Newbie in game development - Guide me pls

[Dinesh Kumar]

Hi

I am Dinesh from Chennai. Though i have 2 years exp in java programming, I am new to game development. I tried to develop my own 2D game in java for a while. But its little bit tougher than i thought. How you guys are making game. What tools you are using friends. Guide me pls. I am also interested to tag along with indie game dev in their work.

Thanks

Dinesh Kumar

[Yadu Rajiv]

Hi Dinesh,

Good to know you want to jump into making games :) 

It would be good if you can tell us where exactly you got stuck in your gamedev projects, so that some of us might be able to help you out :)

Apart from that, I'm not a Java person, but, do take a look at some tools that might help you ease your workload.

The Lightweight Java Game Library (LWJGL) - http://www.lwjgl.org

Slick2D - http://slick.cokeandcode.com/static.php?page=about

peace,

Yadu

[Madhu]

A game engine like unity3d is an excellent tool to make games. It will take care of lot of redundant tasks  in game Dev. You can google for popular game engines.

Regards,

Madhu Samuel

Evelyn Labs

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Indie GameDev India Community
http://indiegamedev.in

[Kinshuk Sunil]

You should also catch up with Vijay Vardan in Chennai. That will also add to the new beginning.

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regards
Kinshuk Sunil

[Manish Mathai]

Not sure if this will be helpful to you at your current stage of development & expertise, but here is an *ongoing* series of video tutorial on making an isometric RPG game from scratch in Java : 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFYT7Lqt1h8&list=PLlrATfBNZ98eOOCk2fOFg7Qg5yoQfFAdf&feature=plcp

Note that it assumes that the viewer has very little working knowledge of Java & aims to create everything from scratch, including the game engine. I _might_ be too slow to base your development on it.

[shub...@gmail.com]

Why don't you try using game-maker or some other tool to start with? Getting into game programming always takes a little time.

Sent on my BlackBerry® from Vodafone

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From: Manish Mathai <manish...@gmail.com>

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Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2012 19:04:27 -0800 (PST)

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Subject: [InGDIn: 429] Re: Newbie in game development - Guide me pls

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[Vijay Varadan]

Hey Dinesh,

If you're interested in game development, I'd be happy to talk to you offline. Axham Games is a new studio in Nungambakkam and you're welcome to visit us any time as are other folks of this group.

We make cross platform games at the studio and stick to C++ for the most part. I've used python and C# as well.

IMO, whether Unity works for you or not depends on how you approach game development. I focus on game play and primarily write game play code first w/o much giving much weight to the visual aspects - those are the kinds of games I create. Graphics and visuals get added in later. So, Unity, which has a visual approach to game creation doesn't quite work for me.

Since I have an engineering background, I typically need just a compiler like CL, CSC or GCC to get going. I then integrate the game play code with a graphics engine ( for production we use Ogre ) or library like XNA, SDL and auxiliary libraries for I/O, physics ( Bullet / Box2D ), audio ( OpenAL ), networking ( Ice, Poco, Boost ASIO, ENet ), etc.

But if you're getting started, a solid understanding of game development concepts are more important than tech. So, go with something simple like pygame ( you can write tic-tac-toe in about 1 hour, breakout in 2 hours ).

Hope I didn't muddy the waters. Like I said earlier, give me a call and swing by the studio, if you like.

Cheers,

-Vijay

[heem patel]

Hey Dinesh, 

I agree with people above approaching game development definitely seems tricky at first. I was in the same state, you're in, about a couple of years ago. Heres what i would suggest -

Create clones for popular games starting with something small like tic-tac-toe , minesweeper etc. This will help you understand the concept of managing a game loop , game states , Managing assets etc.

 I used C++ allegro library , and then C# XNA game studio. 

Once you have managed to do this you should move onto involving more aspects like AI so you can take up coding games like Pac Man etc

I would not worry much about how the game looks visually (unless you're an artist too) because that wouldnt be your role when you make a game. 

After this i started designing my own mechanics or implementing mechanics i liked in some games. 

I am right now using Unity3d working in teams of 4- 5 people to make rapid prototypes of our own ideas. 

hope this helps

Heem.

[Mayank Saini]

Hi Danesh,
If language is not a big concern, then I would suggest you use a game engine that has a lot of tutorials and user base.
This would help you understand the concepts of game development.

You can start with a book or a video/text tutorial.

[Joel Johnson]

Hey Dinesh,

If you're interested in quickly getting games out, and getting feedback... I'd like to suggest Flash/AS3. The advantage is that you can roll out SWFs that can then be placed on online gaming portals like armorgames.com, and if you're into a desi audience... you could approach games2win.com or zapak.com.

It's quite easy to pick this up, since it is very similar to Javascript (except for some syntax related issues). Having said all this, I'd agree with Shubhank in saying that you could get started in GameMaker, it has a drag-and-drop interface for beginners, and scripting for advanced users who'd like to do a little more. (Take the GameMaker 8.1 Lite version btw).

Regards,

Joel.

[Vijay Varadan]

+1 to what Joel said.

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Vijay Varadan | Studio Director @ Axham Games: http://axham.com
Skype: vijayvaradan | VOIP: +1-425-296-1174 | India: +91-99400-13652

[Wighawag Wighawag]

Hi Dinesh and all

Flash/AS3 is definitively a nice platform/api to start learning to make games though in my opinion the display list api (if you use it extensively) has the tendency to make you mix game logic with the display code which often end up in a difficult to read/update code. 

But instead of using actionscript, I ll suggest you to take a look at Haxe (haxe.org) It is a more modern language than actionscript (it has Generics, Typed function, macros... which allow you to write nice generic code without losing efficiency or type safety) but very similar to it (moreover it has some speed up improvement, inline function exists since the beginning for example, Adobe just added them recently :)

It compiles to swf like actionscript (swf is the primary target and is very well supported (latest feature added in a matter of days of the release of the beta flash players)

On top of that if you use NME (haxenme.org) you can target 

- IOS

- Android

- Blackberry

- HTML5 

- Linux

- Mac

- Windows 

all with the same flash API

- Windows 8 (including mobile) is on the way

It is a nice open source language with a very nice community that is growing every day.

As a flash developer I do not see any reason to use actionscript. Haxe do all what actionscript does + it supports natively many platforms.

Of course, it is not perfect and there are few quirks when targeting native platforms but the benefit seems to outweigh the drawbacks (which should go away as the community is actively addressing them)

Have a go! All of you by the way :)

Also, if you use NME, most of the flash tutorial will apply to Haxe (in term of how the API should behave). This is entirely true if you target flash. For native platform, check the NME docs/ forums and report any bug. The community is happy to help.

All the best,

Wighawag

P.S. I am in no way affiliated to Haxe except as a user :)