I am taking the plunge and would like to have a go at making my own games. The dream game is an 2d action RPG space opera with shmup and vehicle elements(If not too ambitious). It will be in the vain of Secret Of Mana or Chrono Trigger. I really want that sense of scale and epicness those games have with the cinematic feel No Place for Bravery or Jotun give off.
I am thinking hand-drawn graphics as I love that cartoony look and want to pay homage to the 80s stuff I grew up with.
Now, I am silly enough to think I can create that game as a first timer. Are there any types of games I should be looking to develop as a beginner that will hone my skills so I am better placed for the dream game?
Or is it just better to prototype small portions such as combat, level design, vehicle sections, shmup sections?
Lastly, where can I find a good game design document or any books, youtube channels people would highly recommendd?
As far as what games to make when starting, go as simple as possible and focus on a single or very small number of game mechanics. What you described would be a bad choice for a first game.
Create a game no more complex than Pac Man, Frogger, or Tetris. Work the game through to the point it is in a polished enough state to potentially ship the game. Until you do that you won’t have an appreciation for how much work even such a simple game will take to get to a shippable state.
For example, creating a Frogger clone will take days or at the most a few weeks to get to a fully playable state. Without the experience of going through all this pretty much any new game developer will be under the misconception that this is the majority of the work involved. In reality it will take a few additional months of work to polish the game, deal with all the corner cases, deal with all the little details such as adding game options and testing on different platforms and screen resolutions, getting the graphics and UI just right, etc, to actually finish the game.
If you work on a much more complex project you will not only multiply the amount of time to get to a playable state, but multiply the time to do all the rest. The game you described could be a year or more of work, depending on the quality you are going for and your current skill set. If you want it to be multiplayer, multiply the work again by 2 to 3 or so.
A lot of this depends of course on how much available time you have per day or week to dedicate to game dev. The guestimate numbers I mentioned assumed this is a spare time endeavor, such as a few hours a day and a good amount on the weekends, working around a job or school schedule. If you have neither and did this like 80 hours per week, you’d obviously get things done at a far more rapid pace.
I think PONG is a great first game, it is deceptively complex, forcing you to handle things such as collision detection and response, input handling, and even a bit of AI. It also requires “states” in that you restart the game each time a point is scored, etc… You also would want to track points, and call a “win/loss” at some amount of points. All that comes in a really simple game.
Tetris and Pac-Man are also deceptively complex, and I wouldn’t want to do either of those as a first project, or even a second really. I think something like Breakout/Arkanoid is better for a 2nd project as it builds on the PONG concept. Tetris and Pac-Man add complexities like crazy, like tracking completed lines in Tetris and maze AI in Pac-Man.
The above advice is also quite sound, as far as building smaller bits of your dream game on their own. Then once you are confident you can handle all of those individual parts, you will have a better idea how to then put them together into the bigger project.
For me personally I did the basic learn stuff followed by this tutorial. The youtube tutorial is pretty handy to go from start to finish and satisfying to see it online and downloadable. Then I made my own simple game of my own idea. Now I am moving into what you are looking to do. Not the same game but a complex, in depth game with lots of moving parts. Not something I would ever attempt without any previous experience.
Anyway that is where i’m at now and how I got here.
I would say listen to him. And then if you want, take everything you learned from Pong and expand it with item variables and custom bits and bobs by trying Breakout. After that follow your heart, you can take that knowledge and put it to 3d or stay 2d, but you’ll at least know better what drawer to put your ideas in.
I really appreciate the answers, in terms of the racing element is there anything that relocates mode 7?
I wonder in my mind if I get to the holy grail of creating that game whether to have the game made in 3d but look 2d if that makes sense so then with the added vehicle/shmup elements it might work easier?
I’ll start basic I have a udemy course and follow Brackets and Skyloo and I’ll take it from there. Thanks all.
Real mode 7 is way too smart for me to comment on, but if it were me wanting to do it with what I had I’d probably mock it up with a 2d flat colorful terrain and basic sprite actors.
Unless your goal is to understand how they implemented it you can just use textured quads with the appropriate camera settings and angle. It was a neat effect back in the day but it was only made the way it was made because the hardware couldn’t do actual 3D.
I dug right into multiplayer when I was a novice, well actually I was forced into it, we started as a sandbox SP game than a another game released that was just that and we shifted towards a MP game instead.
A novice with the game engine but not a novice programmer. I feel it’s important to mention that as being a knowledgeable programmer makes a huge difference when trying to wrap your head around the concepts behind networking.
The traditional game development ladder was something like this:
Tic Tac Toe (OXO)
Pong
Space Invaders
Breakout
Pac Man
Platformer
Racer
FPS Shooter
Where each game gets a bit more complex to develop, it’s a bit dated now with game engines allowing you to throw together 3d environments from templates, prefabs and inbuilt tools.
So why not look at the systems in Unity and pick the ones you want to learn and choose the simplest game that will use those features e.g. 2D physics → Pong.
In addition, you should think about building a game development framework Unity provides a good starting toolkit but there are things you constantly need for games that if you transfer from game to game will save you time. e.g. Menu/Options, Meta Game.
I always tell people TicTacToe but I dont think anyone actually does it.
I have, in three different languages.
Java
Shockwave
JavaScript on an HTML page
As others stated, you should make some simple games first, mainly for practice and experiments. The first steps to game dev are the hardest, with the sharpest learning curve.
After that, if you really want to make a game that big, let me tell you what your biggest enemy is going to be: “Staying motivated.” It’s going to take who knows how long to make, even if you have all the skills and tools you’ll need. It’s very important that you don’t give up half way through, just because you get stuck or bored on something, or because you had a new idea for a game that you feel exited to work on instead. Sure, it might be okay to postpone development temporarily, just don’t abandon it completely. I’ve heard this is a common mistake.
If you ever find yourself uninterested in developing your own game, ask yourself why that is, and remind yourself why you where so exited to make it in the first place. (I know that right now it might be hard to imagine yourself in this situation, but it could happen. You never know what you’ll be like in the future.)
Here’s what your focus should be for now: If you can make most of, or a lot of the big and essential aspects of your game to showcase to people, only then will you have a chance at gathering funds from kickstarter, etc. And with that, you can hire help. (And also gather a following, and build hype.) This is the path many indies have taking to success.
(Now, don’t worry about the “bragging rights” of having made a game all by yourself. Such a pride doesn’t make sense to me, since you probably didn’t make the engine, the tools, the genre, or even the computer that where all essential in creating the game.)
For my personal experience with struggling with code, I would say making a basic third person platformer is actually easier than oxo, tetris and other. In fact 3d is easier than 2d in my view, only if you are using engine.
Turning a character is easier than flipping conceptually
you don’t have to deal with layering order to fake depth
collision tend to be more fully featured in 3d
you are generally just incrementing and decreasing variable, and some input and collision check.
it’s more spectacular to see it move/
adding physics object is generally just dropping them in the scene, and interacting with it is intuitive for complex result.
I tried it on my 12 years nephews (actually cousins, but the age difference is big) and in 15mn we had a full simplest game.
Oxo mean you have to explain what is data structure (array) and how to represent the concept of the data structure visually. So I would say pong is the basic minimal easiest thing to do.
prototype… pick and learn from youtube tutorials… also, do the Learning tutorials on the Unity webpage (yeah, some are outdated and full of errors, but that’s a good thing, as it will force you into the habit of reading the online documentation about the funtions you are using, and gets you used to “bug finding”…
Since you want “Space Opera”, start with the Unity Space Shooter tutorial… very satisfying…