Hello All! This is my first post on this forum and I have a question for you guys.
I’m currently planing to build a video game on my own. I will be encompassing all aspects of game design myself and will have to learn it all. For my game I have most of the groundwork on paper, I have the genre (2.5D side scrolling survival horror) core concepts and pillars decided on and documented and I am ready to start building.
I will be taking a lot of courses on the following:
Programming
Modeling
Animation
Audio Engineering
as well as learning to use the unity game engine properly/efficiently.
I know this is a lot to learn but I am committed and willing to do it all. My question for you is what do you think would be the most effective order to tackle those aspects of game design? any and all insight and information would be greatly appreciated! thank you!
Learning programming or a least a visual scripting tool (if you’re seriously allergic to coding) is a big one.
A lot of game types don’t even require animation; you might even do some simple games first that don’t require that at all. Modeling and audio can be farmed out to somebody else and often aren’t as significant to core game design / gameplay.
Perhaps the biggest one is Unity itself. I would actually start there, as there’s quite a bit to learn in terms of bringing all of the elements together.
Well, you don’t really have to start with Unity and not do any scripting. Typically you’d learn about GameObject’s and prefabs and all that, and quickly get to integrating bits of code as you go. It all works together. Eventually you will likely want to dive deeper into coding, but it’s a fun way to ease into it.
That’s a tall order you set upon yourself, because I don’t think that “being an artist” (audio, visuals and writing) is something one can just decide to learn.
I’m mainly a programmer (still a beginner, of course) and I could probably help out in those areas a bit, but I’m not quite artistic enough to create some sort of visual&audio “experience” of a game (or a really engaging storyline) all on my own.
On the other hand some people (such as my writer team-mate for example) are “allergic” to programming and can’t get any code done regardless of how many hours and how much effort they put into it.
Of course it’s not impossible to do everything yourself, but it’s a very tall order and only rarely seen (such games are often passion projects that require many, many years to get completed).
From my introduction to unity, I think that starting with the engine itself is a good idea, as the tutorials will cover an introduction to programming (in small snippets) aswell as a bit of everything else.
After going through a bunch of tutorial projects, it’d probably help to do some practice projects of your own before starting your actual full game (to make sure the latter is as well-made as possible).