How to make games? Par1 : General knowledge

Posted by : Hamza Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Hey, This is the first of a series of articles about game development, it's mainly dedicated for newbies, but if you are a little bit more advanced you are also welcome to read it, you might be missing some basic stuffs.

Part1: Generale Knowledge

What is a video game ?

- a video game is a multimedia interactive application, i think this definition if fair enough.

What does it mean Multimedia application?

- basically almost softwares you use on your computer nowadays are multimedia application because they manage and emulate different multimedia elements.

--Multimedia elements are : text ,still images, audio, video. so it's obvious console programs are not multimedia applications ( if your a gamer, by console I'm not talking about your PS4 or Xbox).

What about interactive?

- interactive means that the applications is not static, it interact with the user, every user interact with it in a different way.

it's not the same way we play Soccer video game example KONAMI PES also it's not the same way we play NFS, the application respond to the way you control it.

OK..OK! I know what is a video game , Ive played thousands of them.

note : i have been stuck on this line for 3 days because i didn't exactly know how to start

First of all, for most people, the video game experience starts at the store or and ends on the couch. only few realize that creating a game can be as complex as making a Hollywood movie. Months of planning and preparation, script writing, casting, character development, programming, digital art like sketching and 3D modeling and sculpting, cutting-edge technology and massive computing power go into making games.

It's nearly similar in a big company or small independent team. there is some difference we will mention later after we go through the different game development departments, by department I'm talking about different process of making a video game, like programming department, design department, animations department...etc

This can be different depend on the company or the team.

Mostly in Indie(independent) teams it's not the same as big companies because the very limited members number, and every member is multi-skilled for example the Game artist can also be the Level builder and the writer can also be the Music/SFX composer, in other cases single person teams ( like me for a long time) that single person must know everything about video games development , so i compose music i make SFX i make game design , i make 2D/3D graphic assets and i do programming, but mostly I'm not a good programmer, thats why my project looks good graphically but poor in game-play and programming. the worst thing about being a single person team, is that you never get better in any of the game departments , you never become a better programmer or better artist... to become professional in all of them probably you need to live 200 years maybe unless you are a genius your born to do all of them , no you are not the genius guy don't even try to be, i know how you are thinking, that's not going to work. You need a team even beginners they will learn and become good team assets better than being alone crawling slower than a snail.

So the big companies compete with the small indie teams? is that even possible? they got millions of dollars and they make AAA games and they have haundreds or thousands of employees how can that be possible ?

That's true and untrue, because mostly big companies are like Lego makers companies they produce the same products , but each one offer different features different colors, it's the same for big games companies they are limited to some game categories with different stories game-play, game mechanics and they compete the graphics quality...

Indie game development teams mostly work on smaller projects casual games rarely hardcore but they are more innovative independent teams compete creativity and innovation for new games ideas. it's rare to find a team able to make a hardcore game, because they need a lot of hight end hardware and tools they also need a lot of team members. but nowadays it's becoming easier for indie teams to make hardcore games but it's still a really hard job, so if you are a newbie or small team don't even think of a hardcore game, don't ... don't ...don't , i know you like challenge and you wont listen as i did in my beginning i though to make the next AAA game i started to make a team so i made a team of 20 person programmers artists music/SFX composer and audio programmers and writer. I thought I'm that exception i can make the AAA game and become rich and have a big studio. It's obvious to me now how silly i was, the project failed needless to say, don't ask why and try to avoid the mistakes because you can't escape the beginner mistakes and if you avoid my mistakes you will make worst mistakes. just sticks to the rules you can break rules in you game design idea , but don't break management rules because you can't, because you will fail. obviously.

So if you are new team without big experience stick to casual and make small projects and each time you know each other better and have a better experience you can work on a little bigger project. maybe some of your innovative game idea success and you will have enough success to be a bigger and bigger studio. just go step by step don't jump.

In the end, this is not the end but enough talking today, i think you might got enough advices for now, next time we will be starting talking more into development rather than advices and management ... and blablabla i know it's boring but it's needed.