Funnily enough, I didn’t hear anything about the game until its actual launch day, but its explosive arrival holds promise — especially since it’s backed by bigwigs like Vodacom and a the power of a “lower seven figures” budget. They’re naturally hoping to make a great deal of dosh from this — micro-transactions (such as the described ability to exchange airtime for “Elements”) as well as the oft-overlooked charge for data transfer should mean that all three mobile operators in this country will have something valuable to gain from the experience.

Some people may be tempted to roll their eyes at this whole thing and call it an evil corporate plot with the sole aim of getting us to spend more money on frivolous activities, but the fact is that local game developers really need big companies like Vodacom to agree with more initiatives like this. It makes a startling amount of sense for everyone involved: getting “the suits” to cough up funds for (potentially profitable) game projects gives budding developers a grand opportunity to cut their teeth and build up capital in an otherwise destitute local environment. Setting up a game studio — particularly in South Africa — can be a horrendously difficult task without external assistance or a nice whack of cash. Offering one’s talents to a corporation interested in advergames or other promotional projects may not sound like the most inspiring line of work, but it’s a far safer route than immediately diving into your own big game project.

It’s quite a pity that the Legends of Echo team decided to outsource their work to devs in Bangladesh instead of drawing on additional local talent, but it’s still a grand opportunity to take a long, hard look at how co-operating with big businesses can work to our advantage. It remains to be seen how successful Echo will actually be, but the fact remains that Vincent Maher and Nic Haralambous were given over a million rand and eleven months to make a game with.

It may sound like a once-off matter, but other local developers have also benefited from the idea of piggybacking “non-gaming” entities. Luma Arcade, for example, is a local game development company which just recently showed off a preview title for Microsoft’s XNA-based mobile games. It started off as a small side project of its parent company (a more generic graphics studio) with just a few employees and a budget supplied by the non-gaming ventures of the broader company. Indie developers QCF Design also began building themselves up with advergames for companies like Colgate and Tropica (as well as unrelated web design projects) before moving on to self-funded game projects.

It’s not the most glorious model, but it’s one which appears to be doing some good — advergames and sponsored opportunities are a viable way to give small-fry developers a foothold in the local market, and may soon become an accepted stepping stone for people looking to cut their teeth on commercial game development.

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This kind of interactive entertainment has fascinated game developers since the beginning of existence itself, and oral traditions speak of a time long ago when such games ruled the earth, roving the vast plains and humid marshes of a much wilder planet. To this day they are still relatively untamed  by man, and only the most skilled — or foolish — of developers attempt to create them. But the rewards for demonstrating mastery over this genre are immense. Ask the creator of iPhone hit Canabalt if you have any doubts.

Nowadays, the average input device really spoils developers for choice. Keyboards are a sea of possible letters and numbers. Gamepads have thumbsticks, shoulder buttons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers up the wazoo. Even the humble Wiimote has quite a few input tricks at its disposal, especially when you consider the versatility of its motion sensor. But truth be told, not enough designers put that much thought into how players interact with their games: even when designing titles for something like a touch screen, too many devs try to force “many-button thinking” into a button-shy environment instead of forging new ground with the given platform’s unique restraints. I’ve seen it happen with cellphone games, iPhone prototypes and even mint dispensers, and the results can become rather… well, rotten. And rotten mints are just plain wrong.

One-switch games evolved as a tool to enable accessibility for disabled gamers, but they’re a damn useful exercise for developers in their own right. Offerings like Strange Attractors are excellent demonstrations of how versatile and interesting a project can become when given a one-button constraint, testing the developer’s ability to think in terms of context-sensitivity, emergent complexity and the various effects that any given environment can have on players. And sure, sometimes projects can be just plain fun (like the ever-delightful Dracula Cha Cha), but sometimes they’re also pretty astounding exercises in lateral thinking.

An interesting analogy would be to compare good game development to physical fitness (possibly the first and last time this will ever happen). For some poor, untrained bugger, doing a few laps across the swimming pool could pose quite a challenge. But if you force them to swim across the Atlantic — eliminating the practical drowning possibility, of course — those couple of laps suddenly become a lot less intimidating. Placing developers into such a restrictive situation can inspire levels of creativity and modes of thinking that otherwise may not have emerged.

A demonstration of some interesting one-switch games can be found in the Gamma IV games showcase, a collection of more than 150 titles which have also been featured at this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Have you ever tried making a game with a weird and creative constraint? Throw in a comment below and tell the rest of us about it!

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We all hate undoing any sort of work that we’ve put time and effort into, but it’s something that’s important in just about all aspects of life. Writing several drafts of an essay can improve the final script, graphic designers often make multiple concept drawings for a single image and even scientists needs to be open to scrapping older theories in favour of newer, more accurate knowledge models.

Some game developers, however, seem to consider themselves exempt from this particular consideration: they hold the strange belief that once any given feature makes it into a game, that feature needs to stay there indefinitely. Somehow, subsequent versions of the game need to work around said feature’s flaw and turn it into an asset — after all, the more direct route of completely removing the feature would be too painful to even consider.

"The Team Fortress Engineer: always accept the possibility of your hard work being completely *obliterated*."

Fair enough. It’s difficult to kill one’s darlings, even for those who know that it may well be the right thing to do. We all have bad ideas from time to time, and such ideas can vary in scope: maybe it’s an errant menu option, or an unwanted enemy type, or even an entire section of the game. Of course, the size doesn’t really matter — if it turns out that an idea is well and truly poor, it’s time to throw it into the garbage compactor.

Many games go through an initial expansion phase, particularly if they’re complex or experimental in nature: early builds will attempt as many ideas as possible, usually because the best way to test an idea’s effectiveness is to simply code it in and see how it turns out. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, a massively popular Roguelike which has been in development for years, has taken this approach in many areas. This expansion, however, is tempered by an overall tightening of the design: along with every new feature added, the devs also remove classes, races, status effect groups and even entire spell trees — some of which have been in the game for a very long time.

Some players occasionally complain about the losses, but on the whole they tend to work towards a better game experience: even though the version number is at a mere 0.6, DCSS is successfully trimming a whole whack of game fat from its overall package.

Don’t be afraid of revising your own games: accept feedback intelligently, establish your project’s weak points and ask yourself honestly whether you can salvage them, or whether you need to remove them entirely. Remember that a wooden raft held together by frayed ropes is destined for trouble no matter how tough the wood may be. Strengthen your own raft by finding those weak points and replacing them with something better.

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1. Make shorter games

If you find yourself struggling with those big game plans of yours, try getting some practice with smaller projects first. If you find your average attention span for any given game to be about a week, start thinking about stuff that you can create in a few days or less. Not only does completing smaller projects give you a much bigger motivational boost than a mountain of half-finished Homerian epics, it also sets you up with a far more appreciable portfolio.

2. Be consistent

Sometimes our brains just deal better with clicking into steady routines. As tempted as you may be to engage in periods of frenetic game dev activity followed by long cooldowns, you’ll probably end up doing yourself a world of good by opting to work moderately — and consistently — instead. Giving your project even a little bit of love on a daily basis makes a huge difference when compared to working with sporadic “chunks” on the odd weekend. Remember: once you begin a work session, it becomes a lot easier to keep going!

3. Get organised

In general, people find it far easier to stick to commitments and work routines when they’re not operating in a realm of hazy uncertainty. Schedule time for your dev projects if at all possible — earmarking particular hours or days for your work is far more effective than simply thinking about “getting around” to it between games of DotA. Making yourself a nice, lightweight design doccie to sort your mess of a creative brain while you’re at it.

4. Chop it up

Jot down a bunch of project milestones and make them as small and frequent as possible. Doing this will help you avoid feeling overwhelmed by the task at hand, and allow you to feel a steady sense of accomplishment as you complete short-term goals. After all, it’s far less of a mental strain to consider your work in terms of the next sprite animation or level design than it is to think, “Holy crap, I’ve got a whole MMORPG to work on!”

5. Keep it fun

If you’re a hobbyist developer who happens to be game making for the pure fun of it, you can take quite a few liberties with your work. Hate designing menus? Make do with a crude splash screen, or just hop straight into the game! If you’re not into the art side of things, focus on games with small, simple sprites that can work with fewer animations. If your project really does become the Next Big Thing, there’s always time to work on the annoying details later. As long as you’re not completely abandoning or confusing the player, you should feel free to do what’s fun for you.

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This in itself is okay, but creating a “lite” design doc for even your simplest of endeavours can move it from the realm of “something crappy and experimental” to the hallowed fields of “something crappy and experimental that has everybody going insane”. Taking your game seriously (or at least taking the time to document stuff) will benefit your final product immensely. The idea of becoming a more organised dev doesn’t guarantee passage to Awesomeville, but at least it can get you in the queue for a ticket.

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For a start, lite docs offer you the opportunity to clearly realise your own game goals. In the same way that crafting a one-sentence summary of your game is a notable marketing must, the ability to jot down and regularly refer to a few of your overarching design goals can be surprisingly valuable for the game creation process. Want to add a new enemy? Check your goal list: if it emphasises momentum-based platforming action, then you can design an enemy to slow you down or bounce you away instead of doing something cliché like firing bullets.

Scribbling these core goals somewhere, even if nothing else is added to your documentation, can help you fight off looming feature creep: throwing random movement schemes into a game intended to be purely deterministic would be a bad move, yet it’s one that’s startlingly easy to make if a written reference isn’t handy. And when the game gets bigger and more complicated, you may not always remember the reasons why you’ve gone in a particular direction: plans made at the beginning of a project may well become blurry or even forgotten by the time you’re halfway through. This, more than anything else, can cause undesirable departures from your core “game plan”.

A design doc is also just a great way of forcing you to think through a game in advance. Sometimes, a project’s balance or progression can be vastly improved with a few scrawls and some pseudo-maths without writing a single line of code: for example, taking a page to summarise all potential enemies and their statistics helps you spot and fix undesirable effects before they emerge in-game among a bunch of more dissociated game objects and states.

...but an indie hobbyist's "design doc" can be hacked together in any form desired, for any purpose needed!

Remember: a lite doc doesn’t need to be “proper” in any way. It doesn’t have to be a cast-iron set of rules that you adhere to. It can take the form of a comprehensive game plan, a stats sheet or even just a to-do list (if your game reaches any level of popularity at all, you can bet that there will be far more feedback and suggestions than you can easily remember). You can use a tool like WikidPad to organise your thoughts, or just fire up a handy copy of Notepad and start jotting down ideas.

The ability to communicate and store your ideas is an important life skill, so why not apply it within the realm of game dev? It’ll help you out immensely — both now and later.

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Of course, my own humble words may be considered about as effective as hamster droppings in a hailstorm. After all, who am I to persuade people that these shiny, simple games aren’t every bit as heartless, money-grabbing and uninspiring as popular culture makes them out to be? What self-respecting developer would create a game using only an elegant ruleset, a super-friendly interface and a streamlined routine that can see a session’s completion in as little as five minutes by practically anyone? The sheer nerve!

