So, You want to make a game?

A new day has come, where YOU, woke up and just wanted to make a game. Everyone has their starting point! But let's consider some elementary stuff first.

Get yourself a nice notebook. Find some label, and stick it at the front of it. Now write "Game Developer's notepad" on it. Then, before you even begin thinking of creating World of Warcraft II, start asking yourself some questions.

Let's begin :

• What is a game?
• What are the game types?
• What does game development even mean?
• What's the typical workflow of creating a game?
• What's a game's anatomy?
• What's this game's target audience?
• What's the game's genre?
• What's a serious game?
• What are the tools / technology i can utilize to manage this?
• What's my role in all this?
• So, how do i start?!

Did you write all this down? Cool. Now we'll start filling in the gaps... You see, game development is no easy task. It's not just fetching building blocks and mashing them all together to create a unique experience. It requires planning, skill, organization, communication, testing, knowledge, and a lot, a lot, A LOT of time.

Do you still think you have what it takes? Before you kill yourself by smashing your head against a wall going the brute's way of creating games, together, we'll take a much smoother approach to that wall and slowly remove it from our way by taking out all of its' bricks, one at a time, meaning before we take a deep dive in the world of game development there are some key..."terms" you can say, that will require you to be fully knowledgable of them before going for the big catch.

There is plenty of time though if you are still intrested. Let's try and discern each brick and reduce this wall to dust! Operation Deconstruction, commence!

Experimental Learning

Right now I'm mostly into 2D game development.

If you want to learn about game logic, sprites, some event-driven coding, and many wonderful effects, MMF2 is for you and it's a perfect starting place for aspiring game developers that want to go out to the big field, 3D games.

It really helped me make a lot of games , and i will be posting them here eventually. My main goal was to make some remakes of old retro games like pong, oil panic, arkanoid etc, and from such games , grab the techniques i used just to take the next game i will make to the next level.

That's pretty much the most important thing for me. Learning. If you learn to do something, how to utilize it, how to play with it in the future, how to expand it to something more complex and in some cases , much more beautiful , you are bound to become great and evolve your skillset at the same time.

Others learn by viewing tutorials, others by following tutorials, and some others learn by doing, by failing, by experimenting with all these diferent settings MMF has to offer.

For me, it's a really fun way to learn, which only makes you want to learn more. And at least in the early stages of my learning, i just didn't care too much for the graphics of my game, as my main concern/focus was the technique to make the game itself , which was important. Why? Because now i know that technique , and can easily implement it in another game.

Consider yourself in the same spot as me. You will, naturally, go out and do some research, looking at old retro games and you will wonder: "can I make that game? What can I learn from it?". Then , you will try to make the game and if you manage to , you will surely learn more about game mechanics, AI, sprites, animations. That technique can be used in your next project. Or you can also just be in the lookout for more retro games = more techniques. And eventually you will reach that level where you have made 10~15 small remakes of a retro game (just the first level or so.)

You are now in the spot where you can begin your very first FULL GAME, featuring ALL the techniques you learned from ALL other previous games. Imagine yourself as a Dungeons and Dragons' Mind Flyer.
You just learn skills and abilities from your enemies , resulting in you becoming stronger and stronger.
Then you can use these abilities to defeat your foes in a much much MUCH easier way, rather than going heads on with a boss enemy and you don't know any abilities that may help.

It's like going for a Complex 6-man party , time-based RPG with multiple enemies, item system, experience, abilities, status ailments, party swaps and scripted attack animations with special events without ANY previous experience. Will you ever code something like that? Will you ever create such a mechanic from scratch when you don't even know what's being done in the background? NO.

Nothing to worry about though, just go and try figuring out how everything works by working on small games at first and as many as you can. Trust me, you WILL learn and things will go naturally as you make more and more games. And please don't get discouraged if you make crappy games. Everyone does. I currently have made 20 games which are ALL crappy. What have i learned from that though? A LOT.

When I get some time i will start working on my first big project. Some full game perhaps, till then I will just keep learning and learning.

Starting tonight

Hello everyone, my name is Kostas Dokos and this is my first blog post, yay!

Some stuff 'bout me and this blog in general: I am a student and also an indie Game Developer and I will be posting here about game development in general. I am also a Microsoft Student Partner and I spend a lot of time developing Applications for the Windows Phone mobile platform. When I get some time I will usually post here now and then.

I also enjoy Pixel Art, to be honest I just started out, because I wanted to try out my creativity and provide graphic assets to myself just the way I want them , and it's rather cooler, than trying to find out exactly what you want from out there , or from an external source, so from time to time, you may find me posting about my new silly Pixel Art! (An especially useful technique to pickup if you can't find yourself a graphic artist..!)

Game Engine for 2D: Multimedia Fusion 2 developer
Game Engine for 3D: Unity 3D

Coding: C# / javascript (Unity)
Pixel Art: Sometimes PIQ, mostly Photoshop.
Sprite Animation: Either Natively in MMF2Dev or Photoshop.

That's about all the info I can share for now.

Cheers.