Make your own game! It’s easy if you try!

Juancho here.

A few friends of mine have always had the idea of starting a game development studio. We're all big fans of video games and thought it would be fun to try our hand at actually making one. The project was on the backburner because a few of us were off studying abroad and whatnot, but it started fully once we all returned home. We had meetings to brainstorm game concepts and programming for a while, and looked up several guides for independent developers. The first decision was to figure out what to program the game with. For starters, we decided to go with Game Maker.

Game Maker is a programming language developed by Mark Overmars, and published by a company called YoYo Games. It’s a fairly simple language, and it also has a very simple and intuitive interface. It works as object-oriented programming, which basically means that you nominate certain items as objects and then define the interactions between them. The program is really nice, as you can use the language itself as well as a drag and drop interface.

To program with the interface, you first need to make an image (using paint, the included image editor, or some other drawing tool) and assign it to an object. Once you have the object, you define its interactions with the environment through events. You can assign collision events, key pressing events, timer events, and others. The object can react by moving, jumping, changing its assigned sprite, or even shooting another object. You then design a room where these objects interact, and that’s it! You now have a working prototype of your first game!

You can also download all sorts of tutorials, from the official website and from other indie developer forums(I’ll post links to all of those). If you have even a passing interest in making a game, I suggest you download the tutorial and toy around with it. At the very least, you’ll be able to appreciate just how much work goes into making even a simple platformer or shoot-em-up.

There are lots of other tools to make games, aside from Game Maker. A popular one is RPG Maker, which I haven’t tried out yet(Dan has though, pester him to post about it). You can also program with engines such as Unity, a popular one with independent developers, and the ever present Unreal Engine (which, interestingly enough, is free to download; they charge licensing for full games). If you’re really hardcore, you can try learning a real programming language, like Java, C++, or Flash.

Even if you never plan to make a game in your life, I recommend trying out Game Maker. Not only is it fun to use and figure out, but you also learn a fair bit about game development. Who knows, you might find it more fun that playing a regular video game, and it could awaken the creative spirit within you! The sky is the limit!(that is, until you reach the limitations of the trial versions ;P.)

Useful links:

http://www.yoyogames.com/ - The guys who make Game Maker. Right now the latest version is Studio, and you can freely download the basic version that comes with the tutorials.

http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/make/tutorials - These tutorials are for the old versions of Game Maker, but they might still prove useful.

http://rpgmaker.net/portal/engines/ - Links to other useful development tools.