How hard is it really to create your own video game?

So, because this is Tildes, a lot of people will talk about coding, engines, and such. And that is wonderful, you will need that! I am familiar with programming and game-making tools, but I am absolutely not a programmer, so I'll tell you this: what scares me is not the coding. It's the worldbuilding, the writing, the art, the sound effects, the "game feel". Nowadays, there are so many tools to help make a game from the technical aspect that it is basically guaranteed that, unless you're aiming way too high, anyone can probably do it. The real challenge is making a game that is engaging mechanically, aesthetically, technically, and narratively.

I mean, anyone can type on a keyboard, but few can write a good novel.

I strongly recommend starting with Pico-8.

It is wonderful to work with:

• You can immediately write an input handling loop and start moving pixels.
• There are multiple excellent platformers which you can study.
• The extremely minimal graphics prevent you from wasting time early in a project and make any artistic skills look at least decent.

Lastly, the tight constraints will brutally prevent feature creep and force you to make something fun, rather than something that will never get done.

Preface: I do not want to scare you away from making a game. There are TONS of resources out there for all sorts of engines, for all sorts of skill levels. It is possible even for someone with no coding/whatever experience.

THAT BEING SAID, making games is hard af. I have worked as a software dev for about 7 years, musician for 15, and have dabbled in writing and visual arts most of my life. I have been able to release one "full" game so far, and it was just a little mini game for a game jam. I have tons of little toys and unfinished projects, but most not worth releasing. Even with the technical, art/music, and writing abilities, I find it really difficult to finish a project because I end up realizing my games just end up not being fun. Your art can look great, music is stunning, and the systems you code work flawlessly but coming up with a fun gameplay loop is the hardest creative task I think I've worked on. It involves taking all that code/art/sound and making it work within your gameplay loop, in a way that doesn't suck. You could potentially outsource most parts of development (if you're fine giving up some creative control) but the gameplay concepts come from you. It's a lot harder than it sounds to make a fun game.

As prefaced, I don't want to scare you, but I also don't want people to try to make games and realize they just keep failing at it. You mentioned you have the world building planned out, which is great! Lots of games lack a good story / world presence. But, there is A LOT of boilerplate knowledge that goes into game development, and even when you get past that, it's an uphill battle. Even something like the little indie platformer you mentioned, introduces layers of complexity that a beginner is not ready to handle.

The most common piece of advice for beginners is to start by just recreate really simple games that exist. Recreate pong, snake, or breakout then try to mess around with different aspects of it to make it something interesting. IE make pong, but introduce an extra block that floats around the screen that deflects the ball and adds a little variety to the gameplay. You learn so much by just doing it and learning as you go. The idea is to keep the game small and manageable. This also helps because you get to avoid the hardest part, which is coming up with the gameplay hook. Games are super complex systems, and a its a big mistake to start off by trying to create your "dream game."

If coding seems scary to you, I would check out Gamemaker Studio, Construct, or Stencyl. There are a bunch others, so do a little research on what appeals to you and your eventual goals the most.

I made a few complete games when I was a young teenager, including a full, reasonably balanced, reasonably fun JRPG for my brothers using a long dead engine and Final Fantasy IV and Zelda assets (terrible plot!), a Chip's Challenge style puzzle solver with a level editor inspired by a QBasic game I liked (and several levels for it), a target shooter played with the mouse (a bit like that fly swatting game from Mario Paint) and more. (Never quite cracked platformers at the time, not for lack of trying, collision physics are hard!)

I haven't made any games in a really long time - last ones were a Tetris implementation for an Asus ad campaign and a javascript Snake entirely written in an empty conference room while waiting for a prospective client to (eventually refuse to) see me (possibly the most boring week of my life) - but... You can make games in whatever medium you want. If a kid could do it, you can do it. I took a game design class in college and the first thing we learned was to make games without touching a computer. Prototype in paper. Make tabletop games. Design the components and mechanics and how everything interacts and balances with each other. This can be very simple for a platformer, but you may also find that its core the idea you have is not very interesting yet. Not to worry! Just tweak it until it seems fun and original and just the right amount of challenging. Don't add too many conflicting mechanics, though, or it will be hell to balance and feel clunky and confusing.

My second piece of advice is to play a lot of games. You know how it's almost universal advice that people who want to write should read a lot? Yeah, same thing here. But don't just play a million first person shooters - seek out all those weird niche indies that are really different from each other, or if you want to make a platformer play all kinds of platformers first.

People who aspire to be videogame designers are usually advised to know how to program. You don't need to know how to program games specifically, that will come in time. Make sure you know the basics of programming. A good programmer can pick up any language and any paradigm eventually, because they understand how the system works and what the algorithms are doing. Don't get too married to any specific technology, unless you're trying to get a job doing specifically that (specialization is often something you end up wanting to do, but you should know why you want it).

