You must have played at least few computer games in your life. Are you interested in learning about how these games were designed? There is a huge demand for video game designers in all parts of the world. Therefore, you can also think about taking this career path without having any doubts on mind.
If you want to get into game designing, you need to have a clear understanding on how to program. In fact, you should have a good knowledge about all the essential components of programming. In case if you are a beginner to program, you must pay special attention towards Python because it is heavily being used in the gaming industry. Moreover, Python requires a very low level of details from the programmer, which creates an ideal platform to focus more on the concepts. Usually you will be able to figure out the basics of python within a week.
The specific type of language depends on the kind of game that you are interested in developing. In other words, you need to make the decision whether you are planning to proceed with game development or game engine development. The game engine developers are the individuals who create the core of the game, which is also known as the engine. It has the ability to power up the entire game. If you can choose to become a game engine developer, you will have to deal with low level details that are related to programming. Therefore, you will have to learn the basics of C and C++ as well. In addition, you will have to be aware of code optimization techniques and memory allocation as well.
The second path that you can take is to become a game developer. In here, your primary objective would be to code the games with the assistance of a coded engine. You will not have to build the engine from the scratch because you are provided with the freedom to use an engine that is developed by someone else. The game engine usually consists of bindings, which are in a scripting language such as ruby, lua or python. Therefore, you would need to code the game by using this scripting language. You don't need to pay more attention towards low level details because your objective is to design the game.
You can choose any of these paths based on your capabilities and preferences.
People who are new to the game development industry are strongly encouraged to develop the entire game on their own without using a coded engine. Then you will be able to learn a lot of useful things, which can be beneficial in the future. Moreover, you will be able to make the decision on which path you should follow because you have some sort of hands on experience with both phases of development.
In order to make video games, you would require extra libraries as well. If you are a person who knows the basics of programming, you know what libraries are. Basically libraries are the extra patches of code, which could be linked to your code in order to make the life easy while developing. When you are engaged in the process of developing a game, you would require a library for graphics, networking and event handling. People who use Python are provided with perfect libraries, which have all the above mentioned capabilities. If you are using C and C++, you don't need to worry about anything because you have SDL or Allergo. If you do a simple search on the internet, you will be able to get more information about programming libraries related to the language that you use.
Once you download a library, you need to start playing with it in order to get familiarize with the content. You can try to make simple stuff such as loading images, circles and rectangles. You can also make some animations. In order to start drawing an animation, you should first create the object and you need to create another object with the same dimensions and displace its coordinates. You will not have to spend a lot of time in order to draw an animation.
When you are aware of the basics, you can make a simple game such as Tetris or Pong. However, you need to be aware of the basics of physics while creating the game. You can also search the internet for a game loop structure, which will assist you during the coding process. Once you complete coding, you can take the next step, which is about creating a more complex game. For instance, you can create a game with two tanks fighting against each other. You don't need to purchase excellent quality graphics in order to create such a game. You just need to get hold of some royalty free images from the internet.
When you know how to make simple games, you should think about games that have some sort of AI elements. A top view soccer game or something like Pac Man would be an ideal concept for such a game. You can also think about cloning more and more arcade games such as breakout. Once you successfully complete creating an AI related game, you have covered more than 90% of the concepts related to game designing. Learning more advanced theories will not be a major issue for you because you have a clear understanding about the fundamentals.
When you are designing games, you would get the need to use a game recommendation engine as well. You can simply use a game recommendation engine as such Playne because it offers all the features of an ideal game discovery engine. You would get the need to play more and more games in order to get new ideas and Playne can keep track of them to make the life easy for you. It can also be used to track your achievements and earn points based on your gaming prowess as well.