f you’ve played games long enough, you’ve surely thought, “Hey, what if I
made a game?” Problem is, you don’t have a fancy computer science
degree. You don’t know JavaScript from Fortran, and you wouldn’t
recognize an art pipeline if somebody hit you over the head with one.
Making games isn’t easy. It wasn’t easy 35 years ago when Warren Robinett was writing machine code to cram Atari 2600 Adventure into 4 kilobytes of memory,
and it isn’t any easier now that 300-person teams are spending millions
to create incredibly complex 3D worlds with the latest in bleeding-edge
graphics and animation techniques.
But if you can set your sights a bit lower than Halo 5,
there are tons of resources out there to help you turn your playful
dreams into a reality. These days, game-making software is practically a
cottage industry. The first thing to do is find the right tool for the
job. Start with these five.
Boldly going where better game designers have gone before. (Credit: Gordon Cameron)
1. GameMaker: Studio
First
released in 1999, this is the granddaddy of modern game-making
software, and its popularity is easy to understand. A no-frills
interface will make anyone familiar with Photoshop feel right at home,
and it combines tremendous depth with a huge community of users. The
answers to many GameMaker questions are just a quick search away. Plus,
the community forums are full of helpful veterans.
At
its core, GameMaker is built for two-dimensional gaming. The toolset
lends itself most naturally to classic genres such as platformers and
scrolling shoot-em-ups. Go through one of the first tutorials and you’ll
quickly author a simple shooter that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s
played the classic arcade game 1942.
Some
may be turned off by GameMaker’s old-school vibe, but I found it a
powerful, surprisingly simple introduction to game design, partly
because it forces you to confront fundamentals. What exactly is
happening when one object bumps into another? If your character “shoots”
a gun, what does that mean in terms of graphical sprites placed along
X/Y coordinates? How many frames are in your heroine’s animation, under
what conditions does her image flip horizontally, how high does she
jump, and how much control do you have over her while she’s in midair?
Answering these questions may seem tedious, but it can be exhilarating
once you dig into them.
If
you do want to write code — or better, yet copy and paste someone
else’s — GameMaker accommodates that with its proprietary language, GML,
which can be integrated with the mostly drag-and-drop interface.
Construct
feels like GameMaker’s younger, hipper, and pricier cousin. Released in
2011, it does a lot of the same things GameMaker does, but in different
ways.
One
of Construct’s interface innovations is the “Event Sheet,” a separate
tab that aggregates the game logic and instructions running in the
background. While there’s nothing here that can’t be executed in
GameMaker, the different presentation may be easier for some users to
get their minds around.
Which
program you prefer will largely come down to personal taste. I
gravitated toward GameMaker for the simple reason that it was less picky
about which sorts of audio files it was willing to import for sound
effects and music, plus the full version is $30 cheaper. But both
feature plenty of depth, have a manageable learning curve, and will be
especially congenial if your design ambitions skew retro.