If you know how to program and you understand conceptually the mechanics of the game design you're trying to implement, it should be much easier to figure out where to begin.

I’ve even gone so far as to plan out an entire game universe timeline with fleshed out characters and factions

This is a writing thing! Many game designers are the writers of their games, or have been writers in the past (see Tim Schafer for instance). Worldbuilding is a fun part of writing fiction, whether it's for a novel or a videogame. There's a whole worldbuilding subreddit if you want to talk about your world with other people.

It's great that you have the flavor already, but remember that some parts of the development process - creating visual assets, for example - can be postponed, especially if you are not competent or confident in doing those yourself. Don't be afraid to use placeholders. Need a protagonist? Use a rectangle. You can even name the rectangle. You could call him... Thomas. Wait, no-

Especially for your first game, you may end up having to use premade assets, free or purchased for example in the Unity Asset Store, or you can pay other people to make them for you. You don't have to do everything yourself. Just don't try to contract everything out, unless you have a lot of money and want to start a studio. If you really want it to be your game, you should fulfill at least one of the development roles yourself. If you really don't want to be a programmer in your game, for instance, there are also indie games that are artist-designed. In this case you might do things the other way around - create concepts, sketch out characters and assets, and write down how you want everything to work together, then find a friend or partner to implement it.

I think the most critical information we need is: Where are you starting off? If you've got a degree in CS and years of software experience, the answer will be vastly difference to someone who's not touched maths since leaving high school.

I haven't written a full-blown game, but I am a software engineer. If you want to aim for a reachable, simple target, then using a game-building framework is probably the way to go. However, I'll tell you what: as a software engineer, I think a huge part about making a good game is the non-engineering stuff: the visuals and the music. That means 3D models (characters, monsters, buildings, objects), textures, 2D art (loading screens, character imagery, maps), UI elements (windows, buttons, etc.). That means sound effects, and well-written, well-produced music.

I think I have the technical chops to pick up almost any game engine and get going with it, but when it comes to visuals worthy of being in a game that people would spend money on, my skillset is near zero. I honestly think it's easier for good artists to learn to program a successful game than it is for good programmers to make good-enough video game art.

Alright, so, I'm going to buck the general trend of the advice here and say: it's easy to create your own video game.

Obviously, there are some caveats. But if you want to get your feet wet, for personal edification and enjoyment, that's essentially never been easier. There are really good tools, frameworks and tutorials out there. Pick one by whatever measure you like and dive in.

So, the caveats:

• I cannot emphasize this enough: do not plan to make money on your first game. (Or your second game, or probably any game unless you're signed on with a fairly sizable publisher.) Selling a game actually is extremely hard, and the vast majority of indie game makers do not make a dime off their games.
• Also, I don't mean this to sound dismissive, but making a good game actually is fairly difficult, too. Game design isn't its own whole field because it's trivial; there's a lot of subtlety, and big professional outfits absolutely get it wrong with some regularity.
  • As a corollary, don't make "the videogame you want to make" first. It will not live up to your expectations. Figure out your tools and your gamemaking "voice" first, before you start trying to realize your dreams and either fail, or make "the videogame you want to make" and it unfortunately sucks.
• Making a game engine is extremely difficult. Doing it solo even more so. Modern game engines are complex beasts, running under constraints that are extremely esoteric in software and thus difficult to learn about and prepare for. (For example: in a game running at 60fps, you have sixteen milliseconds to do everything you need to do for each frame, every frame. In the webapps I work on at work, we tend to take notice when tail latencies go above 500ms or so; literally a 30-times looser time constraint.) Don't make a game engine unless you're already really good at programming and you want to seriously challenge yourself; and don't plan for your bespoke game engine to ever make you any money or form the basis of a non-tech-demo game.

The two biggest engines for indie devs these days are Unity and Godot. Unity has pretty comprehensive Learning Pathways courses, and there are lots of decent Godot tutorials too. So those are probably where I would recommend you start, depending on which engine you want to learn.

For something a bit more simple, solely focused on 2D, and likely a lot easier to learn, there is also GameMaker as well, which also has plenty of tutorials too.

As already mentioned, it's really hard to give tips and recommendations when not knowing where you're starting from. But coincidentally, I've watched this YouTube video the other day that compares game engines. I feel like that will be useful if you're starting out with Game Dev, no matter what the current state is :) I found it interesting and I'm a programmer with no Game Dev experience.

Depends on the platform. I believe the Playmate makes it easy to make a game from scratch since the console itself is so simple.

Where to start? Download Unity and mess around with the tutorials. Will you produce a successful game that releases on steam? Probably not, but you'll have fun and learn along the way.

I think level design is a common way to get started? Many games have tools for creating your own levels.