Contrary to popular belief, this isn't the only end goal for gaming.

I know that there are many cash-ins out there, and quite a few projects on websites like Facebook are the sort of things which make me silently throw up in my mouth until the mess starts dribbling down my chin, but this doesn’t mean that the casual game market as a whole should be maligned by developers. I recently had a delightful exchange with Jason Kapalka, a PopCap co-founder who confided that many PopCap employees — despite their drive to make “light” and accessible games — are gigantic fans of hardcore titles such as roguelikes and in-depth strategies. The devs that they employ certainly aren’t stupid, and even their most outwardly simple titles are created with determination and purpose: design decisions are made carefully, and everything is polished to a shine to make for a well-balanced and rewarding game experience.

Casual game development is one of the best ways to train up good game development skills: offhand, one can reason that it teaches you how to be nice to players, encourages you to make your games function on a very raw (and fun) level, and even frees up a bit of time to let you focus on alternative game design skills such as writing and level design.

Many people play and enjoy Minesweeper, yet it can still be maligned in "serious" game discussions.

Of course, casual games are a breeding ground for not only refinement, but experimentation as well. Consider Flash portals like Newgrounds and Kongregate which host thousands of online games, many of them under a megabyte and requiring only a few minutes of very simple play. Sure, there’s a bunch of pretty epic titles in the list, but many of them are designed to marry charisma, accessibility and a completely new play style to appeal to anybody who has half a mind for experimentation but not a lot of time to pour into anything.

… and consider the original game prototype for World of Goo, which basically consisted of stacking a tower of icky blocks to see how high you could go without the whole thing toppling over. What a simple, charming, casual game concept!

If you still think that casual games are limited to the realm of the uninspired and money-hungry, it’s probably time for a radical paradigm shift. Defining what a casual game is can be a difficult task in itself, and standing on the hardcore pedestal is one of the single most limiting acts that you can take as a gamer and designer. Don’t fall into this trap: keep your mind pried wide open and remember that you don’t need an insurmountable wall of complexity and prestige to prove a game’s worth to anyone.

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Of course, this sacrifice of normality brings about some really interesting and awesome scenarios. Imagine this: you’re locked inside a computer lab for 48 straight hours with several dozen other crazies and the end goal of making a game before your detention time expires. Aside from fellow developers, your only companions are some webcams tracking your work, enough caffeine to poison an elephant and whatever you can bang together to sleep on for an hour or two. Free pizza is abundant, and the frayed psyches of participants are held together by high hopes, amazing concepts and raw grit. This is the ultimate test of man’s endurance and determination.

Caffeine: our shining beacon in the darkness.

The Global Game Jam, which took place over the final weekend of January, was the execution of this very situation. Despite the misery and insanity that the above description implies, it was also surprisingly awesome: grouping so many individuals with such a passion together and asking them to do what they love can be an amazing thing despite the odds, and the promise of prizes and glory just sweetens the deal. On top of that, the “global” part means that people are doing this all over the world at pretty much the same time.

Ten games were produced in the local leg of the Jam at the University of Cape Town, with the competition theme of “Deception”. Additional game constraints and achievements were provided for bonus bragging points, and participants were able to use whatever tools they desired: Flash, Game Maker, PyGame, Unity, Unreal … anything they could get their hands on and bring to the table.

The Game.Dev community sported two entries amongst the local participants: first place went to ~Press Tilda, an intriguing platformer game which relied on “console commands” to manipulate obstacles, destroy enemies and find cunning ways to the level exit.

A herd of wild developers is spotted on the horizon.

Game.Dev’s other representative game, YouDunnit, took second place at the UCT competition, presenting a causality-based, futuristic murder mystery where the player is trying to establish a suitable alibi for the heinous crimes that they committed.

Third place was awarded to Module, a physics-based machine creator which required players to go head-to-head and carefully manage resources while constructing the ultimate spaceship to destroy their opponent. This project was constructed by a team of six dedicated UCT students.

Prizes included several Take2 vouchers, assorted gifts from sponsors such as Derivco, Afrigraph and UCT, and even an Xbox 360 elite along with a full range of accessories.

If you’re interested in the Global Game Jam, hop into the Game.Dev GGJ discussion thread or visit the site itself for more info. It happens at the same time, same place next year and is a whole whack of fun.

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There is, however, a certain hard limit to how surprised a player is allowed to be. Shock them in a safe environment, sure. Maybe even throw in some danger as long as it’s not immediately lethal. But for the love of gooballs and meat men, don’t ever go down the dark path of complete unfairness. Avoid dickery: give your players reasonable warnings.

Good games, old and new, know when to “telegraph” the right messages to players in advance. In classic platformers, bosses blink or shift posture before unleashing an attack. In Shadow Complex, power armoured opponents laboriously lift their arms before unleashing a killer strike. No matter how subtle these warnings may be, players take note of them and use them to do something before they get sliced/squished/punched to death. Like important clues in a detective game, advanced warnings of any sort — even if they’re just half a second in length — make the difference between a fun, challenging experience and a purely frustrating one. Being proactive is a good trait, but in the world of gamers, skilled reaction can be just as important.

For example, consider the two different gaming experiences offered by these Super Mario Bros. screenshots:

You’ll probably notice right away that simply having access to the full screen offers players a vast array of warning information not provided by the subsection. Leaps of faith aren’t required — platforms can actually be seen before a jump attempt is made, and the presence of enemies is noted long before the player can make actual contact with them. Even “surprise” elements such as cannon balls or Bowser’s fiery projectiles still offer a critical second or two of “Hey look, I’m over here!” before they actually meet the player.

Would you be able to play through the adventures of everybody’s favourite plumber if you only ever had access to Screen B? And even if you could, would you really want to?

Giving players suitable warning space is an oft-overlooked and rather subtle feature in game development. This is hardly surprising: it’s just one of those game elements which goes completely unnoticed when done properly, but ruins everything when it’s screwed up. If you put surprise or shock elements into games — particularly action titles — always ask yourself two questions:

(1) Could the player have reasonably predicted this behaviour or event?
(2) If not, does the player at least stand a reasonable chance of survival?

Consider these questions carefully: answering them honestly may just make the difference between a crappy and frustrating game, and a totally rad one. Nobody likes leaping off-screen only to be instantly chowed by a giant walnut — don’t make the same mistake in your own work. Give your players the break they deserve.

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What fascinates me most about the game is the documentation outlining its core design philosophy. Everything in the Crawl world is purposefully designed to be affected (and used) by the player in some way, from subterranean plants and mysterious altars to smoke clouds, water puddles, and even ordinary dungeon walls.

Better yet, every interaction is meaningful. Deciding how you’ll attack an enemy or deal with a dead body is never a straightforward process – the game is built in such a way that you’ll never have ridiculous quantities of any resource at your disposal. Even the most potent spellcasters will occasionally need to conserve mana and attack weaker enemies in hand-to-hand combat, while shop prices are structured in a way that forces careful spending of gold.

Crawl: a world where players should never, ever let their guard down

This is one of the secrets of absolutely awesome game design. Yes, a lot of games depend on rhythm and figuring out sequences through repetition, but other games inspire us through their lack of order – the idea that no matter how good you get, you’ll always have to pause and think about your next move and how it will affect you.

Some developers consider “obvious” decisions to be anti-game moments. If players know from the word go what needs to be done, the challenge is rendered moot and it becomes a matter of grinding one’s way to the finish line. The puzzle is solved in advance, the tactics have been figured out, and the intrigue is over with before a situation even begins. When victory is assured in such a manner, time investment becomes the only obstacle. And while steady progression and raw achievement accumulations are effective psychological hooks in themselves, the issue of meaningful gameplay can make the difference between a nice game and a truly great game.

If you’re designing a game (particularly a turn-based or puzzle title) remember that half of its value for a player will stem from making meaningful decisions. If there’s an obvious and one-dimensional way to approach all situations, consider designing instances and levels that force a rethink or even turn rules on their heads. When you add something to your game, make sure it has meaning and significance. Carefully consider every single element that you add, and try to give it depth – either on its own, or in the way it interacts with everything else. This doesn’t mean that you have to make a game as difficult and complicated as Crawl: far from it, in fact. The concept of meaningful design goes hand in hand with minimalism, and is especially important for indie developers who can’t afford to waste any resources on padding and weak concepts.

Do this, and you can turn your gaming experience from a routine chore into something that will engage and interest your players from beginning to end.

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Here’s a small selection from the list of finalists to give you an idea of the sheer variety of games up for grabs. All four are currently available as demos or full games, so hit the links for gaming goodness.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity

Dejobaan have style and humour by the truckload when it comes to game development. They’re also good at making painfully long titles. Aaaaa! is one of those sort of games which oozes all sorts of weird indie flavours: players spend most of their time throwing themselves from really high buildings and falling through a psychedelic environment filled with hugs, kisses, and a variety of spectators who you can flip off or grant a thumbs-up to. It’s a fun and elegantly-presented game which refuses to ever take itself seriously.

Rocketbirds: Revolution!

Rocketbirds has been nominated for several IGF awards, and is the only grand prize entrant that is currently available to play. Its slick presentation, excellent audio, and all-round fun easily makes it one of the top Flash games of the year, and if this quick description doesn’t convince you of the love and effort that went into it, you should try the single-level demo to get yourself a taste of some unrelenting action/puzzler awesomeness. Just be careful: its bandwidth requirements aren’t for the weak of heart, or anybody stuck on dialup.

Star Guard

Loren “Sparky” Schmidt is a delightfully minimalist developer: he tends to make awesome games like Slot Machine RPG using only a few retro sprites and a handful of game elements, and Star Guard does this just as well. The premise, like so many other things in this game, is simple: guide the spaceman through the castle and defeat the wizard. The excellent design, however, will quickly reveal that this is a far more engaging (and rewarding) experience than one may originally think.

Today I Die

Today I Die makes this list because it’s one of those intriguing “art games” featuring in its own category among the IGF finalists. One of several games nominated for the Nuovo Award, this game is about, well, constructing a poem (literally) through puzzle solving and simple click and drag action. It’s pretty difficult to describe, but maybe you’ll have better luck figuring out what it’s about by playing it and its two predecessors, I Wish I Were The Moon and Storyteller.

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Planescape: Torment. Great game, amazing story, limited success.

Narrative game devs are writers at heart. They like telling stories, they like other games with strong stories, and when it comes to making their own … well, the story comes first. Unfortunately for fans of this style, good narrative surfaces only occasionally in the mainstream game business. A lot of contemporary games have stories “tacked on”, but the demand for action-oriented gameplay and open-world sandboxes makes it difficult to deliver a title held up by its story.

Consider, for example, the critical acclaim (yet poor commercial success) of Planescape: Torment, a game whose dialogue alone could (literally) fill a sizeable novel. Add to this the fact that “interactive movies” and their kin are difficult and risky to make, and you find more AAA titles deciding to play it safe while leaving good storytelling by the roadside.

Fortunately, indie development absolutely thrives on the limitations of the mainstream, and this is how the genre of interactive fiction (IF) has become so popular.

