Game Development Article

Making a Video Game from Start to Finnish

Game development starts with an idea or inspiration. You think, Hey, what if there were a game like this and with elements of that.

But building a game is like any other formidable task, like building a cathedral or writing a novel. Building a video game takes passion. It takes dedication. You could even say it takes obsession. From what I have learned it takes a great deal of your time, energy, and thought. It's never finished. Even when it's technically finished, you find things, new things that you could correct or change.

It's a very demanding and highly stressful task. If you don't love it completely, with all its misgivings, you could quickly grow to hate it.

There are several things that a person who has an idea might do in order to make it into a reality, and that's what I will share with you, based on my experience from creating a small game myself and from talking to game developers. 

The first thing you need to do is to come up with your idea which I found can be very hard. I went and talked to Sean Northridge former Microsoft employee and independent game developer. Sean explains his process “You have got to come up with the game play first, as much as the story is fun, the gameplay is what makes it great, if you don’t have great gameplay but you have a great story it’s just not going to work ”. Once you have it all down you then should put it in a game design document.

The game design document, or GDD, is a collection of information that describes every aspect of the game from a design side of things. It describes how the menus will react to user input, the backstory behind the main character, the art and what experiences the player should have while playing the game.

It helps to explain your ideas to other people so that they can join you in realizing them, and it allows the development team to share a common understanding of the project on which they are working.

After your idea is sorted you will need two groups of people: The developers to help you make the game and the publishers who pay for the production of the game.

You will need a technical design document. The same as GDD this describes how the game will function behind the scenes. Everything from the technical perspective must be included.

Now you move to the most critical part of your game, the engine. It works with all the core code in the game, the code that's made to perform physics calculations, talk to other computers over a network, draw the graphical elements in the game, play the audio, run scripts, and manage the artificial intelligence. Once you find one that best suits your game you can start working on it.

You will also need content and art. The levels, characters, music, textures, 3D models and animations should be separate from the engine this allows developers to easily make modifications as the production changes over the Corse of the project.

When the game begins to resemble the vision you had for it. It's at this point it is important to start testing it. As it comes together, there's a kind of euphoria, a sense that you have built this wonderful and amazing thing quite literally from nothing at all. You created it from only the brilliant swirling visions inside your head.  For the testing you need to get players that know nothing about your game. You need to take note of the things they find difficult or impossible to understand so that you can work on them to move on.

During this phase of the production your original idea might change in order for you to correct the flaws. By testing it and working hard you can come out with a nicely polished game.

I also went and talked to David McCabe programmer for Batcat games. David advice for developers starting off   “Make lots and lots of games because your early games are going to be almost invariable shit so get them out of the way early make clones of things and figure out how things work and don’t worry so much about the end goal.”

Now that your game is complete you are ready to release it into the word and start your career as an internationally acclaimed game developer.