The more you know about the process, the more miraculous it seems that games get made at all. As former PC Gamer writer Tom Francis described programming when he was making Gunpoint: "The most useful way I've found to think of it is this: Your game is fucking insane. It is a mental patient. It has completely lost its mind, and to make it behave in any kind of reasonable way, you have to be expecting every sensible instruction to be met with screaming, preposterous bullshit.
While it's easy to feel paralyzed by the thought of learning to design and program your own game, we asked quite a few indie devs for their advice and they all offered the same advice for beginners: just do it. Jump in, no matter how scary it is.
To help you take that first exhilarating and inevitably frustrating—but also, probably, rewarding! Paired with developer recommendations, hopefully this will serve as the push you need to get started.
GameMaker Studio 2 is your one stop destination if you want to get into game development. The platform allows creators to use the tool's easy-to-learn drag-and-drop interface, or work hands-on with the engine's own scripting language, GML. We talked to several developers who've made popular games in GameMaker, who shared their own experiences with the tool.
Mark Essen, creator of Nidhogg and Nidhogg 2 , says GameMaker is great for beginners because scripting is pretty open-ended, and Yoyo Games has a wealth of tutorials and guides to help folks get set up quickly. A marketplace also offers add-ons to customize the engine to build a platformer or top-down RPG.
Thankfully, 2D gaming later saw a resurgence, with most of these AAA series receiving 2D or at least 2. And now we have popular indie games like Nuclear Throne, Hyper Light Drifter, and Super Meat Boy paving the way forward for what was nearly a lost art. Trends are always changing, however, and in a world smitten with blockbusters like Red Dead Redemption 2, Fortnite, and Overwatch, one can't help but wonder how 2D gaming will persevere going forward.
So, to help us predict the future, we asked our panel of 2D game developers how they see this early form of gaming evolving. But before we get to the future, first we need to understand the present. Why is 2D gaming still so important in the modern era? We were given a range of reasons, starting with the inherent accessibility 2D games offer. This sentiment was echoed by Dan Johnston of Chequered Ink -- makers of Game Dev Dan vs Life -- who says: "2D games are easier to visualise and prototype quickly for developers.
You don't have to build a big, complex environment in a beefy game engine to get an idea how your game idea is going to look. You can also make 2D games with a smaller and less experienced team. YoYo Games head of development Mike Dailly adds: "It's still the fastest way of making games, and still the simplest interaction for casual users. The frustration of a 3D interface will drive many casual users from an app, not just games.
This isn't to say that 2D gaming is exactly easy to develop. In some ways, it can be even harder. Art is often the biggest challenge. Levels need to be hand-drawn, even in pixel art, and minor changes always require updating and working with the art.
There's no easy lighting adjustments, no camera tweaks. If it doesn't look good, it's being redrawn -- no way around it. Steve-Tack , Aug 6, Joined: Dec 26, Posts: 7, Personally, I see it as the question should be "what makes you play a computer, console or phone game? I guess I think somewhere along the way designers kind of lost some creativity turning their focus on 3D and "for real" physics and so forth.
Obviously, this is not entirely true. Anyway, 2D and 3D well both are just viewpoints of the game world. There is no reason why you cannot build a really cool 2D game that is way more fun than the majority of 3D games. Focus on the important stuff not the graphics rendering system used. I've always thought interaction is one of the most important aspects to a game. The more your 2D character sprite can interact with the game world the better in general. This also allows the player to come up with their own unique solutions to obstacles encountered in the game.
GarBenjamin , Aug 8, And the wider collision boundaries for helpful objects and smaller ones for harmful objects is HUGE…I went through that myself when I had testers playing my game Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief App Store — shameless plug haha I had collision boundaries that were all the same size for both the dangerous and helpful objects and it only checked for collision on one frame of the animations…this was good for the dangerous objects because you had a little leeway since things had to line up just right to count as a collision.
What the player expects to happen is sometimes more important than what should logically happen. When you program a game, you think logically about what happens in the background of the game. You even use this logic to judge how fun the game is. But a player does not see the logic in the background. Pingback: 11 Tips para hacer un juego de plataformas entretenido. Big thanks for posting this! I was so worried about how I should start writing my platform GDD and this really helped to put things in order.
Pingback: Diorgo Jonkers » Game dev articles. I personally first do all the graphics and then start to code using this graphics.
Sometimes of course I have to make corrections, but the speed is much higher than if I was working on prototypes and later discovered that they were wrong. If you work in a team it may be better to prototype. Imagine if the artists just started creating graphics and when you finally start programming you realise that half the graphics will not be used. Therefore a lot of time and money has been wasted. Prototyping does not necessarily mean you have to prototype the whole game before creating assets.
You can prototype in bits, but ideally should prototype the main gameplay first. Essentially, you prototype something before creating large amounts of assets for it.
The artists start creating the player graphics and all the animations. When you finally program the game, you all realise that you spend most of your time running, and never walking and very seldom use the slide. The running turns out to be more fun than walking or sliding. You then decide to drop the walking and sliding from the game. The prototype helped define all the team graphics that the game will need.
At the end of the prototype, I could give the artist a very specific list of graphics I needed, even down to the number of frames per animation. Because the prototype helped determine the maximum texture size for a team, I knew how many frames will fit on the texture.
It was much easier and faster to change the prototype graphics i. I know this is an older article, but I just want to say thanks for the tips. And on prototyping, I only prototype when planning out the workflow for dev.
There is no point to working months on a prototype. Also, a prototype will tell you if the game is fun without the graphics. The art is the icing on the cake that enhances an already fun game. On the flip side, how many lo-fi games are out there that people love to play, but look like trash?
A lot. When I made my first game where I work I probably did 10 prototypes of different style of games until we decided which one to go with. I did them in a month using different game engines until we decided which would work at that time.
I would do the same thing for my personal work as well. Pingback: Moonman: The Last 2 Years. BP I make video games and fun software by fractional distillation. Fuq son. Pingback: Primeiro post Technoverdrive.
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