An Introduction to Video Game Making

What is video game making and can you do it? The answer to the first question is a bit complicated but the answer to the second question is a resounding Yes! You can make video games and you can make them for free if you are on a tight budget. This school will cover these topics and more but first let's talk about what making a video game is all about.

The world of video game making is a very rich and complex world. It is an industry that is mature yet still growing. If you want to make video games you can choose from many different career paths available. You could do programming, graphics, story writing, project management and more. For now you are probably thinking that you would just like to make video games and see what it is all about and if you like it.

Will you have to learn how to Program? Let's take a look at a piece of code written in the language called C++

#include<time.h>
main()

{

clock_t time,deltime;
long junk,i;
float secs;

LOOP:

printf("input loop count: ");
scanf("%ld",&junk);
time = clock(); for(i=0;i<junk;i++)
deltime = clock() - time;
secs = (float) deltime/CLOCKS_PER_SEC;
printf("for %ld loops, #tics = %ld, time = %f\n",junk,deltime,secs);
goto LOOP;
return 0;
}

All of that might look pretty crazy to you but that is a snippet of code in the language called C++. And at first it might be intimidating. This little piece of code is a little timer. For a real video game the lines of code could run into the hundreds of thousands even millions of lines of code. That's a lot of programming and it gets very complex. But this is exactly what a video game is really made up of. These code instructions do everything and tell your computer, monitor, and keyboard exactly what is needed and what is done.

If this snippet of code and the thought of programming seems interesting to you then game making is a perfect fit for you! There are many things you can do in the realm of programming and just learning the skills and tools of a programmer makes you very desirable for a lot of different positions in the game industry.

But you don't have to learn how to program to make great video games!

The industry of making games has evolved to the point where there are software applications that make game design easy and programming free!

Here is an example of the workspace for game programming software called Reality Factory. The main section in the middle is composed of four large squares. In these squares you get different angles of a room in a video game (the views are top,side,front, and 3d) . Those light purple squares are your room. And in about 1 minute you can create a room and in another 5 minutes you can paint the walls different colors then actually put a character right in the room and play!

This picture shows a simple game I made with the reality factory software. I had this game up and running in less than an hour. It was really quite simple to do and you can do it too. So todays game making is a lot like architecture. You design rooms, worlds, and buildings. Then you place objects into them.

This image shows a room with a platform and some columns. Can you see how it is a lot like architecture?

Hey but what about the man in the game? How did he get there and how do you do that? We will cover that but first lets take a look at the different types of games you can make.

Lets continue with this lesson and take a look at the different types of games