How a “dunno" game did
Foreword
Good day, dear readers. I am a student with lots of free time and desire. I decided to share my experience in creating simple games and write about it on Habrahabr. I hope I can answer someone’s questions, or at least take a moment in your time with an interesting story. So let's go.
The idea
About what I need to do something of my own, I thought about two years ago, but I began to take the first actions quite recently, this fall. It all started with the fact that in my head ideas were born a la "I need to do something." I wanted to make a game that would allow me to pass the time. Also, I thought that its embodiment should not take much time and effort. It is worth mentioning the fact that until that time I had never seen any programming languages and generally did not know how this works.
I was somewhere at the level of an ordinary user who just shook the buttons and enjoyed the magic of the 21st century. By the way, this was my first mistake, which made me nervous at the time when I moved to decisive action. The game for mobile phones in the "endless run" genre was ideally suited to all my requirements. I didn’t want to do something difficult, such as Subway Surfers, I wanted to do something like a game called “Run” (by the way, it was not so popular). I thought that I could afford to make a project of such a small scale.
Embodiment
After making the necessary decisions, I sketched a few concept art (to be honest, not one of these “concepts” was used). Then he began to storm the Internet and, in particular, Google. First of all, I needed to solve the engine issue - which one to use? The engine was chosen - open, free, easy to learn and use Unity3D. To start work not with an empty head, I decided to look and read a few lessons on how and what to reap in Unity, so that the result is a game. It should be mentioned that, as instructed by my friends, I chose C # for programming, not JS. Why? I dont know.
And I advise you not to neglect this rule
To start creating a game, relying on the knowledge that was obtained from several video lessons and written sources from Google, was my terrible mistake. However, once the business has begun, I will bring it to the end. After several days of stubborn battles with the compiler, which was constantly yelling about some new errors in the code, I got the first results: my character was already running continuously (moving along the axis, because there is no animation yet), I could jump by pressing the space bar ", And the plate at the top of the screen showed the number of my points.
The first gameplay of my “game” looked very ridiculous, but still I was happy about that ...
The next problem for me, which seemed insurmountable, was to force the game to create and remove platforms so that my runner was truly “endless”. Of course, after a certain number of attempts, killed time and nerves, this system was made, but there were still a lot of bugs in it. Naturally, I did not like it. Therefore, the system had to be radically redone.
At the end of the week, the game completely suited me in terms of all the main systems. I made my character speed up, the platforms were built and disappeared, and I was even able to add coins that gave the player extra points. This all made me very happy, but still there were minor bugs and shortcomings that required urgent correction - this required a cold mathematical calculation.
A good portion of programmers wish me a painful death for my code.
External design
No less difficult (or even more) was the task of external design of my home-made game. The whole problem is that the skill of my drawing is “ 0 and tends to minus infinity ” and this, of course, prevented me from doing quality work. Also, I could not close my eyes to the fact that I can not calculate the distance between the platforms without taking into account the size of my character. So I had to use Simple Assets. To this day, the visual design of my game remains the main problem for me, since I still have not come to a design that could meet my desires. To create all the models, textures and sprites (Sprite) I use programs from Adobe (in particular, Photoshop) - an ideal option.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I want to say that the process of creating a game is extremely interesting, exciting and informative. Of course, you will have to make a certain amount of your strength, and also kill a lot of time. This is especially true for people like me who do not know any programming languages and are faced with this business for the first time. On the way to creating even the simplest game, you will have difficulties, but the result will "pay off" all this many times. So to summarize:
- Before embodying your ideas, study at least the basic level of a programming language, otherwise you will have great difficulties;
- Do not set big goals, start with small projects;
- Make your product quality, do not spare the time to correct small flaws. After all, sometimes big things start with small ones;
- Do not hesitate to seek help on the Internet, there are a lot of kind and helpful people!
Thank you all for your attention!