For you to have the greatest chance of finishing your first game, you must resist this urge and stick to Level 1. Again, it is important that you plan out as much as you can before you begin coding. This is why the main encounter for this level is a desire to stop planning and begin coding. You would have been hard pressed to continue playing if you kept dying over and over again to these massive obstacles. If you've played the Halo series, just think about how hard the game would have been if you encountered a Hunter pair during the first level of your first playthrough. If you did, you would encounter hard problems that would cause you to quickly become demotivated and stop. Game development is about the trade-offs - great games don't have to do everything, they just have to a limited number of things well.īecause of this, it is extremely important that you do not skip this level and head straight into development (Level 3). Take a look at these tutorials for more advice on planning a gamedev project: Thus, the secret to finishing a game is to deal with problems in small amounts and without letting them pile up all at once. It becomes more difficult to finish a game as the problems you encounter increases. You don't want to leave any big holes in your design that will cause you to struggle later. However, as time goes by, this level becomes increasingly harder to complete.Īs you jot down your ideas, also jot down the details of these ideas: how they will work, how they will affect the player experience, and how they will affect the gameplay. Usually this is pretty easy at first, as your mind races with lots of neat ideas that you will want to incorporate into your game. Think about everything you want in your game, and then write it down. When you first start making your game, the best thing to do is write down all the details. The goal of this level is to consider everything about your game up front so that you don't have to improvise later. The first level, and arguably the most important level, is planning - planning out every aspect of the game before you even begin coding. Remember, the first 90% of your game takes 90% of the time the last 10% takes the remaining 90% of the time. It will incorporate resources and quotes from other game professionals, as well as insights about how implementing the walkthrough for my own first game would have helped me to finish it. This walkthrough will guide you through the process of successfully creating your first game. Each level also has its own encounters (the problems and difficulties you are likely to come up against) and its own end level boss (which signifies when you are ready to move on to the next level). Just like in a video game, each level is more difficult than the last. If developing a game is a game in itself, then it consists of four levels: Plan, Prototype, Develop, and Release. So how can you increase your chances of finishing your first game? Enter this video game development walkthrough. Many developers start a game but never finish it. Unfortunately, my experience isn't uncommon for game developers.
#How to create your own game on a computer code#
I never finished that game (it didn't go beyond the first town) and I don't even think I have the code any more. I first programmed it as just a simple room using the TI-83+ Calculator, and later made into a full-fledged town using Java in my last year of high school. It was a simple text based adventure inspired by a MUD called Divine Blood: My First Gameīefore we get to the video game development walkthrough, I want to tell you about my first game. When you get stuck making your first video game, what can you do? That's where this article comes in: think of this as a walkthrough for developing your first game. When you get stuck in a video game, you might head to GameFAQs to find a walkthrough to help you get through it.