I apologize if I anger anyone by posting this to the wrong place if I have in fact done so.
I am an aspiring game designer. I literally (not figuratively) have completely written out 15 games both on paper and in digital writing tools. Every aspect of the game from characters to story line to environment etc. I am not a programmer so I haven’t actually done any scripting and I can’t draw worth beans so I haven’t animated anything. I know a little about scripting and animation though, and I’m teaching myself C# and a little bit of spriting and animation from different sites and sources. I just really want to come together with a team and at least try creating something so my question is. Where do I start? what should I do to get into this. I am attending Full Sail University for a bachelors in Game Design as Game Design is what I actually want to do (I am just kind of regretting my choice of college) and I am wondering if anyone can give me any insight, any at all, on where to begin with all of this.
While this is a good ‘General’ question, this can be approached from a design angle.
The first thing you should do, is find the dead-simplest idea you’ve written down - hold onto it for later.
Next, download Unity. We’ll wait.
When it’s installed, you will want to start running tutorials; the Learn link provides structured lessons to help you get started. You will want to do as many of these as possible to learn how to use Unity and the associated scripting languages!
Now. Where to actually start making games, is to try to realize that simplest idea in Unity.
Full Sail is a well and good school, but in the end the question you should be asking yourself is, ‘have I created anything?’ Your first goal should be to go public with a game, and get critiques. To get there, you have to complete a game.
Lastly, something important - Game Development is one of those things that you have to ‘just start doing.’ You’ll make mistakes - don’t fear those mistakes. This community is particularly good at being constructive and helping you find the flaws and the fun in your designs.
TL;DR: Three steps to begin:
Download Unity
Run through every single tutorial to learn how to use the tool
3: Make the simplest game you can.
If you have any issues with running through the Tutorials, there are forums for Scripting, Audio, Graphics, and more. Those can be reached from the Forum link in the menu bar above.
That’s good advice. I’d note that it is possible, I think, to assemble a team that includes a programmer and an artist, so you can focus on the game design. The problem is that most programmers (or most good ones, anyway) are very smart and creative people, and probably have lots of design ideas themselves. So, you would need to find somebody who is happy in the role of chief engineer, and an artist who’s happy making things pretty. Tricky, but doable.
I would advise you to try to find these people on campus. College campuses are a great place for that sort of thing, and working together in one place is still far more efficient (and fun!) than working in a geographically distributed team.
And, consider participating in the Global Game Jam next week! You may find some folks there that have other skills but need design help.
I would also agree with both above comments, & encourage you to look at the global game jam. Even I’m giving this one a go, not because I can program well or do art, but because you can make a board game or card game etc as well & they are just as valid. I am learning, & being surprised by, the effect paper prototyping can have & the time it can save.
In your case, because you say you have story lines & stuff, I’m assuming you could make it into an RPG or even a board game with stats or card game. Any type of game needs detailed rules before you pass them to a programmer because if the rules are clear & concise, & structured well, the programmer will be able to structure the code & work out what needs to be done & all the interactions (the implementation won’t be easy, but it will be easier than being given vague direction). If you aren’t relying on lots of physics you can easily write out your rules, find little counters, make cards on blank card stock or on bits of paper put into collectible card sleeves to make it easy to shuffle, get dice, make a board out of cardboard, whatever, & then you & your friends can sit down & play the game so you can find out if everything works as well as you think it does. This is much much quicker & cheaper than doing lots of complex coding. And who knows? you might also be able to sell it as a physical game & double your sources of income.
Wow, you guys are all great and I really appreciate all the great advice. This has helped me a lot. I am definitely downloading Unity right now. I have been learning C# all month and I am anxious to that knowledge to good use. Also I am open to other peoples creative Ideas. My designs are not so set in stone that I cant make appropriate adjustments towards and Idea or concept someone else would like to see in a project I created. Thanks again though guys I really appreciate the help. If I can get involved in the game jam I will I actually don’t have my own internet I have to go to the McDonalds everyday to sync all my stuff and do all things web-related. Not to mention it’s blizzard season here in DC so no promises but I will make the best attempt at it I can.
To get involved in the GGJ, you don’t need your own internet; you need a host site. Many colleges have them, and where there isn’t one at the college, there may be one in a nearby town (ours here in Tucson is hosted by the local makerspace). Just search for a jam site, clear your calendar for next weekend, and dive on in — it’s a great way to meet people and get involved!
At the end of your college experience you should have 2 things:
A portfolio / something that shows what you learned is applicable in the industry.