Technical definitions of IF equate it to the likes of text adventures: you receive a wordy description of your character and environment, type in a verb-noun response (“LOOK AT CHAIR”) and alter the environment in ways that depend on your behaviour. In common use, IF refers to the modern revival of text adventures, the community that surrounds it, and the fact that there’s far more emphasis on simply enjoying the tale rather than going out of your way to do puzzle-solving (some IF work, such as Adam Cadre’s Photopia, is entirely linear). In other words, it’s the narrative dev’s dream: a story that’s only surrounded by the faintest dash of gameplay.

Who needs puzzles? Some of the best interactive fiction out there is linear and unassuming.

The medium of choice for writing and reading IF is something known as Z-code, an old system used by Infocom back in the day for classic text adventures such as Zork. Tools like Inform can compile to Z-code, allowing the game to be “read” by a virtual Z-machine and played by just about anyone.

IF isn’t for everyone, but it does enjoy a considerable following. As a matter of fact, new fans can look up the annual IF competition for inspiration and even check out the currently-running Jay Is Games casual competition if they want to try something wordy themselves.

Better still, head on over to The Interactive Fiction Archive for links, helpful reviews, and a gigantic list of IF games from both past and present. Then, once your interest is piqued, be sure to look up some of the more well-known IF authors like Emily Short. For more articles related to game narrative in general, you can also check out Quinton Bronkhorst’s series on narrative in Dev.Mag.

Have fun unleashing your inner writer!

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The size and scope of the project doesn’t matter: whatever you’re working on, you need to know about the potential pitfalls (and advantages!) of operating in a group. Here are a few basic points to consider:

Two heads are better than one …

You may have already read up on the value of advice, feedback, and support from game development communities. Working on a project with someone else highlights these same benefits. Team-mates who are skilled at viewing each other’s work critically (and we’re not talking about the “LOLusuk!” approach) have a far higher chance of polishing and refining a project – one member can poke at things that the others would rather leave behind, or provide motivation when morale happens to be low.

Batman and Robin. TEAM!

… but too many cooks spoil the broth

Contrary to the beliefs of some, teamwork is a skill in itself and needs due attention. We all value our own creative vision, and it’s usually easy to follow a plan that you’ve made yourself, but incorporating other people’s views can be more difficult -especially if you’re not used to it. On any given game development project, disagreements will occur on a daily basis, landing somewhere on that bell curve between “Shouldn’t this bullet be a darker shade of blue?” and “I’m just about ready to devour the soul of your firstborn.” Your job is to accept and discuss the former, while avoiding the latter and defusing it properly if it surfaces.

Getting organised

Every project demands different things. In a small, casual endeavour it doesn’t really matter what team members do, as long as their roles are defined: give people responsibility for particular areas, then stick to that plan until the team agrees on a change. Similarly, put someone “in charge” overall – even among friends, it’s useful to have a project manager who is willing to take the responsibility for tough calls and work scheduling. Just make sure that the candidate is a good leader!

Lode Runner co-op: possibly the best team training device in existence. It's also fun to lock your buddy in with the monsters.

Communication

Lack of communication is the number one cause of misunderstandings, and interferes with the spreading of potentially awesome ideas. At worst, it can waste days of work because somebody got the wrong idea about an arrow texture.

Communicating well isn’t easy, mainly because people have such different ways of expressing themselves. So take the time to establish what your team members are most comfortable with before launching the project: do they work better solo or with an overseer? Do they follow written or verbal instructions better? How do they comment their code? Do they fling poop when they get angry?

If nothing else, set about answering these questions. Your game development life will be better for it.

Good luck with future team projects, and consider using the holiday period to get together with some dev friends if you haven’t already. Also be sure to pop by the Game.Dev forum and show us what you’ve got.

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Hey, who doesn't recognise this game by now?

The Experimental Gameplay Project (henceforth known as EGP, because acronyms are that much more awesome) started off in 2005 as a simple diversion for a few random grad students. These random grad students were keen to see whether they could make a whole bunch of games in just one semester, and eventually came out with more than 50. Due to their hard work and the successful promotion of EGP, they soon became not quite so random and their effort turned into an Internet sensation.

Then, for a while, they went silent.

After a period of dormancy, their brainchild emerged with a fresh coat of paint this year, and they’ve since been holding monthly competitions focused around broad themes such as “Failure” and “Art Game”, affording participants some flexibility that nonetheless encouraged them to get rather ingenious with their interpretations.

The competitions don’t restrict entry, don’t really have a way of tracking your dev time, and don’t shower winners with cash and other loot, but they still do their job well. After all, fostering a culture of creativity and experimentation is always more important than formalising and monetising it – and will probably lead to bigger and better things anyway.

Here are a few delicious examples of “success stories” that have emerged from EGP:

Yep, this is an actual game screenshot.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Those who keep tabs on big indie trends probably know that Crayon Physics Deluxe won the grand prize at the annual IGF last year. A lesser-known fact is that, some time before that, it was sitting pretty on EGP as a wide-eyed and hastily put-together project that had no idea of the prestige it would one day enjoy.

World of Goo

Back in the days of oldschool EGP, a cute (but crude) little game called Tower of Goo took the indie community by storm. This humble glob of proto-code and simple gameplay eventually morphed into an indie commercial project (World of Goo) and single-handedly secured Kyle Gabler’s place as one of the most prominent indie developers today.

Proof that graphics don't have to be "good" to be "awesome."

Broken Brothers

More recently, an EGP game called Broken Brothers surfaced on the IGF entry list for 2010. It is made by one Michael Todd, who’s recently been crafting a slew of small, experimental videogames for people’s consumption, and featured quite prominently in a recent EGP competition.

Canabalt

If there’s anything notable about Adam Saltsman’s Canabalt (aside from the fact that it’s incredibly simple, addictive, and made with his own flixel framework), it’s the fact that the developer wastes no time. A few scant weeks after showing up on EGP, it tore its way through the online Flash scene and Saltsman announced that it was coming out for the iPhone. Whoah.

If you have some spare time (and even the slightest inclination) head over to EGP now and get experimental! Competitions are constantly on the go, and the experience may just be what you need to unlock that killer game idea.

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Know that level design is everywhere

Action platformers such as the Castlevania series and puzzle games like 3D Logic rely on level design to shape encounters and (with the latter) drive lesser mortals insane. This fact is nice and obvious, but other kinds of games rely just as much on good level design – even if the link is more abstract. Branching options in text-based interactive fiction can be considered “level design”, and even chess serves as a good example of countless game scenarios emerging from one initial layout.

Any game which is considered spatially driven (no matter how tenuous that declaration may be) can benefit from good level design. Be mindful of this.

3D Logic. Oodles of complexity on one teeny tiny little cube.

Less is more

As the G-man once told Gordon Freeman: “The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world.” When designing your own game, everything you lay down needs to be a potential Freeman: if you find yourself putting three spike traps into a narrow corridor, ask yourself whether you can achieve the same effect by placing just one instead. Always ask yourself which elements in your current level setup are game changers, and which ones could just be considered “spam”.

Sure, it may not sound like a problem right now, but every extra element that you place in your game has the potential to confuse or bore. Make players jump over a pit of lava? Cool! Make them jump across a hundred identical lava pits? They’ll probably come over to your house with a sledgehammer.

Go ahead and read or play anything to do with Anna Anthropy. That’s minimalism in action, and it works.

Yuck. No.

Place everything with a purpose. Everything

What’s the backbone of good level design? Enemies, pickups, and obstacles? Actually, it’s the stuff we don’t think about, like the placement of a single, inglorious wall tile. In this respect, the Megaman games are astoundingly well-designed: obstacles, ladders, cover, and platforms are all precisely placed to account for jump heights, enemy movements, firing arcs, and a whole combination of mind-boggling situations that make the difference between a newbie failing horribly and a veteran winning at everything forever.

A fascinating take on the idea is included in this blog post about reviving Road Rash which explains how its unusual use of the environment makes it a superior game. Think out of the box more. Better yet, think about the box itself.

A word in parting

Level design, as mentioned earlier, is a complex field – use these rules as a generalised starting point, but once you feel that you understand them, start breaking them! Discipline is not necessarily the same as limitation: if you feel a creative urge, go with it and see what happens.

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Prepare to meet the Unreal Development Kit and the Unity Indie package. They’re large, they’re in charge, and they won’t cost the earth. Heck, play your cards right and they won’t cost anything at all.

Unity

If there's one thing that developers note about Unity, it's the damn fine dev environment.

Chances are that even game development laymen have heard something about the Unity engine, by now. Its tendrils are steadily entwining several game platforms (most notably Web browsers and iPhones) and the titles produced with it are remarkably good – especially considering that it’s one of the most accessible “big” tools around.

Unity features an innovative WYSIWYG editor which is comparable to the sort found on much simpler tools, and yet it possesses an incredible level of power that makes it useful for … well, anyone. It’s one of those everyman tools which really doesn’t do anything wrong, and can create everything from monstrous 3D epics to fun and simple browser games.

Just note that this is not a free ticket to development on the iPhone: you still need to be a registered platform developer with a working copy of Unity iPhone. Insert other fine print where appropriate.

Get it here for great justice.

Unreal

Epic Games is possibly one of the most important game development groups in history. In the early days of game modding, they single-handedly brought about a game community revolution with the likes of UnrealEd and their extensive support of third-party material and creativity.

It seems only fitting, therefore, that the Unreal Development Kit is now freely available for anyone to use. This is important for various reasons: firstly, the Unreal Engine is what we like to call Serious Freaking Business™. It’s the driving force behind loads of today’s triple-A titles, and getting something like this for free is almost unbelievable.

Prometheus, a time-travelling "single play co-op" game that claimed second place in this year's Make Something Unreal competition.

Secondly, anybody who possesses the dev kit can play a whole manner of Unreal-based mods without actually owning any Unreal-based games, meaning that the modding community is set to enjoy not only a fresh injection of starry-eyed developers, but a major swell in its audience too.

There is one catch in this whole thing: games made with the dev kit are for non-commercial use only. There is, however, an interesting commercial license scheme geared at indies who don’t have the scratch for major projects: a dev license can be purchased for $99 when the game goes commercial, and no further costs will be incurred for the developer’s first $5000. After that, there’s a 25% royalty charge on all profits.

It should be noted that this is a fairly steep price in the long run, but for struggling indies who want to release a commercial game on the cheap (or a non-commercial game at absolutely no cost) the Unreal Development Kit may just be what’s needed. Just weigh it up carefully against the alternatives: tools like Unity are nothing to sniff at either, and in such cases come with no strings attached at all.

Find it and conquer.

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Modding can be a lot more useful than most people think, and it only seems fair that a case gets presented for it. Here’s a few reasons for any self-respecting game developer to think that modding is cool:

1. It’s educational

Modding can take a variety of forms, but all tools share one particularly awesome trait: they’re great learning aids. On one extreme, modding can consist of making custom maps for Starcraft and using the editor’s scripting utility to make interesting situations. On the other hand, modders can also build up to things like total conversions of popular games such as Deus Ex and even Oblivion.

