How to Make Games

Disclaimer: I suck at making games. The screenshot below is from a prototype I’ve been working on over spring break. It took me two days to produce that crap. My drawing abilities are even worse than my poor programming skills. Outside of a few friends, no one has played any of my games since I do not think they are good enough to show to the world. But do you know what you call the guy who makes crappy games? A game developer.

A not-so-impressive shoot ’em up with time control mechanics.

For years, I was just a wannabe. In middle school, I started visiting gamedev.net and doing the tutorials on cprogramming.com but gave up once I got to DirectX and imposing function calls like int MessageBox(HWND hWnd, LPCTSTR lptext, LPCTSTR lpcaption, UINT utype);. Through high school, I made a few more attempts at getting into game development, but they all stalled when I could not build my overly ambitious ideas.

Then a few semesters ago, I grew tired of never producing anything, so I learnt how to use the XNA framework and made a Pong clone. From there, I continued making small, simple games and learnt to use some new libraries like LibGDX.

Making games has become a passion of mine, but I get depressed knowing that if I had better guidance my skills could be years ahead of their current state. So I have written this piece to give advice to newbies like the past version of myself. This advice may not be valid for everyone, but in a world of 7 billion, there’s at least a few who will be aided by this.