Fledgling Videogame Developer

Here are some general guidelines that should help to get your first gamedev projects proceed, and even completed in a reasonable time. 0. Prepare to sacrifice your time and effort Ok, you have idea for a game. But are you ready to make the effort to implement it? If you want to get your ideas ready, most likely you got to do it yourself. No one else will do it for you. 1. Start with something small and simple.  If your first game project is large and complex, you probably won't finish it. 2. Select an engine that fits to your game.  There is no need to shoot birds with cannon. Try different engines and use the one that fits for your purposes. 3. Create lots of prototypes and small games.   Select the ones that work for further development. Gather experience on suspended and unfinished projects.  4. Test the mechanics in early phase.  Find out if game mechanics is working as soon as you have working prototype. Try to define game's "fun facto...

It is somehow rewarding (and also relaxing) to get something finished. I am happy to tell, that after all that debugging, polishing and problem solving we got " Explopool " flash game ready and released. Game mechanics is not too complex, but still there were challenges to be overcome before we were able to say that this (possibly) works. The basic idea of the game is simple: place and set a bomb to pool table, wait it to explode, and see how balls are pushed by the shock wave. If ball goes to the pocket, you will receive some points and handful of coins. When coin meter (on the right hand side) is full, you will get one more bomb. There is also possibility to get 2x or 3x points, if you get enough balls to the pockets with one explosion. There are few special features available to make game more interesting and challenging: black hole: sucks all balls in certain range to the hole color match: if this is activated, balls of same color will disappear if they col...

"No matter what you publish, as long as you publish something" . I have tried this strategy for a while when learning game development and released several flash games (or equivalent) without much self-criticism.  There are many hobby game developers who start a project, work passionately on it for some time, and finally dump it to the trashcan or leave to the drawer to wait for better times. And this is repeated over and over again, for every game project. Basically, there is nothing wrong with this approach: sometimes project has to be terminated for some reason. And there is always something to learn from each project, even if it was left unfinished and never shown to anyone else.  For most game developers the funniest and most interesting parts are concept creation and actual development of the game. Who would not like creating game assets and mechanics, or sketching characters and new worlds? Bug-hunting, game polishing and balancing are also tolerable tasks for most...

How do you get ideas for games? How do you further develop and grow your ideas? Do you consider yourself as a creative person? Since I have long background on so-called non-creative sector, the concept of creativity is not too familiar for me. I have colleagues who consider themselves as hightly creative persons. But in practice most of them are rather systematic thinkers and great problem solvers, than truly creative persons. Of course there are individuals that differ from the mass, but there are not many of them.  In my daily work (as SoC specialist), most of my ideas are born because of practical need. There might be a task that no one has done before and there is no ready-made solution for that. Also because I am bit lazy by nature (typical engineer?), I will try to find  the easiest possible way to perform the task. Therefore, I write lots of custom scripts for a wide range of applications. This is commonly called as problem solving, and in many cases it has nothing to...

After releasing my latest game-like work at Mochimedia, I decided it is time to have a small break in game development and evaluate how things have been going in last couple of months. My goal for the overall quality of my first flash game was not pretty high, but yes: I still was able to fall below that: game idea was not earth-shaking, graphics sucked, there were performance problems, and to top of it all the game had some nasty bugs or unexpected features. But hey: I was able to get something ready and distributed! I think it was the most important thing at that point, and it encouraged me to take next steps forward. Following game projects were bit easier to implement, and I was able to add some complexity to the game mechanics and graphics. But more complexity means also more work and to a certain extent also higher probability to errors. Couple of my projects have ended up in deadlock situation where I was unable to figure out how to fix them. I would say fledgling game dev...