The point is that beginners can look to modding in the same way that they’d seek out tools like Game Maker and AGS. It’s just as accessible and just as educational, with the added benefit of providing a structured and familiar setting for enthusiasts to work in.

Game mods: Letting you bite people in the face since 1681.

2. It’s experience

In the world of game development, your portfolio is king. Many, many people who have trained up the necessary skills to start devving on a major project (programming wizardry, familiarity with 3D editors, a natural aversion to sleep) often don’t know how to apply those skills.

Due to the (generally) low resource requirements and high accessibility of game modding, a lot of aspiring developers harvest experience points by working on one or two modding projects. This removes the classic Catch-22 of game development by affording people the opportunity to work on medium- and large-scale projects without having to become part of a formal, publisher-bound team that builds something from scratch.

3. It can land you a job. Honest!

Alien Swarm, one of the many successful Unreal Tournament mods out there.

This relates very closely to point number 2. Having a nice mod or two under your belt can really help your case in a “real world” job situation, even if it’s not in the glamorous style of Counter-Strike or DotA. This doesn’t apply quite as much to programmers (unless the reworking is sufficiently extensive), but it works for artists and designers.

Just make sure that you’re realistic about your chances: there’s a lot of devs out there, and jobs aren’t going to be handed to you on a silver platter just because you make a version of Unreal Tournament with kittens in it (though this would admittedly be very cool). It’s a good idea, sure — but not a guarantee.

4. It can be really fun

Do you like modding? Do you have fun doing what you do? Well done, you’ve pretty much won either way. ‘Nuff said.

(This article was heavily inspired by a GameCareerGuide feature entitled “Is Modding Useful?” If you’re really serious about modding, go ahead and read it. Right now.)

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But what if that could be different? What if a developer decides to generate the complete product first, then improve upon that with subsequent releases? In other words, instead of showing off an incomplete game and trying to finish it, why don’t more people create full games, and then make them fuller?

Hey, it's that flixel guy again! We re-use his pic at every available opportunity.

The idea may sound odd at first, but it makes a startling amount of sense once you dig into it. High-profile developers do it all the time: commonly, it’s the approach used for game development tools and frameworks such as flixel. In these instances, an initial offering is made available to the community and then expanded upon through subsequent versions (flixel, for example, currently stands at v1.25).

Games themselves also fall under this umbrella. It’s not strange to see multiple IGF entrants in any given year sitting on the beta phase, or adopting the label of “work in progress” despite the fact that they seem to be complete titles. Or maybe a long-term project has insisted on keeping its version numbers strictly below that solemn and final 1.0, racking up a long list of nines after the decimal point because they insist that it’s not yet done.

Dyson (now better known as Eufloria) was one of the games to take this approach, as was Spelunky. Both were fairly complete and playable long before their official finals (particularly Spelunky), and both enjoyed considerable media attention and swelling fan bases during their development. These games are only two examples among many.

Dyson (Eufloria) has only just hit the market, but people have been enjoying it for a long time already.

So, how does this paradigm benefit us? Let’s count the ways.

(1) Motivation. More than anything else, releasing and marketing a complete game (even if you’re not yet satisfied with its level of polish) is a huge boost to morale because the product will be acknowledged, played and enjoyed by a far wider variety of people. With this approach, the first version of your game doesn’t merely garner playtesters. It actually secures you a bunch of fans!

(2) Feedback. If you’re prepared to take a few knocks, criticism from “real” players can have untold value. They’re frank, they know what they want, and they’re the best representation of your market because… well, they are your market. (On a side note, if you aren’t good at taking hard knocks, this article may help you out)

(3) Marketing. While demos and previews will sometimes be picked up by game journos looking for news, it’s much easier to construct, promote and hype up a product that people consider relatively complete. And don’t worry about blowing your marketing load too early: if your game’s good, reviewers will come back and do an updated report later!

So if you’re unmotivated, unseen, or otherwise struggling with your game development, consider going with this development style. It’s no guarantee for success, but it’s certainly a fine pick-me-up if you find yourself in a rut.

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The truth of the matter is that many good games out there are simple. To this day, tried and tested formulae are holding strong against exotic RPGs, “revolutionary” FPS mechanics, and convoluted simulations. People find run-and-jump platforming to be as satisfying today as it was back in the era of Super Mario Bros. Many modern racing games hold the same core appeal of Atari’s Pole Position, throwing on bells and whistles like physics and crash models to convince players that they’re somehow doing something new. Sites such as Retro Remakes and the success of games like Lode Runner on Xbox Live demonstrate that people still enjoy core classics. Why add complexity when you already know what sort of cool stuff players go for?

Lode Runner. It's 25 years old, but good design can still keep it fresh.

By using a simple concept for your game, you’re offering yourself several advantages right off the bat. For a start, it’s generally a lot easier to manufacture and polish a product that isn’t bogged down by design complications. Instead of throwing away precious time on building an RPG with fifty billion weapons, enchantments, enemies, and armour combinations, you can craft just a few elements and figure out how to combine them in different and interesting ways. This is a far greater show of design skill than “brute force” content or rule generation. Checking up on Flash portals such as Kongregate will reveal lots of popular games that follow this line of thinking.

If you decide to go along the “retro” route (faithfully reworking a popular concept) there are also quite a few possibilities open to you (as long as you don’t slip up and do something too legally iffy). That’s not to say that you’d necessarily do a cast-iron remake of Sonic the Hedgehog, but taking the core premise and adjusting it to be slightly better can yield some impressive results. Case in point: Tom Sennett and Matt Thorson have a game called Runman, which uses speed and momentum in a way that many reviewers argue was missing from the original Sonic. You’re rarely able to die, there’s no rings to collect, and arguably the game can simply be summed up as “get from A to B in the fastest time possible”. And hey, it does this really, really well.

Runman: Race Around The World is simple, charming, and oodles of fun

Remember: there’s no problem with creating something that has a simple premise, or draws inspiration from classic, “one dimensional” games. Titles which have a simple, easily explained (and easily learned) premise tend to rock people’s socks off: the skill lies in what you do with the game rules that you have, rather than trying to create more just to be interesting.

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However, this nifty little program was released way back in 1994, which in human years makes it approximately three gazillion years old. Despite its remarkable age, it still clings to life in a way that would put even the most tired and tenacious of EA game franchises to shame. Heck, it doesn’t just cling: it retains its own thriving community, and lots of high-profile people are still making games with it today.

The thing about Klik & Play is that it hits a sweet spot that’s not shared by many other tools. It’s far more powerful than the likes of Sims Carnival, but it’s also slightly simpler and more accessible than Game Maker. And despite being a good 15 years old, it’s still remarkably useful in today’s game creation scene.

Number 1 on the list of cool ideas: a step-through editor.

Klik & Play, like many other game creation tools, is based around the basic building blocks of rooms, objects, and events. It works its magic through a combination of drag-n-drop coding, prefabricated game objects (complete with movement schemes and animations), and an incredibly powerful tool known as the step-through event editor. The latter is an innovation which still has no real peer amongst today’s game creation tools: it allows a developer to run through the game and have new events such as collisions and keyboard presses checked in real-time.

So, what do you stand to gain from Klik & Play? Well, for one, people are still using it here and there. It also happens to be a free download (at least in its “KNP for Schools” incarnation), though you shouldn’t expect much from it if you want to make a commercial game: a little disclaimer displayed at the end of each game’s run-through makes it quite clear that Klik & Play games are not for sale.

Klik & Play allows you to set up a fully functional level in moments. Pirate-cops and snowmen optional.

If this tool interests you, but maybe doesn’t quite fit in with what you’re after, you should really look up the series of game creators that it spawned, which includes the likes of Click and Create, The Games Factory, and Multimedia Fusion. Developers such as Derek Yu have found the series useful in crafting games like Eternal Daughter, and even today the product line stands proudly against others in a world of fun and easy game creation.

Grab Klik & Play now and see for yourself what the early ’90s can teach a whole new generation of hip and trendy young game developers.

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The local Game.Dev group makes it a tradition to show up at rAge in some form or another every year. Sometimes we hide amongst the regular stands. Sometimes we grab ourselves an air-conditioned lounge overlooking the masses. This year, we went ad-hoc and set up on the showfloor itself with no stand, no walls, and no limits. And here’s why you missed out if you weren’t there:

No, we're not talking about the plushie companion cube. But that was pretty awesome too.

First of all, rAge is valuable for one big reason – it gives local developers a chance to meet one another! At no other time during the year are so many South African game devs able to meet face-to-face to swap stories, game ideas, and marketable products. Over the course of three days, dozens of eager developers and other community members frequented the stand on a regular basis, and hundreds of newbies and “normal people” stopped by to play and chat about game creation, or receive demos on how to make their own cool Game Maker titles in a matter of minutes.

The second big thing about the Game.Dev zone was the ability for anyone (community member or not) to come in and display their games on a gigantic LCD screen that flipped between various indie titles for the duration of the show. Donated by community member William “cairnswm” Cairns, this enormous glowing screen of undiluted awesomeness quite literally gave several lucky developers their fifteen minutes of fame, standing on a pedestal that offered them the same potential audience as any other big name at the show.

Gears of War JRPG, a delightful low-def game in delightful high-def glory.

For those who weren’t into computer games specifically, there was also room for board games and other “analog” media: several people brought along some fun games like San Juan and Space Hulk. These were supplemented by locally-developed contributions such as an intricatedly-crafted Worms boardgame and an absolutely excellent Left 4 Dead card game. Both of the latter were being played by developers and regular gamers alike, most of them having never seen (or possibly even heard of) these games prior to rAge.

That's right. Game.Dev aren't fussy about the medium used. And Left 4 Dead turns out to be fun in any form!

Aside from the general fun and mess-around-ery, game developers also had the opportunity to sit down and chat about the big issues. Topics included game postmortem community discussions, getting started with iPhone development, and improving one’s marketing techniques so that more people can enjoy (and play) locally developed games.

If you attended the Game.Dev stand at rAge this year, give us a shout in the comments section. If not, then you’d better get yourself over there next year. You’ll be greeted with warmth, smiles, and awesome games.

Interested parties can catch a few Game.Dev pictures knocking around in the various rAge galleries on NAG Online. Take a look and see if you can recognise anyone, including maybe yourself! Wooo!

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Learning about your potential media outlets is always a good first step. Read on and find out more about where to promote your project — complete with examples of Game.Dev Comp 23 entrants who are using these avenues to successfully market themselves.

Facebook

Regardless of whether or not you actually like Facebook, there’s no denying that it’s a good promotion vehicle. If you have an account, set up a Facebook fan page for your game. Renowned marketers have sung its praises, and Comp 23 entrants such as TF2: Goldrush have used it effectively.

Love it or hate it, Facebook works.

Blog

Though not as powerful a marketing vehicle as Facebook, blogs are still rather useful to keep around. If anybody is interested in your game, it’s nice to have a specific Website to direct them to for additional information.

