Introduction to Game Development!

What is it?

Gaming or Game Development is one of the most complicated paths in the software industry. So, before we start, one the common question about game development is “Is a school degree needed in learning coding?”, here’s the answer,  absolutely NOT. Even if you do start at school, you probably will get a head-start, as the school is going to start basic but probably will end basic too. Depending on what college or school you’re going to, most of the subjects you will study can be self-taught, and it’s very important to teach yourself more than what college does, especially in programming.

Game development is a very vibrant domain, but the best part is when you design a game or an algorithm used in the game mostly it’s unpredictable, It’s something involved with a lot of randomization and that’s why the player designing the game actually enjoys it because he is not able to clear up the level he has created. Confusing I know, but wait until we start.

Let’s dig a little deeper...

Before we proceed to game development itself, let’s clear up a lot of myths that surround this amazing field. Game playing and game development are completely different industries. If you’re a great Fortnite player or Counter-Strike player and you want to build your game just like one of them, well, there’s a good side and bad side for that. The good thing is that you’re aware of game strategy, game design and game arena quite a lot, but if you’re gonna be spending a lot of time playing the game, eventually you’ll never be able to get started in the game development process itself. 

Let’s get started… For REAL!

Now getting started into the game development. First of all, you need to decide what kind of game you’ll be building like is it a 2D game (such as Mario and Contra) or 3D game (Counter-strike and Fortnite). For 2D games it’s more over a mobile oriented and pretty easy to get a hype in that kind of games, for example, the Flappy bird which had a pretty easy design and got very popular. 

Now, if you want to start with 2D games, the Construct 2 and the SpriteKit are two great way of getting started with that. One thing I like about SpriteKit is that, with my iOS development knowledge I can design a nice game easily. But the drawback is that this game will be only published on the iOS platform. Moving on to Construct, Construct 2 is a little bit different game engine and mainly based on windows platform. It designs most of its games based on Javascript, which allows you to explore the game on iOS, Android and Windows. So, it's a great point to get started.

If you want to get started with 3D games, there’s plenty of engines out there. Unity3d which you might be aware of, is one of the most amazing and popular game engines, Unreal engine and a lot of other engines. Some of those engines are being used for Call of Duty, some others are being used for Assassin’s Creed. Every engine of these has its own advantages and disadvantages.

So, once you’re ready for the 3D game engine you’re ready to use, make sure you understand the basic knowledge, for example, If you’re going to use Unity3D, you’ll have to use C# programming language. Using Unreal engine, you’ll have to use C++ programming language, etc. Game engines ARE NOT programming language itself, but they harness the power of programming language used. Game engine itself has a lot of things like graphics, UI design, movement control, monitor mapping, sound, physics, etc.

To conclude...

Today, we’ve covered the introduction to gaming development, more of what it is and the engines used for both the 2D and 3D games. In a later article, we will talk more about game engines and how to choose the right one for our game. Our  goal from this article was to clear up some myths about game development and how to get started with that.