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Whats your advice to younger people learning how to make games?

A topic by CCSoftware created Apr 28, 2020 Views: 705 Replies: 13
Viewing posts 1 to 9
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im 13 and I was wondering is there any advice anyone could give to me? Thanks

Moderator moved this topic to General Development
Moderator(+3)

Make the games you like to play, because you'll be playing them a lot.

Be patient, because you're not going to make great games in a week, or a month, or a year. It will take much study and practice. You'll probably fail a few times, too.

Start with something simple. Don't turn your nose at text-based games, for example. People love them, and you have to start with something you can handle.

Talk to people. Play their games, too. Then show them your games.

Try all kinds of engines. Try to learn programming. Figure out what you like best and what you can do good work with.

Don't give up easily.

Be kind.

Thanks :) I know quite a bit of c# so that's like my main language but ill take everything you said on board

C# is definitely a good starting point, considering you can use it with Unity or create your own engine with it. I wouldn't discourage you from learning C++ one day, but that's only if you just really love programming.

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As another already said, start with something simple.

There are lots of game engines out there that don't even require programming skills at all. If you're more of a visual learner that might be the way to go. A game engine like Crey might be a good starting place. 

But if you're like me and want to know what happens "Behind the scenes" in a video game, I would check out QB64 for the Qbasic programming language.  Some people might not remember, but back in the 80s and 90s there were tons of books and tutorials on how to make very simple Qbasic games. Heck, in just the first week of High School Qbasic class I had already figured out how to make a decent text adventure and from there I played around with graphics and other features.

One way to gauge how "easy" or "simple" a programming language is: Research how many lines of code it takes to do something simple, a prime example being the famous "Hello World" project. Some programming languages can accomplish this in 2 lines of code and others require 5 or more.

I hope this helped and welcome to game development -- it's fun!


EDIT: Just saw that you said you know C# already so in that case I'd skip QB64 and stick with that. I'm planning on learning C# myself.

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Thanks. C# isn't too hard id learnt it by watching unity learn tutorials and taking notes all the time.

Deleted 3 years ago

Thanks :) Im implementing custom music on my current project so ill tick that one off the list.

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I wrote some essays on software development, including a few on game development,  several years ago, available here on itch.io. The table of content links point to the same articles on Medium.  It's oriented to professional development, and some of it is a bit dated, but maybe you'll find something useful. Aside from that I recommend reading project postmortems wherever you can find them (gamasutra.com has a lot) to see what other people went through to get their games done, and I always look at in-game credits to see how many people worked on it, what specialties, tools, etc...

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As others have said, start simple.   I have a small mountain of unfinished games that required complex mechqnics that I just didn't have the skills to complete.  Playability > content.

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I'd recommend a lite Computer Science background. Not college level education, but you need to be aware of how applications use up CPU and RAM, where it's stored in the memory, etc. Even if you're not a programmer, it's a big help. For instance, a lot of newbies using Unity tend to waste resources on giant 4K textures, even if there's not much detail. (You'd be surprised at how often 256 or 512 resolution textures will suffice in 3D games)

I'd also read up on Game Programming Patterns.  I don't expect you to understand all of it, but I recommend at least reading the bits on Game Loops, States and Object Pools.

Thanks. I’m hoping to do Computer Science or Games Dev At University so that I’ll take that in :)

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Don't go to university for gamedev!!! A computer science degree will get you far in many fields, but a game dev degree will only get you a 50% chance of landing a position in a AAA company with little job security, long hours and not much pay. Keep studying C#, and delve a little into C++ if you really like it.

Yea that's what everyone says so probably will do computer science as there is way more jobs :)

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It has been said a lot but really, start small =D. Personnaly I started working on video games around 24. I spent 3 years on my first game because it was way to ambicious. Now, I want to work on a new game every 4 or 6 months and I'm happy with that =]

Also, share your work , but you are on itch.io so you must have gotten that already. =]