Just don’t expect blog advertising to swell your ranks: it’s the sort of thing that generally receives attention when somebody is already sold on the concept of your game. Valuable, but not as easy to maintain. Still, Comp 23′s L4D card game has the right idea: in fact, its creator has a pre-existing blog to take advantage of. Bonus points!

Twitter

Twitter is like the lightweight version of blogging: while also arguably more difficult to promote than a well-placed Facebook page, it’s very easy to maintain and is an important way to keep fans in the loop about game updates and future projects.

Here’s a sample Twitter feed from Comp 23, for a game called Pea Adventures. It’s still rather small, but it’s already demonstrating Twitter’s potential for cross-linking and micro updates.

Forums

This point has been drilled in before, but it bears repeating: sign up to a game development community and get involved. You’ll have a free audience, free critiques and free advice. Not to mention that being surrounded by like-minded people is always rad. Starting off somewhere local such as Game.Dev is great, but the more marketing-savvy should also look further afield in places such as TIGSource.

Site Reviews

This may sound like the “big fish” (and looking at IGN may indeed be a bit hopeful), but smaller sites such as IndieGames and even Rock, Paper, Shotgun will gladly check out most indie offerings. Journalists aren’t as evil or snobby as most terrified devs would assume — poke them and see what happens!

I’ve personally enjoyed three reviews on IndieGames without investing any effort (the most recent being Comp 23′s Onslaught of the Electric Zombies), and their general review lineup reveals an openness to newbies and experimentation that is genuinely quite refreshing.

And remember …

When it comes to marketing, just do it. You’ve got nothing to lose, and unless your tactics involve several kittens and a flamethrower, chances are that you won’t do any long-term damage to your reputation.

People are generally more supportive and interested than you otherwise might think: your job is to prove this.

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Most freeware devs are genuinely quite happy to see their tools and resources being used for someone else’s games. This may well stink of flowers and unicorns, but it’s true: if you’re polite enough to fire off thank-you messages once your project is finished, chances are that you’ll get a bunch of pretty cheerful replies as opposed to legal threats and requests for money.

However, not everything is quite right in the resource-sharing utopia, and one must always be mindful of the following cautionary points:

(1) ALWAYS give credit where it’s due. A simple line in your readme can make the difference between a warm reception and a Limbo of the Lost witch hunt. It’s just like writing an essay — if you don’t want to be accused of plagiarism, you source information properly. It’s not just some law, either: it’s the decent thing to do.

It's time for the illegal adventures of Sir Scammy Stealsalot and his noble steed, Copyright Infringement! Crappy names, we know.

(2) Speaking of Limbo, here’s another piece of important advice: always remember that some resources simply aren’t free. Using a copyrighted image from Oblivion, for example, fits squarely in the “totally illegal” category of resource sharing no matter how many times you throw “BETHESDA RAWKS” into your credits section. Similarly, but less obviously, other file resources may be free for use in some respects but not others. Read the fine print: if a particular resource is only free for non-commercial use, don’t throw it into a game that you’re planning to sell.

(3) If you’re making a fan game or a project that somehow nods to your favourite AAA Xbox title, understand this: you’re entering shaky legal territory. It doesn’t matter that you’re a small-time dev. It doesn’t matter that the game is free, or that you’re making absolutely no cash from it. It won’t even help if you generate the art and sound resources by yourself. The original game developers, if they so choose, have every right to bring down the hammer.

(4) On the flipside, making “Bob’s Super Mario Adventure Land 6″ doesn’t necessarily make you a felon or instant lawsuit fodder (AGD Interactive’s Sierra remakes have done fine enough). And fan remakes are super duper fun! Just understand — and accept — that you may be called out at some point with the “cease and desist” spiel. It’s a slap on the wrist, but you’ll emerge unscathed: assuming, of course, that you weren’t trying to sell anything!

In the end, just bear in mind that there’s a lot of stuff out there. Some of it shouldn’t be used in your game. Some of it should be used rather carefully. Don’t let it scare you off using the stuff that is genuinely free: just approach the matter intelligently. The industry will thank you for it.

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These guys are totally checking your game out.

Of course, it’s this same audience who will be providing you with feedback while the game is in development: after all, how else will you figure out that your game is way too hard/easy/filled with unicorns? So here are a few points to consider when you’re on that all-important quest for player responses:

Sourcing

As a rule of thumb, it’s best to approach fellow game developers when you’re looking for initial feedback. Not only will criticisms generally be fairer and more constructive, but you’ll be addressing people who are used to analysing games on a deeper level than the average gamer. What you’ll effectively have is a two-in-one bundle: people who can put themselves in the shoes of your audience while still relating to you as a developer.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t use “ordinary gamers” for your feedback process: in later stages of the game testing process, their input will actually become the most valuable. It’s just a lot easier to get input from people who are in the same merry boat as you.

Intimacy

You don’t have to go cuddle the playtesters in a corner (unless that really is your thing), but it’s a good idea to grab willing participants, sit them down in front of your PC and ask them to play the game in front of you. Watching players fumble through your game can offer pointers that you wouldn’t find anywhere else: you can watch them struggle, excel, or otherwise deviate from your “intended game plan” with greater precision than their own understanding would offer.

There are drawbacks to this method, of course. Your very presence can potentially interfere with a game session, either through intimidation or spoilers. Make yourself inconspicuous, whip out a notebook in some darkened corner, and learn to shut up. Every bit of information that you volunteer during game time will reduce the play session’s integrity: if you warn testers about a boss character before it arrives, don’t expect them to react naturally when it bursts out of the wall.

Selection

Finally, bear in mind that not everyone’s feedback is valuable. On the most obvious level, there will be people who either slander your game outright (“I HAD MOVE BUG UR GAME SUX KTHXBAAI”) or praise it unnecessarily (which is kinda nice, but not exactly helpful). But you have to be picky about constructive feedback, too. On occasion, people will make suggestions that won’t fit with your game’s ethos, or may even just be plain ol’ bad. Sometimes, one group of people will like a certain feature while others don’t, and then it gets really tricky.

In the end, no matter what feedback rituals you follow, it’s important to remember that any given piece of advice isn’t the Word of God™: it’s just a springboard, and the big decisions ultimately have to be made by you.

Approach the matter critically. If you can properly balance faith in your own design with respect for your audience, your game will be far better for it.

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Adam Saltsman. What a charming bugger.

Adam Saltsman is a pretty cool guy. He makes some pretty nice games here and there, maintains a pretty interesting blog on Gamasutra, and is always pretty quick to respond when I nag him for info on game development articles. This puts him very firmly in my “good books” territory.

He’s also made a Flash development toolkit called flixel, which is the subject of this week’s column.

What is flixel?

If you’ve followed my Crash Course 500 guide to Flash development, you should have a very raw idea of how to set up and get started with development in Flash’s primary language, Actionscript. If you’re confused about where to begin with Flash and Actionscript, said article is pretty cool. If you want to make a full-blown game, however… well, there’s still a fair amount of work ahead of you. Fortunately, flixel makes that process a whole lot easier.

While you’ll still need to be a reasonably literate programmer to benefit from flixel, it makes things a helluva lot easier for coders who know how to slap a class together but really don’t want to get caught up in all the grunt work that makes a good game system. To put it simply: if your new Flash game is a house, flixel is the foundation that it’s going to be built on. To put it in mysterious code-speak: flixel is a collection of pure Actionscript classes which you can easily extend to create quick and stable game objects. Listed features on the flixel overview page include fast sprite rendering (5000+ objects on-screen), particle systems, collision detection, buttons and organisational classes, several special effects and excellent support for free Flash IDEs like FlashDevelop.

A whole whack of cool Flash games have already been made with the flixel libraries.

Sounds cool: how do I use it?

Let’s start from scratch, here. If you’re an absolute green when it comes to things Flash-related, take a look at NAG Online’s tutorial on getting started with FlashDevelop. It’ll get you to the point of your first “hello world” project and arm you with the basics of compiling and running Actionscript projects.

Once you’re set with that, you’ll need to gain more familiarity with Actionscript itself. Some sample FlashDevelop projects can be found here, and the flixel site recommends this tutorial to help you along — just be sure to skip the bit about MXMLC, since it won’t apply to you unless you happen to be going with that particular tool.

Flixel itself can be downloaded from the official site, and a help thread has been set up to point new users in the right direction. There’s also a convincing list of games made with flixel that’s hanging around, so you can check them out and see what Saltsman’s framework is capable of.

The long and short of it: if you’re a fan of Flash, flixel is an absolute must. Give it a try, let the creator know what you think, and have fun making games!

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“But sir!” I hear you cry, “I’m here to make videogames! What’s with this analog nonsense all of a sudden?”

Slappity slap, heathen. There’s nothing wrong with a good old board game, card game, or pen and paper RPG. In fact, let us count the ways in which board game design is actually more awesome than its digital counterpart:

All of the good devs do it

Most board games come with multiplayer support... and some very interesting AI behaviours!

In a sponsored feature entitled “How to be a Game Designer Right Now”, Game Career Guide explains several accessible ways to get into game development. The first point? “Going analog” and designing board games. Then there’s the Rock, Paper, Shotgun series on classic board games, said to be the most extensive and in-depth set of reviews the Website has ever written.

The point? Well, if you tap the shoulder of any veteran designer out there, chances are that they’re not going to frown upon board game design. Indeed, it’s quite possible that most of them have made their own analog game at some point, even if it consisted of cutting up little pieces of lined paper in primary school to make a card game for their friends.

It puts the focus where it matters

With even the easiest of videogame dev tools, there are a few hurdles to overcome. There’s events, tables of actions to choose from, sprite drawing, and bugfixing to take into account. It is, quite frankly, a horrible waste of your time. In contrast, board games and their brethren truly start to shine.

In a board game, you only have to think about those elements most crucial to the game design process: resources, rules, game balancing, and raw fun. Want a wizard to shoot a fireball every six steps? In programming terms, that becomes a chore. In a board game, the rule simply has to be declared, and the player can envision it.

With board game design, you don't need to get caught up on syntax.

It’s more fun

That’s right. It may sound like heresy, but designing board games is more fun (and more rewarding) than making a videogame. With the former, you can create a working concept in an afternoon or two, and have some like-minded friends gather around a table the very next day. And the next. If they like your game enough, you’ll probably see school or work breaks being swallowed up by these “sessions”. How many people, complete beginner or not, can say the same for their videogames?

Even if you ignore the rest of the advice in this article, remember one point above all others: board game design can be the most rewarding experience of your early game development career. You really have no excuse: if you think analog games are fun, you should be making one yourself. If you don’t think they’re fun … well, it’s time for you to make one that is.

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Developed at MIT for mysterious educational purposes, Scratch is an animator, simulator and game creator. If you’ve tried out The Sims Carnival,‭ ‬you’ll find Scratch to be similar fare in several ways:‭ ‬it has an easy,‭ ‬visual‭ “‬programming interface‭” (‬those special quotes mean that the words aren’t nearly as scary as they sound), a friendly premise and a broad community of other game creators that you can upload and share your creations with.

