Have you ever played the Super meat boy game? Or Minecraft? These are two successful games that have one thing in common – individual game developers made them. The two games I just mentioned have made millions, even billions and that’s only two of the several success stories of successful games built by individuals game developer.
The question now is how do you create your own success story? How do you make a game by yourself? What are the skills-set you should have? What tools do you need to make your own game? Don’t go too far; I’m answering all the questions in this post, so carefully read through. I believe that once you’re done reading through this practical guide, you can confidently start making games by yourself.
Before I start, there’s an important notice you should know: making a game on your own requires lots of time and dedication. This is not in any way to discourage you, but to make you know before-hand that it is time-consuming. Therefore, you must be ready to give at least couple of hours daily to developing a game.
However, looking on the bright side, you won’t be all by yourself. These days you can find a lot of useful guides and video tutorials that will guide you to making your own game with step-by-step instructions.
Continuing, let’s explore the processes involved in making a game together.
Firstly,
You need to have a game idea and visualize to yourself: It all starts with a concept, what you have in mind about the game. The type of game genre, what characters will you represent, and the storyline of the game are essential factors in the initiation process. I expect you to be a beginner reading this, so I suggest you have simple video game ideas at this stage, don’t start with building a GTA type of game, start small.
Secondly, you need a game making software; this will save you the time and the stress of learning complex computer programming languages. The game making software is designed to make game development straight forward, though they require some basic programming which you can handle as a beginner.
There are quite some game developing software out there with different features and price labels. You cut your coat according to your size; you can also read their reviews online to see which works best for you. For me, I use Unity because they have a free version(Windows/Mac OS X/Linux) that has quite some feature, it has a very active community to help in case of challenges, and it’s a good software for making cool 3D games. You can check out other game making software like Stencyl, GameMaker, RPG Maker, etc.
Furthermore, you need to design the character and interactive environment for the game: this process is as complicated as the game concept you have in mind. Designing the characters and setting off a 2D game will be more comfortable for you compared to that of a 3D game. For a beginner, it’s best you start with a 2D game in which all you need is a good image editing tool like Photoshop or GIMP. Anyone of them will do very well.
Lastly, test the game for errors; I believe as a beginner you need to spend more time on this process to build a great game. Play the game, publish it for friends and family to play; get feedback from them on the whole game. Lookout for the errors and make adjustments to codes written in the game developing platform.
After fine-tuning the game of any possible errors and hitches, you can publish it to any platform for everyone to download. You can use Unity to publish your game for different platforms easily.
That’s majorly the processes involved in making a game by yourself, other aspects that are equally important in making your game is the design of audio files and sound effects for the game. If designing audio is strange to you, there are libraries of free audio files available on the internet that you can download.
Simple and clear, right?
So, let’s highlight the necessary skills you need for you to go through the game making process as explained above comfortably:
- Have a great imagination. This’ not a skill per se, but an essential ingredient in building your game. You can decide to replicate other games as you practice, but much more, you need to be creative. Bring up your characters and storyline.
- Be able to code in C# – you should have a fundamental knowledge of C#, you don’t need to know all the complex codes or algorithms in making your first game. If you can’t program C#, there are free online courses you can learn from via the internet.
- Also, be able to draw and make simple arts from an image editing tool like Photoshop.
You don’t need a college degree in computer science or art to make a game. All you need in summary is a creative mind, a dedicated attitude, be able to use a game developer, basic C# knowledge, basic Photoshop knowledge and that’s all. You’re good to make your first game all by yourself.
