Start game development

But today, software like Unity , Unreal Engine , GameMaker , Godot , and more provide access to the same technologies and tools available to large game developers. This means literally anyone can make a video game. The key is in assessing your skillset and finding the best tools for the job. The first step is in assessing your skills and identifying your strengths.

Are you a programmer? An artist? A designer? None of the above? Identifying your skills and strengths will help you figure out where to start and what tools and platforms you should use. If you're a programmer, for instance, maybe you should start with a game engine. If you've never written code, maybe you should start with GameMaker.

Are you a web developer? The table below shows common game development software and frameworks beginners might come across:. Many more game engines, frameworks, and tools exist in the world. The above list is intended to provide you with a starting point. Look through the list and find a tool that fits your skillset. We recommend that as you learn more in your game development journey that you try different game engines and frameworks.

They all have their strengths and weaknesses, and no one engine, framework, or tool is perfect for all developers or all game styles and genres. There are a lot of resources out there for you to learn from, but there is also a lot of noise. At GameDev. The player solves a puzzle to finish a level. These games should start pretty easy to let the player get the hang of the puzzle, but it should become harder and harder as they progress to win. Still, every level should be solvable. If the game is either too easy or too hard, people will get bored with it.

Remember, different players use different strategies to solve a puzzle, so make a puzzle with some possibilities. For the player, the fun in a puzzle game is in finding the best strategy; for the designer, the challenge is in finding the sweet spot for that strategy, somewhere between trivial and merciless.

Think about action games. An action game requires players to use speed, accuracy, and timing to overcome obstacles. Action games need to be full of life and energy, and they should require the player's full attention. The game should depend on speed, navigation, and avoiding obstacles, all of which become more difficult as the game gets faster and faster, bringing more excitement to the player.

In that way you take gamers attention. Also add achievements and a ranking system to attract more people and encourage them to play your game for longer. Consider simulation games, games that are concerned with playing out realistic situations in game settings.

These include taking care of virtual people or pets, developing cities of societies, and building amusement parks or zoos. Some of these games take hours to play, and maybe incredibly complex. In stimulation games you can use things from real life.

Anything from daily life that you find interesting can become a simulation game, and you can use simulation games to explore areas of life - different jobs, parts of the world, people and animals - that you normally don't get to participate in. For this reason these games can be attractive and endlessly interesting. Think about creating a racing game.

Racing games involve speed and challenge. You'll need to choose a vehicle - car, motorcycle, pterodactyl, anything that moves. Design different tracks or race courses where the races will take place. Also include different weapons, power-ups, or anything else you can think of to change the flow of the game and keep it from getting boring.

Find the perfect team to help you build your game. Assemble a group of people with complementary skills and ideas. Having a team will help you come up with and develop more creative ideas, and it will make the process of building the game much less stressful and more fun. Find friends to help you or find teams online, or else find an existing team to join.

Extensively test your game before publishing. After you finish the game with your teammates, review it, test every part of it in every situation you can think of to try to find bugs, and fix every bug you find. Then before publishing, find an awesome name and description for your game, one that will attract people and make them play. There are a bunch of things you can do to make a scary game with no jumpscares. Appropriate background music is worth its weight in gold when it comes to scary games.

Music really sets a mood, and depending on the music and all of the sound effects, really , you can partially control how the player is feeling. Yes No. IEnumerators and Coroutines allow you to start doing things, continue doing things until some time has passed, then stop. These contain data with less overhead than MonoBehaviors. Game engines: Make your own.

Low level. Really, really low. Unreal Engine. Notes: 2D support is not great. Requires Javascript. GameMaker Studio. Requires GML. Beginner level. Requires Lua. F or MacOS. Visual Studio? F or Windows. Comes with Unity. Tends to lag. Corgi Engine. Dialogue System. Post Processing Stack. Keijiro Takahashi. Works at Unity. Has amazing open source Unity visual effects projects! Last but not least, my 1 solution for coding problems: Google!

First: Do you want audio? Audio tools: Logic Pro. MacOS only. FL Studio? Has free demo. F ree. Limited capabilities. Useful for cleaning audio. Retro sound effect generators: Chiptone. Leshy SFMaker. Free sounds: Soundcloud? S oundcloud has a t on o f gorgeous gems under Creative Commons CC. Make sure to provide attribution if needed. C C music. Must attribute.

CC music. Bug testing your game Get others — not you — to play it. Preferably in front of you, because if they encounter a bug, they might not realize or have a hard time describing it. Play it on all targeted platforms. It may work in the editor, but does it work where it matters? For Linux and the different versions of Android especially, I find that things get a little wonky. What now? Check the console for exceptions. Found one?

Find the file and line number where the exception was thrown. If the exception sounds like something from Mars, Google it and learn about it. Then figure out why that line number is throwing that exception.

Write to console. Start tossing in them log statements in the place s you think is causing you trouble. If not, fix that. When worse comes to worse, check logs. The logs of your project will give you way more info than the console.

Read the last lines where the exception occurred. Can you fix it now? This is just a bad dream. Common errors NullReferenceException. Quick fix: Check if the variable is null before doing the thing. Problem: Your code has invalid syntax. I promise these'll give you trouble at some point in your life. Pink or black screen. General optimization tips Set the target frame rate. The frame rate could be 20 for a visual novel or 60 for a first-person shooter.

A lower than default target frame rate allows the game to spend less time rendering frames. Compress textures and audio. Crunch compress textures. Stream music and decompress sound effects on load. Decrease the audio quality. Note that compression may or may not decrease the quality of assets noticeably. Object pooling. Avoid instantiating and destroying many objects at once to prevent huge spikes.

Instead, object pool them in a List, Queue, or other data structure. Things like bullets should be object pooled. Raycasts are like little rays that shoot from your fingers or mouse everytime you tap or click.

Give each renderer a material. AssetBundles will save memory by pulling from online e. All of these are from Unity but can be applicable to other engines. Scripts: Optimizing scripts in Unity games? Art: A guide to optimizing Unity UI? Art Asset best practice guide? Memory: Reducing the file size of your build? Memory Platform-specific: Practical guide to optimization for mobiles? WebGL performance considerations? Memory Considerations when targeting WebGL? Create drafts of your game page on all your targeted game distribution platforms.

Find a list of platforms in Resources below. You can.. Find writers you like and Google their name. Their email is bound to come up somewhere: Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.

You can get video coverage of your game by: Ranking high on game distribution platforms. Keep it sweet, short, and compelling.

Use eye-catching photos and gifs. Social media. Hit that Publish button! The facts are, you made a game. You learned so much.