Projects are easy to make and come packaged in a very friendly environment.

And yet it adds a few extra points which are worth looking at too. So what’s interesting about Scratch? Let us count the ways.

(1) As mentioned above, Scratch is an educational tool — with plenty of focus on the education. Everything about its design seems to be geared towards helping people learn: code components, for example, are built block-by-block as “puzzle pieces” which only fit together in certain ways. This reinforces basic programming principles by showing users which parts of the code can logically interact with each other, and in what order.

(2) Scratch also makes great use of colour. All control structures (such as while loops and if statements) are coloured in orange, motion code is in blue and variables are in red so that you can quickly identify these components based purely on their hue. On top of that, you’ll be able to see your code while you play the game, and components will flash every time they’re used in the program so that you can have a better understanding of how events work. Ahh, the miracles of modern science!

(3) Finally, perhaps moreso than with any other beginner’s tool, Scratch elaborates itself through demonstration. When stepping on over to the File > Open dialog, users are presented with a lovely “examples” button that takes them straight to a folder with nearly a hundred samples of games, animations, simulations and stories that are ready-built and looking to teach you something.

Check out the examples folder: it'll be your most important teacher.

So, is Scratch brilliant? Well, yes and no.

Scratch’s primary drawback is that it isn’t too powerful. At all. Most of the games on display are primitive (and buggy), and, in particular, the way that they address matters such as object creation and collision detection between sprites is … well, somewhat strange.

But given how determined Scratch is to make the user experience simple and colourful, it still seems to possess great value as an introductory guide to programming, particularly for children. While this may not be the tool for you, it could easily be useful for somebody you know, or maybe even a local school that doesn’t yet know about it.

If you’re still looking for that beginner’s tool to convince you,‭ ‬then just take a look at Scratch and see for yourself just how friendly it is.‭ It’s free, it’s solid and it has a lot of pretty colours. Check the Website here.

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Don’t build an MMO

If you’re relatively new to game development, chances are that you’re not going to be able to match the efforts of dozens of industry veterans equipped with the latest in computer and networking hardware, slaving away 24/7 in a market where all but the most high-profile games are constantly running the risk of fading into obscurity and bankruptcy. Point made yet?

Look, it may be fashionable, but don’t launch yourself into a behemoth just yet. This advice applies to MMOs, projects of technical wizardry, and Fallout 3 clones. Sure, you may think that you have the time and dedication required. But consult the following professional-looking graph first:

Don’t try this one at home, kids.

Don’t go hardcore

This piece of advice is the bugger that has to be reinforced the most often. People will leap into C++, 3D, machine-level assembly coding, and those abstract DOS tools that nobody really uses anymore unless they’re trying to prove a point (you know the kind) and then produce… well, nothing. They’ve found themselves so caught up in all the little intricacies, that they’re actually struggling to make a product.

There is definitely an argument for using these sorts of tools: it’s a learning experience, to be sure, and the mad rep you get from it will certainly earn the respect of your Grove Street homies. But it’s not the route that you go down if you want to produce results. And if you think that coding 3D geometry from the ground up is cool, remember Einstein’s famous words:

Don’t hide

When you show your game to people, they’re going to give you feedback. Not all of it is going to litter your path with rose petals and chocolate bunnies, so you must accept that your game is going to be picked apart at some point. Even the best devs out there still receive crits for the projects that they make – you’re no exception.

Also, while idea theft is a sad, sad reality in the world of game development (particularly in the more mainstream areas, where legal things like NDAs suddenly become very important), chances are that it’ll probably not happen to you. Seriously: if you have a cool little idea and post it on a small forum somewhere, there is a very, very low possibility that somebody is going to be a dedicated enough dick to go ahead and sweep your idea from under your feet. Stop worrying.

In conclusion: just relax a little more with your game creation! When you’re a beginner, there’s no shame in doing beginner’s stuff. You’ll learn faster, better, and with a great deal more enjoyment. We promise.

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In this article, we’re going to show you how to create a basic room, an event encounter, and your very first battle with some baddies in a classic JRPG world. This may sound horribly complicated, but don’t worry: the standard package of characters, enemies, animations, and tilesets means that you actually have to do very little work to get yourself started. You can take advantage of this to see how things tick without figuring everything out from scratch.

First of all, grab the trial version of RPG Maker XP from this download page. It’s free for a trial period of 30 days, after which you’ll need to fork out some dosh to continue using it. That should be more than enough time to decide whether or not you want to stick with it.

After downloading, you’ll want to open the ZIP folder and run the setup. There are two components that you need to install: the support files for the software (your clue here is a hideously long acronym: don’t ask us what it stands for) and the toolkit itself. Once you’re done, fire that bad boy up.

You’ll be confronted with a rather blank screen. Let’s change that by going to File > New Project. Here, you’ll be presented with your greatest challenge: setting up the game properties. Don’t worry, you can get through it.

Once that’s sorted out, you should be presented with this:

You are the artist, and this is your canvas.

RPG Maker conveniently sets you up with not only a nice, friendly map canvas, but a few default tilesets as well! Have fun and place a few tiles by clicking on them in the left window and putting doodads onto the right-side map. To make your life easier, take note of two things:

(1) You can select multiple tiles at once by clicking and dragging in the left window. This spares you the pain of building a large structure block by block.

(2) Tiles are laid down in three layers. You can flip between these layers by checking the diamond-shaped icons at the top of the window. Use this to put a tree onto grass, for example.

Once you’ve built something you like, try it out by clicking on the playtest icon at the top. You’ll see that the game provides a menu system and characters for you already! Fiddle about with the sample. You’ll see that you can’t do much just yet, so exit once you’re satisfied and get ready to check out the database.

The default in-game menu. Characters, stats and a whole lotta blue.

Once you’re back in the editor, press F9. Whoa! That’s a lotta stuff to take in. What you’re seeing right now is a summary of every object, graphic, character, enemy, and just-about-everything-else-thing that will appear in your game. Have a look at some of the tabs and mess around if you feel like it. RPG Maker kindly provides a lot of default entities to populate your game with so that you don’t have to create your own.

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While it may not be the most powerful or revolutionary tool out there, it’s certainly easy enough to get to grips with in 500 words. So start by downloading the software and installing it. When done, fire it up and see what it’s made of.

You’ll be presented with a screen consisting of the game’s canvas, an object pane, and a “behavior” panel (remember kids, we’re dealing with the mysterious American spelling system here). Click on the giant floating spaceship, check how it’s been programmed, and click on the play button at the bottom-right corner of the canvas to preview the game. Understand everything? Good. Delete that ship and get ready to create your own object.

Click on “Import an IMAGE file” and select an appropriate pic for your new game avatar. This picture will instantly become a game object with most of its properties automatically set up for you. You can fiddle with the image by using the buttons below the canvas.

Egads, we've created a monster!

Once you’ve found a suitably ugly image for your nefarious deeds, click on the “Launch Behavior Library” button. This defines all the cool stuff that happens in the game itself, divided into “if” and “then” categories (you should see “if” for now). Click on the “Keyboard” tab under “Basic” and drag it to the behaviour board. Click on the green arrow that appears. Where it says “Conditional”, open the menu and select “While key is down”. Close the dialog using the green arrow again.

Now go back to the library and select the “Then” tab. Select the “Move” option and drag it onto your neatly-made “If” statement. Ooh, it links up! And has its own green arrow next to it! Click on the arrow and check the properties.

What you should have right now is an “If” statement that checks when the left keyboard arrow is pressed down. This triggers an event which moves the object 10 pixels to the … oops, better change that radio button to “move left” instead of right. Click on the green arrow to roll up the window again. Congratulations, you’ve just defined your first object behaviour.

Create three more sequences in the same vein, one for each keyboard direction. Net result: when you run the game (by pressing the play button, remember?) you should be able to move your object in all four directions using the keyboard. Congratulations, you’ve just created your first moving object in The Sims Carnival. It’s smooth sailing from here, mate.

If you like the looks of this tool, check the FAQ and get going! For an even simpler game creation, try out Carnival’s Wizard Tool.

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The name is Kodu. Its job: to be a fully-fledged game creation lab for the Xbox 360, allowing practically anybody to generate their own awesome project in a matter of minutes, using only the Xbox and a handy controller. And it costs the equivalent of just five US buckaroos.

Described by Destructoid as easier to use than even Game Maker, Kodu Game Lab is promoted by its colourful, family-friendly (and noob-comprehensible) interface that’s based on icons and “when/do” event interactions rather than codes or scripts. In fact, if you DO somehow manage to find any code that’s not cleverly disguised by some sort of cutesy interface, you should write in to the devs now to claim your medal, because the rest of us have certainly overlooked it.

Kodu itself is built on the XNA framework, and affords users both power and flexibility – or at least, it does the best job that it can given the limited controls and the necessity for simplicity. Kotaku had issues with the interface at times, but also praised the tool for its versatility and wide array of options. That, and its inherent cuteness, scored it a few extra points.

As far as distribution is concerned, Kodu allows you to share your games with your friends on Xbox Live and let them play through your creations. Unfortunately, it doesn’t extend far beyond that (one can assume that people universally sharing every single Kodu project out there would be a tad overwhelming) but as a beginner you’ll probably just want to keep your work amongst your buddies, rather than subject them to the ogrish stupidity of the broader gaming population anyway.

So, in a nutshell: is Kodu any good? Well, if you’re used to more powerful game creation tools and don’t mind digging into code, general consensus is that this tool isn’t necessary and will probably just feel limiting. But if you need to dip your toes into the shallow end of the game development pool (or know somebody who does) then here’s a great way to do it. It has already been met with hearty praise in classrooms and after-school projects.

Kodu is arguably the simplest and easiest game creation tool in the existence of everything ever, and is available from Xbox Community Games for 400 MS points. If you own an Xbox and are completely green when it comes to game development, give this a go. It could be just the springboard you were always looking for.

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1. Start commenting your code!

Code comments can add clarity. And sometimes flavour.

It may sound cheesy — or painful — but you need to get into the habit of commenting your code. Why? Because it’s very, very easy to remember what your code does for, say, a few days. After that, things get hazy. Writing a “plain language” comment in the middle of your code, such as “//This algorithm lets the character do backflips” (the slashes are comment markers so that your compiler doesn’t throw a fit) allows the future-you to look at the code you’ve written now and go, “Ohhh, THAT makes sense!”

Commenting your code also prepares you for work in a team-based environment: after all, how is another person supposed to interpret the gobbledegook that you’ve scrawled unless you leave an explanation?

More code commenting evangelisation over here.

2. Get a design doc!

Design documents are the theoretical skeleton of your game, outlining rules, interactions, and classes, so that you have a nice overview of everything before you dive in and realise that you have to rework entire sections due to poor planning.

“Proper” design docs are pretty technical, involving scary stuff like state diagrams, interaction events and data modellers. For hobby dev, however, you’ll want to do something a little less intense: just get yourself a notepad document where you can scribble all of your game design ideas, flesh out potential obstacles, and try to make predictions about what the game will need.

