Video game creation is a quite complex process that requires a great deal of skill and expertise. Making something people will want to play involves knowing what your audience likes, what they expect and how can you deliver that in a way that will still surprise them.
First Steps
The first step is designing the concept for the game. This means coming up with a unique idea for it that will be enjoyable for players to play. This also includes deciding on a genre of game, such as role-playing, shooter, puzzle-solving, or sports-based games and deciding on characters, environments, and other features that will make up the world of the game. You’ll also want to pick the best game engine for your needs.
Giving it form
Once the concept has been designed, it’s time to create the characters and environment of the game. This requires artists to design art assets such as textures, 3D models, animations, audio, and more. These assets are then programmed into the engine that runs the game so they can be interacted with by players. Animators are also brought in to create cutscenes or other elements that help tell a story within the world of the game.
The way you can create a whole scene varies depending on the engine. On unity for example, you can either make everything yourself(with softwares like Blender) or use the Asset Store to get some pre-built stuff. You can also use Terrain Tool, ProBuilder, or the Environment Package to model the world the characters will be on. Unreal Engine has similar tools.
Making it move
After all of these assets have been created it’s time to script out how they interact with one another. This is done differently in different engines: Unity3D uses C#, Unreal Engine uses C++ and blueprints, Game Maker their own language called GML, RPG Maker nowadays uses Javascript, etc.
One thing in common on all of those is: You almost always create an entity(an object), and then place the scripts inside it. The object can be the player, an NPC or just a “controller”, which is how programmers usually call the object responsible for taking care of the logic of the game(say for example the score, the menus, global events, weather, etc).
Hope it doesn’t explode
Once these pieces are complete it’s time to test. Now this is the hardest and most important part of a game, since releasing a buggy game can ruin it for the fans(Looking at you Cyberpunk 2077). You gotta make sure the game works on every platform you intend to release(Test it on Windows, Linux, your android phone, webgl, anywhere you post it).
Testing also involves checking performance. You can make the best game ever but no one will play it if its minimum requirements are a RTX 4090 TI and 64GB of ram. Make sure the game runs well on most machines, and preferably create multiple graphics settings if you’re dealing with platforms that not consoles.
Get it out there
The final step in creating a video game is marketing it before its release date. It’s good to create a bit of hype and gather people interested on the game before release, so that when you press “post” later on you won’t see the download counter stay at 0 for a week or two. It takes time to build a community, and if you plan on making money with your game, you’ll want it to do well right from the get go. Also make sure to publish your game in as many places as possible(Steam, Epic Store, Google Play, etc). Some places will ask for a fee to have your game there, and may even take a cut out of anything sold, but it’s well worth it.
To summarize, creating a game is a bit complex, but well worth it if you ask me. Videogames are like an interactive movie: they give the audience a whole audio and visual experience to enjoy at their own pace while also allowing to explore more than whats thrown at the screen. That’s what makes them one of the best kinds of art to exist.
Keep an eye on the blog tab if you’re interested in this topic, I intend to post a few articles on game making soon!
