No need to make an engine, and you'd have more of a chance to do art sooner.
I'm pretty tired so I hope that made some sense.
First thing to do is decide if you want to make your own engine or use a pre-existing one. My group decided to use the Source engine because it is pretty well documented and we didn't want to write our own. If you are thinking about writing your own engine, consider building it from the framework of the Ogre 3D. It's a free OpenGL engine, which is nice if you want the game to run on Linux and OSX.
My groups project last year failed due to several reasons
-whlie none of us had any prior experience creating 3D games, 3 of the members never actually put any effort to learning the aspect of game creation they said they would
-way too ambitious
-the modeller couldn't get the vertex deformation on our model to work in-game, which was a central part of our game
So my general suggestions (if you decide to mod an already existing engine) are
-keep in mind that, in all likelihood, at least 1/4 of your team members are not going to contribute much
-getting animated models was by far, and still is, the biggest bottleneck on the project
-don't get bogged down on big problems - find small, easy things you can do that *visibly* change the game/gameplay every few weeks. Sometimes just one small change will make the difference between an excited, motivated teammember and an excited, but noncontributing, teammember
This year we found some more members - two of them were on a mod team that disbanded the year before because the project was too ambitious. So from the ground up we designed the game with simplicity in mind. The mod is still chugging along pretty well and we're going to launch the website soon.
Are all 3 of you guys going to the same college or living in the same town?
http://realmcrafter.com/
At night, the ice weasels come."
Also start small as don't to worried about asking for help. If you use MMF, sign onto a Kilk forum like www.create-games.com or something.