You can even go wild and use the doc as a canvas for free writing.

3. Start a dev diary!

A dev diary is a very flexible concept. It can be personal and informal, or public and structured. It can even take the guise of a simple forum thread, where the game’s creator regularly posts updates about the project’s progress.

Writing about the work that you do can have a positive effect on your productivity: it forces you to think about what you’re doing and how quickly you’re achieving your project milestones. This promotes a more disciplined, deadline-oriented mindset.

If you get more ambitious, it can even be used as a marketing tool for more high-profile game development projects. For a great example of this, consider the Wolfire Blog.

A screenshot from the Wolfire dev diary. Pretty-looking, yeah?

And don’t forget …

Have fun with all of the above! Make witty commentary in your algorithms. Sit down for ten minutes and scribble the most random ideas you can think of in your design doc. Start working on a Starcraft-themed brawler and post up your dev diary for entertainment value and great justice.

Get organised in a fun way, and the rest will follow!

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Code in Python, go to outer space. A simple process, really.

Do you really, really want to become a game programmer? Do you really, really have no idea how to start? Try some Python! This easy and simple programming language is not just a great springboard for people who don’t know much about coding: it’s also a tool that’s gained a considerable following in South Africa over the past few years, and is famously endorsed by Mark “can haz astro-monies!” Shuttleworth.

Now, while it’s not strictly recommended that you plough straight into the Python language as opposed to, say, firing up Game Maker and fiddling with its script editor, Python is not a bad introduction to programming in its own right. For those who insist upon diving into the world of “pure” coding, it would probably be a good idea to stop off at the Python station before moving in a direction as drastic as C++. It’s a lot friendlier, and arguably a little easier to create games with.

Python is what’s described as “totally freaking simple” by programming veterans. An experienced coder can learn it in an afternoon. A beginner can dip his or her toes into the shallow end for a while, realise that the water is warm and then do a full-on bellyflop dive into more complex programming territory.

It’s often used in conjunction with open-source tools such as Blender, and serves as the coding glue that holds Red Hat’s system software together. It was also created by somebody with a sense of humour, so most of the tutorials are pretty cool to learn from, as well.

An example of Pygame in action.

From a game developer’s perspective, the cherry on top is the existence of Python game creation libraries, such as Pygame,which extend the language in a way that lets you create all sorts of 2D/3D titles. Pygame is the major Python option for game crafting, doubling as its own dev community that discusses, creates and plays games made with the tool. Spotlights of better games are dotted here and there to give new users an idea of the tool’s potential.

Is Python the alpha and omega of game design? Not necessarily, but it’s a great way to get comfortable with “full-on” coding environments in a way that will demonstrate how fun and easy programming can be. So if you want to go “pure” and are eyeing C++ in place of a rapid game development toolkit, do yourself a favour and learn Python first. It’s a joy to use, and at the very least will serve as a great stepping stone on the way to all that programming high sorcery.

Check out some Python downloads and beginner’s guides to help you get started, and look over here for Pygame downloads and tutorials!

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I’m talking about being a well-read game developer.

“But wait!” you cry. “Are you not the be-all and end-all dispenser of ultimate wisdom (at least according to your own column)? I wanted to use X game development kit, so I’ve read up on the X tutorial. What else would I need?”

Quite a bit, actually, if you want to take game development seriously. And you can never start too early. Let’s have a look at just three examples:

Gamasutra
Killer feature: Member blogs
Gamasutra is one of the first stops on the Internet for a game development enthusiast . Although it has quite a lot of content, one of the sections that I would wholeheartedly recommend for newbies is the recently-established blog section. Blogs can be started up by anybody who has signed up with Gamasutra (even you, you shy little bugger!) and represent a mixture of hobbyists and industry professionals who are all sharing their opinions on a daily basis. This is your chance to get to know what other people think about game development, and whether or not your own thoughts are on the right track.

IndieGames
Killer feature: Indie game reviews
The IndieGames blog is a very popular news stop for a lot of indie game developers, but what I find particularly useful about it is its daily pick of freeware and browser-based indie games. I cannot overstate the importance of getting out there and exploring indie games as an educational process. Try the following: pick at least one game every day from this blog, play through it and think about it afterwards. Identify at least one strength and one weakness in the product. Then eat a cake to celebrate.

TIGSource
Killer feature: Community
I’ve evangelised game development communities before, and I’ll say this again: TIGSource is my favourite bunch of game creators on the Internet (aside from the beloved home base at Game.Dev, of course). Not only does the TIGSource blog offer a variety of interesting insights about the game industry on a daily basis, but most of the reports stem from its very own community of eager creators, submitting announcements and newly-finished titles from within the TIGForums. Make friends and enter a community of like-minded development maniacs!

These are just a few of the many places that you can visit for more information on the game development industry. This weekly dose of NAG advice can give you a springboard, but if you want to take the art seriously, it’s definitely good to entrench yourself in loads of further reading, too. Want to find specific kinds of game development material? Leave your questions in the comment section. For now, have fun surfing!

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Most developers wouldn’t hesitate to agree with you. But it’s rather strange when you think about it. People are generally willing to code games from the ground up, draw their own graphics, write their own character dialogue and even act as their own PR agent. And 99% of the time they’re absolutely eye-bleedingly awful with at least one of these chores. But despite the incredible array of jobs that the average dev is willing to take on, the task of sound engineer is still considered somewhat … icky.

Sound creation is no more specialised — or difficult — than firing up your favourite drawing app to doodle some random sprites. Yes, it takes a lot of skill and experience to master, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to paddle about in the shallow end of the audio creation pool.

There’s a stunning array of sound effects you can create by simply firing up Audacity, making a noise for the microphone and modifying a few basic traits such as pitch, tempo and echo effects. That’s pretty much it: if you don’t believe me, try this little offering that I helped construct for a 48 hour development competition. Part of my job on this project was to cobble together a few sound effects, and I did everything using only the method above.

“But I’m shyyyyyyy!” you protest. Okay, so maybe you live in a crowded hostel and are somewhat paranoid about your own voice going into a computer. After all, nobody wants to get caught shouting, “PHWEE-OOP-DE-DOOP!” into their desk mic (unless it’s like a fetish or something, in which case you have other concerns). But even then, there’s still a remarkable number of handy sound generation tools wandering around the Internet that don’t cost you a cent.

Take, for example, this wonderful retro sound generator by DrPetter, which offers a wide range of adjustable old-school explosions, jumps, impacts, and pickup noises. Finding similar software on the Internet isn’t that difficult either (with or without the patronising commentary).

Heck, go one step further and dig out the old MIDI skills — pick up something like Anvil Studio and create compact (and easy!) background tracks for your latest project. It’s super awesome.

Still scared of sound creation? Overcome those fears once and for all! Just take a deep breath and give it a try. At the very worst, you’ll create something hideously corny … but that in itself is just a part of the greater educational process. If you’re brave enough, give it a shot and swing a link to your creation down in the comments section.

And so, to all of those who are about to start a glorious audio engineering career: I salute you! Now go get soundcrafting, already.

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To start with, grab a copy of the tool from YoYo Games and install it. Skip registration for now.

You’ll be presented with a blank workspace – look for the red Pacman symbol in the icon bar and click on it to create your first sprite. This will be the “skin” for our main character object: give it an appropriate name (“GoodGuy_s”, perhaps), go to “Edit Sprite”, double-click on the green square and draw something in the default space (leave the bottom-left pixel, that’s your transparency colour!). When finished, close the GoodGuy sprite window and repeat the above to create a Pickup sprite (maybe a coin).

Next phase: create objects to attach our “skins” to! Click on the blue circle near the top panel’s sprite icon. On the left of the resulting window are your object name and sprite. Change the name to something appropriate, and change the sprite to the one you made earlier. Create your Pickup object in the same way. When that’s done, return to GoodGuy (if you’ve closed it already, you can still see it listed on the far left). Now we make stuff happen.

Recipe for a bare-bones GM experience: 2 sprites, 2 objects, 3 events and 1 room. That and love, of course.

There are two things that we need our game to do: (1) respond to arrow keys, (2) end in victory when we hit the pickup. These actions are considered “game events”, so click on the “Add Event” button, select “Key Press” and choose “<up>”. Then look at the “move” tab on the right, search for the button with eight red arrows on it, and click and DRAG it into the white “actions” area. A new window opens. Select the up arrow and set the speed to 4. Bam! You have your “up” motion sorted out. Repeat the above for the other three main directions.

Now go to the “Add Event” menu again and select “collision”. You’ll be given two options: select the Pickup. Now we determine what happens when the GoodGuy sprite touches the Pickup in the game world! Click on the “main2” tab on the far right, find the red “End Game” icon and drag it into the action box. The game’s action set is now complete.

Close the object window, go to the top row of icons and look for “Create a Room” (right next to the object button). Left click in the room grid that pops up: you’ll automatically put down a copy of your Pickup object (known as instancing). Neato! Look for the white box that contains the current object’s name, then click on it and select the GoodGuy. Place that somewhere else inside the game room. With that, you can press F5 and play your very first Game Maker game! Well done.

Extra links:

Project example (if you get stuck)

Official Game Maker tutorials (the next step)

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Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to learn about Xbox Live Community Games.

Take a deep breath, click on the link, and check out the list of games. Dearest reader, what you’re seeing is a verdant valley of indie development: every single one of those titles is made by an unaffiliated, unrated, stay-at-home-and-code-in-your-spare-time indie developer who wants to make it big just like the rest of us. And their efforts earn them more than just exposure: there’s a trickle of cold hard cash as well.

Trino is a great example of what Community Games can produce. It's so shiny, too!

Avid readers may remember a piece that was written a while back about the 2009 Dream-Build-Play challenge. In DBP, contestants are required to build and submit a game that can run on an Xbox 360, standing a chance to win glorious cash prizes, everlasting fame, and probably a private island somewhere in the Pacific.

The tools needed for entry are absolutely free, and entering the competition automatically qualifies developers for a non-premium subscription to the XNA Creators Club – which means getting a free ticket to deploy games to an Xbox 360 console.

But how does a game go from competition entry to Community Games wunderkind, you ask? Good question.

Weapon of Choice: beware of the giant bug things.

DBP carries the promise of an Xbox Live publishing contract for one lucky winner, but what Microsoft doesn’t advertise quite as much is the fact that for $99 (a paltry amount when compared to the cost of most “serious” development tools) you can purchase a full Creators Club membership and deploy your creation to the Community Games portal instead. Quite a few former DBP entries have already gone down this road: titles such as Trino and CarneyVale: Showtime are among the finer examples.

Your work then appears on the Community Games tab for pretty much every Live-enabled Xbox in the universe, complete with a little price tag of your choosing (of which Microsoft naturally takes a cut). Bam! Cash flow.

Of course, it would be naïve to suggest that the Community Games platform is perfect. For a start, every second week reveals a new idea about the platform’s financial viability, the concept undergoing a constant tug-of-war between stats which say it’s a horrific waste of time, and other stats which show individual devs netting a tidy profit. Then there’s the fact that controller-based massagers, rehashed controller-based massagers, and Cold War games which contain controller-freaking-based massage features, are more plentiful than oyster-chugging bunnies during mating season.