Some industry connections.
You can actually learn Game Dev / Design / Programming / Art / whatever for free in about the same amount of time you’d spend at college. The thing that is worth thousands of dollars that a college should actually do for you is connect you with potential jobs and industry people whilst you are in college.
That way when you’ve got your degree and you get in touch with people, you’ve at least got the reputation of a good school saying you can do the job, plus you’re not cold calling people.
That’s game writing, not game design. Game design is building all of the mechanics. Doing the math on how they balance. Making the mechanics fun. Building an engaging interest curve. Flow. Ect.
Perhaps more importantly, how can you know the quality of your work if you haven’t play tested ? Chances are you are sitting on 15 games that aren’t worth playing.
So get out unity or a pen and paper and do some protopyping asap. Game design is an iterative process. Design-test-design-test and so on.
To everyone who has commented. That is a big 10-4 and I will get started on all of this is soon as I can I have already started spriting for a small project just to get into design and really get a feel for what im going to be doing. Thank you all for all your help
What’s wrong with Full Sail? We’ve hired 3 game programmers from there - I was happy with all of them. To the @OP, the problem is that you are stuck. As ONLY a designer, you can’t bring anything to life. If you study Brett Victor’s talk, Inventing on Principle, you will realize that your situation implies an infinity of time between you having a good idea and the realization of that idea. Which really limits how creative you can be. It makes you a worse designer. I advise that designers learn at least some small amount of programming, if for nothing else than to be able to relate, to use a shared vocabulary, and to bring their ideas to life with prototypes.
TL;DR - Build small, tiny, dumb games. Use crappy art. And GOOD design techniques for small projects. That is your challenge.
Gigi
PS - This is often discussed in the Game Design Zen podcast (see sig).
Hey thanks a lot I will definitely take the knowledge you have shared here to heart. I have to get a removable hard drive because my notebook has crap for space but I should be getting one bynext week so I can actually get started on everything.2 TB should be enough to get everything started. As far as fullsail I have read a lot of reviews after enrollment and how thier dealing with my education overall is just kind of leaving a bad taste.
not to discredit other graduates from the university or even the curriculum so much as the faculty
Just an update for everyone who cares, I finally got my External 2 TB HD and have installed UE4 and am currently trying to install unity. (having problems because I don’t have stable internet and the install takes 5-Ever) as soon as everything gets moving I will begin posting updates on a small project I have started blueprinting so yeah. Again thanks for all the help progress coming soon.
OK so I’m freaking out. If anyone could help me or point me in the right direction to recieve help I would really appreciate it. I was studying C# on my PC. I was also simultaneously attempting to reinstall visual basic to my external HD as it didn’t completely install the last time I tried to install it. Suddenly my pc froze I waited about 40 mins for the issue to resolve itself to no avail. So I then hard reset it (held the power button until it shut off) and when I started it back up the pc refuses to show my external hard-drive. I have been trolling the web trying to find a solution to the issue. When i go to the device manager my PC recognizes the device is present and even Identifies it by name (Seagate expansion scsi device) but it does not show up under my PC as it usual. It doesn’t show up at all. I cannot access it. I did a basic google search of the issue and found a dew solutions but none worked the most promising of the solutions showed me something new that has me worried. I was told to download miniTool partition Wizard to attemp to repair a partition of the drive that ma have been damaged during the heard reset due to the fact something was still being written on the drive. And when I ran the program and looked for my other drive it shows up as “Read Only” 0.0GB. It’s a 1TB hard drive and everything that I have been working on is on it. all the sprites I made all my PDF’s everything and I don’t know how to recover it if anyone has any advice or help or solutions please share them because I completely lost and I don’t want to lose all my stuff.
These are the free troubleshooting steps you can take. you can always spend some money on data recovery software.
Well I’ll tell ya how I’ve done data recoveries on ext-HDD’s. first thing I rule out is any malfunctions with the USB, by tearing the HDD out of the caddy and connecting the drive directly to a SATA cable. then I’d go into Disk Management in Windows environment to see if the partitions are OK. if they are you maybe able to run RObocopy over to a second HDD. if your still seeing a 0.0GB volume and Robocopy isn’t working. I’d go to a Linux environment. sometimes I’ve had luck using Linux if something has happened to the formatting. also why you are doing this I would listen for clicks coming from you HDD. If you hear any odd noises, but it in the freezer for a few hours. this will shrink the metal parts and hopefully reset the actuator arm.
