Game Development: A Beginners’ POV
Have you ever experience the magical moment as you type the words ‘how to’ in the search bar of Google, the relief surging as you scan through the endless search results and the painful confusion after hours of reading? If yes, Congratulations! You’re one step closer to becoming a game developer. As a complete beginner with no knowledge in game development, Google will be your bestfriend.
Here are some tips that helped me as I ventured in the game industry.
1. The first and vital step in your adventure in the game world is Research. Search as many ‘how to’ and ‘what is’ as you want. Familiarize yourself with the terms. Research what goes into game development. Read about different development tools and visualize your goal. Are you trying to make an addictive mobile ‘Clicker’ game for profit? Are you trying to express your artistic side with an indie project that nobody else may understand? Are you trying to make a commercially viable game? Are you just trying to learn how to program for video game development? Make sure you have your goals carefully set so that you focus on the engine and market that’s right for you.
2. Choose the best engine that suites you and your needs. Depending on your game engine, you may need to learn a programming language. No pressure, there are game engines that are open sourced and provide scripting API. Your friend Youtube can offer you “Getting started” tutorials about your preferred engine.
3. Follow along with the tutorial to familiarize yourself with the game engine environment. You can also take classes on online classrooms like Lynda, Udacity and Udemy. These are not free but they’re very cheap and it’s worth it. I’ve tried the tutorials in Lynda about Unity Game Engine and they’re very helpful.
4. Ask questions. Join online discussions and forums. Get involved with the community. The more you network, the larger your support network will be. You can start with Brackeys Forum, they have up to 214K subscribers and they are all very accommodating. So don’t be afraid to ask questions.
5. Study your game engine. Learn the ins and outs, practice creating basic games and enjoy the process. If at first you don’t succeed, name it version 1.0. You can create as many versions as you want and you will eventually start learning through trials and errors.
6. Find a niche and stick with it. Some people that try to learn too many different styles at once but they ended up giving up very quickly.
7. Be ready to devote a lot of time and energy into this new skill. It has a relatively steep learning curve, but once you pass a certain point- something with ‘click’. That is when you will realize that you are in fact capable of creating something very special.
8. YouTube
9. Google
10. Youtube
11. Google
12. Youtube — Google. I can’t stress this enough. Google and YouTube are wealthy of information about game development all you need is to learn how to sort through the nonsense.
You will encounter countless of errors and difficulties that will test your patience and when that time comes you must look back at your goals and how far you’ve come. Don’t give up. It will be hard at first. Anything worth having takes time and energy. This includes the skills that go with Game Development.
