It's Free, And Not As Hard As You Think

Video Game making has evolved dramatically over the past decade. There are many free for public use video game software suites and they are all very similar. If you learn how to use one of them you can readily transfer your skills to the others. And if you are serious about your video game making, the skills you learn with the free software are a good foundation for working with the high-end software tools that the professionals use. You can easily find any number of these free software applications by using a popular search engine. Two of them that I have used are the Genesis game engine and the Reality Factory game development suite.

There are five basic steps to making a video game. These are the steps that professional developers take when making a cutting edge game and they are the same steps you take when making a small game that you and your friends can enjoy. The very first thing you have to do when designing a video game is to get it down on paper. This is the most over-looked step and it is also the number one mistake that many budding game designers make. If we compare the process of making a video game to the process of building a house this step would be like drawing up the blueprints.

Before building a house you have to get everything into the blueprints so you can know exactly what you are building, where everything goes and what everything looks like. This holds true with game design. Before you start making your video game you have to conceptualize it. After you have your overall map completed you can work down into the details. Draw floor plans of any buildings and dungeons. Place the rooms and all the structures. To aid in the visualization of your buildings and rooms you should draw sketches of key areas. What will they look like, What are the unique things about your game,

Draw sketches of these. Once all the concepts are detailed, and your vision of the world is created you can begin the actual software creation of your game. This translates your game from its paper version to its computer version. Professional video game design companies spend an enormous amount of time in this phase of game development. They work out every detail and make drawings and sketches of every room, every character, and every scene. You do not have to design your game with this level of detail but you should make it as detailed as possible. Every hour of work you do in this stage of the process will save you several hours of work in the next step. In this step of creating your video game you make an overall shell that the whole game will be played in.