14 replies to this topic

[FrazMasta]

Just decided to try my hand at game development and that stuff so decided this looked a good place to ask so i was wondering can anyone recommend any help for someone with no past experiance

[eddie]

My advice is a three step plan....

1) Figure out what you want to do (type of game?). :)
2) Find the obstacles towards that goal
3) Iterate slowly, developing your skills, until you reach whatever #1 turns up. :)

If #1 turns out to be something huge, you might want to put that on the backburner while you grow your skillset some, by doing small little games in the meantime.... But it's still good to have that big picture in your head!

[FrazMasta]

the type of game im looking at is a type of legend of mir style of game

sort of magical and medival in a certian sense

I don't actually know where to start at all

[eddie]

OK, well this is the part of the interview where i ask you your skill set. :)

Are you a programmer? have you ever programmed before? are you an artist? What's your aptitude for these things?

Depending on your answers you might need a lot of self-educating (on programming, or modelling, or whatever you need), or you might just need to tune your head to the differences between whatever programming you're used to to game programming.

[FrazMasta]

Well i have never done programming of any sort apart from superlogo. I would consider my self an artist/designer and my friend is good at programming so with a little self education i think it can go somewhere

[monjardin]

Read this:
http://www.lupinegam...ath_to_dev.html

Python seems to be an easy language to start with:
http://diveintopython.org/
http://pygame.org/news.html

GIMP is good for making sprites:
http://www.gimp.org

With those links and google, you're ready to make your Tetris clone!

[FrazMasta]

ok started building up a small team

ive got three people including me

ok considering i only started considering this today

all three of us are good at desinging etc and one of the guys is good with programming and i can learn

so looking a nice little balance

[Methulah]

Don't try to get a team together unless you know exactly what you want to do, it will most likely fall apart otherwise.

[eddie]

A team can be useful, or detrimental.

If you have one strong leader that's willing to shoulder a lot of the vision and managerial work, the team will work.

Conversely, if you have a team solely for the fact that people feel safety in numbers, generally not a lot of work will get done and people will use the 'team' as a way to hide things.

Only you can judge the state of your team, but make sure that someone has vision and determination, so the others can follow and get bolstered by that fact.

[FrazMasta]

The only prob i see with my team is that one guy aint to good at listening bit he can be dealt with

[Nodlehs]

You make is sound like your going to shoot him :) On a more serious note, as far as a team goes, you shouldn't really bring programmers aboard a project until they actually have something to code. If they have nothing to do, they lose interest, and lose morale. I would suggest getting everyone involved in some good design meetings and figuring out what your direction is going to be, to actually get your coders something to do.

[eddie]

Design meetings are good for reinforcing listening and improving morale as well.

You also want to make sure you don't have a bunch of rogue coders going at stuff willy-nilly either. We coders are a renegade bunch. :D

[IrishFarmer]

I'm just a step ahead of you actually. If you're looking for a good place to start, I would say start with a 'point-and-click' 2D engine. This is where I started. Speficially with engines like RPG Maker (shhhhhh), or The Games Factory, or Game Maker, etc. to kind of get a handle on the development process. Then after that I moved on to learning the basics of C++, and from there I then went to a more advanced scripted engine. 3D Gamestudio is my engine of choice. The scripting language can seem difficult at first, but if you ignore their tutorials (which assume you're an experienced programmer in my opinion) and just start coding VERY simple actions like spinning objects and build from there you'll know enough to be able to program a game on your own (with some help from the reference manual of course).

Then from there I would look into a book like Sam's Teach Yourself Game Programming in 24 Hours or something like that. They'll help you develop an engine and. Well actually I never got past chapter 7 in that book because once the engine was developed I got bored with his games and wanted to make my own. Also, if you're going to use a book like that, I recommend ignoring the classes he writes and try writing them yourself first. Then you can compare them when you're done, but having that blindfold on means you'll learn a helluva lot more than you would by just copying his code. Although I did pretty much just copy his windows code word for word because I don't care to learn that stuff.

[-InsomniA-]

does anyone know of any good starter tuts for python cos im trying to learn

btw im m8 of fraz

[eddie]

Python has a tutorial on it's site. http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html

I'd still recommend having a pet project or scripting action you want to do, and then using the tutorial as baby-steps to get you there... But that's always a hard one to do. :)