Hey everyone,
In the next few ‘Tale Tuesday’ articles, we will cover and answer some of the more commonly asked questions about game development. Stay tuned, as there will be plenty of articles in this topic and some of the questions that interest you may soon be here as well! This is the second article in the series, the previous one is available here: https://iguanamercenary.com/2022/04/20/tale-tuesday-27-common-questions-about-game-dev-1/. Let’s get right into it!
How do I get started if I don’t know anything?
Firstly, choose a specialty that interests you the most. Do you enjoy coding and do you want to be a developer? Or maybe creating ideas and managing them was your thing? Or maybe you love to make art? Whether it’s development, design, artwork or any other category – you should focus on the one that interests you the most. If you don’t have anything that interests you in particular or you’d like to do a bit of everything because you intend on doing everything in your games on your own – I recommend you that you learn everything one by one, until you feel comfortable with what you’ve learned and can move on to the next thing. In this case, I’d recommend you to start with coding and follow with design, artwork and then everything else. If you know how to build components, you can easily create and visualize your prototypes – so make sure you know well how to code your game. Secondly, you should look for sources online. Whatever it is what you’re trying to learn, there’s always quite a bit of tutorials, materials, books and excercises which you can use to study the matter. Depending on your choices, you might have larger access to those elements than others. That’s why so many choose Unity – it’s a well-known engine with countless tutorials and materials to work with, such as templates which you can freely edit. Everything depends on what you’re going to work with. Either way, the best option is… to simply start! You won’t get anywhere trying to understand everything without trying. Whatever you’re learning, start from simple games such as Pong, Snake, Pac-Man and slowly work your way up, creating more and more complex concepts. After this series of articles, I’m going to share some of my personal tips, so stay tuned!
Can I only design games?
Of course not! If you’re interested in design, games are one of the many things you could design! Video games, board games, mobile apps, websites, general software – you name it. Designers role can be quite extensive and its details vary depending on what exactly we’re designing. There are many different ways to go about it, hence why people often specialize in only one of the categories. Some even dedicate to only a given type of video games, limiting their designing to only one kind of platform. Such specialization further increases designer’s expertise in the field. Personally, I only design video games and had very little contact with websites designing, so my knowledge on the other topics isn’t that great – however, you should explore the possibiltiies and see your favourite.
That would be it for today’s ‘Tale Tuesday’ – stay tuned for more!
Iguana Mercenary 