But if you’re looking for a way to get your feet wet in console development without a publisher and massive budget, then don’t forget that the Xbox offers you a very feasible way to do just that. Thanks go to Microsoft for this free lunch!

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Getting the stuff

There’s three things that you’ll need to start developing in Flash. The first component of your project (and the biggest chunk of it) is the Adobe Flex SDK which you can download over here. There are several versions: you should be fine with 3.0 (about 79 megabytes) but version 3.3 comes strongly recommended as the most up-to-date one (it weighs in at about 121 megs).

With just a few minutes and some basic ActionScript literacy, it's easy to create some simple (and horrific-looking) Flash games.

Okay, so you’ve swallowed the most bitter pill already. Good job. You should now have a zipped file on your drive: extract it to a location like C:\flex_sdk_3 or something. We’ll get back to it later.

Grab yourself FlashDevelop and install it – this is going to be the place where you create everything (the SDK is just for compiling and stuff, and works behind the scenes). Once that’s on your system, get yourself the Flash Player ActiveX control content debugger and the Flash Player Projector content debugger from this download page. Install them,please: they’re important support tools which will make your development life a whole lot easier!

Setting up FlashDevelop

Before compiling a single line of Flash, you’ll need to set up the IDE/SDK link (if you don’t understand what this means, just hang tight and follow these instructions). Open FlashDevelop, dismiss any dialog boxes that pop up, and go to Tools > Program Settings. Select the AS3Context plugin from the menu that pops up and look for a field labelled “Flex SDK location” on the right panel where you’ll enter the path that you extracted your SDK zip to earlier (for example, C:\flex_sdk_3). Well done, apprentice: you’ve just passed the next step in your Flash trials and are ready to code a simple application.

“Hello World” and an example

Go to Project > New Project , select the standard AS3 project from the options that pop up, and enter the new project’s name and directory. Once you’ve got your new workspace open, find a file called “Main.as” in the Project window on the right (it’ll be hiding in the SRC folder) and double-click to bring up the code window. Just below the two default “import” lines, write the following:

import flash.text.TextField;

Now enter this code just below the green comment which says “entry point”:

var myTextField: TextField = new TextField();

myTextField.text = “Hello World!”;

stage.addChild(myTextField);

Press CTRL+ENTER to compile and run your code. If everything goes well, you should see a little “Hello World!” application pop up in a new tab or window. Congratulations, you’ve just learned Flash in under 500 words!

For further reading, there’s an extended tutorial on Dev.Mag, an AS3 manual from Adobe and a simple example project over here. Happy Flashing!

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The answer to that is fairly in-depth. First of all, because I’m an awesome game dev journalist (who would never, ever speak wrongly of local developers Luma Arcade or shamelessly plug their URL in a completely unrelated article just because they made a game for the iPhone), I have about eleventy-threeve different news feeds which I check every day for the latest news on what’s hot, happening and of interest to me. To mention all of them would be lucrative (I get paid per word, folks) but not very conducive to an interesting article.

But a far more important factor (which I have mentioned before) is my desire to get into the thick of things by joining an actual game development community. Not only does it help me surround myself with like-minded people, but I actually have a platform from which I can get feedback on my games, provide feedback to other indie developers, and get the choicest news about fresh developments and game making tools.

I’m currently sitting pretty and posting regularly in two communities: one is South Africa’s very own Game.Dev group, kindly hosted on the NAG forums. The other one is TIGSource, an indie news source and developer community that’s headed up by a bunch of indie veterans like Derek Yu.

Wait a minute. This looks pretty darn familiar, doesn't it?

Aside from news gathering and feedback, joining a community can be important for a whole whack of reasons. For a start, it’ll force you to regularly correspond with other people online (which, let’s face it, you’ll be forced to do sooner or later if you ever want to show the Internet all the cool stuff you’ve made). On top of that, earning the respect of a community by getting involved and showing them what you’re made of will encourage them to help you when it comes to building and promoting your very own Best Game Ever.

Think of how you make friends in the Sims, or win allies in computer games. Whatever. In the same way that you can build a reputation in any self-respecting RPG, you can build a reputation in the world of indie gamers by participating and making yourself known on a personal level rather than coding up a storm in solitude before signing up at all the game development hotspots at the last minute to shout “PLEASE WILL SOMEBODY PLAY MY GAMES???”

Build up your foundations now. Networking as an indie developer will go a long way towards helping you to learn new things and gain recognition for your projects. Sign up with Game.Dev. Sign up with TIGSource. Start a blog. Follow other people’s blogs on Gamasutra. Leave comments on IndieGames.com. Buy yourself a goldfish.

Do anything that will make your name familiar to more people in more places – it’ll invariably carry you a lot further than reclusion and shyness ever will.

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Cease your lamentations, little one. The fairy godmother has just landed on your shoulder, sprinkled some generic magical powder over your face, and cooed, “Of course there is, you fool. Have a look at Luma Arcade.”

Yes, the fairy godmother is a rude little creature, but she has a point. Luma Arcade is what one would call a “real” game development studio: even if you look down on indie development (“Which you bloody well shouldn’t!” snaps the godmother), it cannot be said that these hardworking people aren’t making a mark on the local and international scene.

Luma Arcade started off some years ago as a humble division of a broader creative studio, the team consisting of various industry experts that included game developers absorbed from the ranks of Game.Dev and I-Imagine. Their first project was a branded racing game known as Mini #37, a “whizz around the racetrack” offering which had players zooming (and screaming, and crashing) around localised tracks that featured true-to-life environments from Durban and Cape Town. It was a really novel offering for South Africans who were able to playtest it at major events such as rAge or download it for free from the Mini #37 Website.

Since then, Luma Arcade has been expanding its game development portfolio with projects including CG movies, game trailers, real-time graphics solutions, advergames and a whole lot more.

At the moment, its crowning glory is an iPhone game called Marble Blast Mobile. If any of you are aware of GarageGames, you may have heard of the original Marble Blast, an action puzzler which has players rolling marbles along crazy, cartoon-style landscapes.

GarageGames gave Luma Arcade the responsibility of developing a mobile port of this hit classic for the iPhone, making the group one of the first iPhone game developers on the continent, and possibly the first developers in South Africa to be entrusted with such high-profile game IP. There were a lot of technical and design-related issues involved in moving a game like Marble Blast to the iPhone, but Luma Arcade rose to the challenge with innovations such as “virtual analog sticks” coupled with an educated look at previous Marble Blast titles and game design philosophy.

Aside from press announcements and the oh-so-typical marketing spiel, the people involved with Marble Blast Mobile have already offered the public a technical postmortem written by one of the core developers.

Even in these times of economic doubt, Luma Arcade has shown that there is still potential for South African developers – take a look at their stuff when you have the time, and you may just get that warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy.

Marble Blast Mobile is available from the iPhone App Store and has its own GarageGames product page for you to check out. The going price is $4.99.

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Game Maker
http://www.yoyogames.com/gamemaker/try

We’ve chatted about Game Maker before. To be quite frank, it’s one of the best rapid game creation toolkits out there. Not only is it wonderfully accessible (making it perfect for beginners), but it also allows advanced users to do some really impressive stuff, and sports one heck of a big developer community. The free Lite version doesn’t contain full functionality, but it’s good enough to get your feet wet. For more Game Maker evangelisation and whatnot, check our Game Maker primer article.

The GIMP
http://www.gimp.org/

No, it’s not what you’re thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter. The GIMP (also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program) is basically the only thing you’ll ever really need for 2D image creation in your games. Its functionality rivals that of big-shot applications such as Photoshop, and unless you really want to use a specific fliggyblub-whassisname image filter that is somehow only available in the latter, you’re on easy street for picture-making. The interface is a bit strange (GIMP really likes multiple windows) but it’s cross-platform, free and powerful.

Blender
http://www.blender.org/

Hands-down the best free 3D modelling program out there. Blender is an open-source answer to the likes of 3DS Max and Maya, and boy does it have clout! Blender has been going for a long time with a really big community, meaning that it has plugins for just about every function imaginable (though, sadly, it still lacks the ability to make an omelette). Many game development tools – Game Maker included – support libraries or plug-ins aimed at importing Blender files, and if you’re one of those really determined types you can even try your hand at making a game within Blender itself. Holy cowbells, Batman!

Audacity
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

A lot of game developers tend to neglect sound production in their projects, while others run straight to free sound libraries. By using an app like Audacity, you can make a huge impression with the generation of original audio – even if it’s just a few random hacks and wheezes into a microphone that’s held together by duct tape and bubblegum. The Audacity download comes with some optional extras — two of them are the LAME MP3 encoder (install to export MP3s properly) and the LADSPA plugins (loads and loads of cool filters). It’s strongly recommended that you install both of these.

So, there you have it. These tools are all that you need to start off your game development career! Go forth, build up your portfolio, and have loads of fun while you’re at it.

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The Nameless Mod by Off Topic Productions is a tongue-in-cheek look at online communities which is based on – you guessed it – the original Deus Ex game. Oh, you little sleuth, you! It’s also apparently really, really cool, having received numerous positive reviews and thousands of downloads in the tentative couple of months that it has been on the market thus far. One could hazard that anything less would be gravely disappointing – the better part of a decade went into this mod’s creation – but it’s still quite encouraging to see success stories like this.

Goth girl? This MUST be cyberpunk.

The Deus Ex modding community isn’t nearly as large or prominent as, say, the Unreal or Half-Life mod groups, but because it’s based around this decade’s Most Awesome Freaking Game Ever™, there’s a lot of loyalty and enthusiasm alongside the stench of coffee and general unwashed-ness that accompanies most developers. And when you gather enough enthusiasm, know-how, and raw manpower, you end up with what’s called a “total conversion” mod – an entire rehash of the original game engine with new sounds, graphics, and game rules. The Nameless Mod is one such venture, promising at least 30 hours of unique gameplay in a built-from-scratch game universe which is so extensive that it actually outweighs the original Deus Ex game.

So, how did the team manage to pull together such an enormous project and keep themselves motivated over the seven long years that it took them to complete it? In this Gamasutra interview, some of the mod’s creators go into detail about the creative process and the challenges involved in making a mod with a development time that’s longer than the average AAA commercial game.

"What the hey? Where'd those giant floating letters come from?"

“We worked very hard to establish a community around the game,” said Lawrence “Trestkon” Laxdal, the mod’s producer. “To be sure, we did a lot of internal back patting, but nothing beats encouraging words from fans anticipating your work.”

What can we learn from TNM? Two things, probably: for a start, the fact that a game is old doesn’t stop it from being ripe for modding. For example, a great deal of Unreal Tournament 2004 mods are still being developed to this day, despite its comparative age – much to the delight of a whole whack of mod fans. Secondly, there’s nothing more important than the backing of a dedicated team and an enthusiastic community that just wants to have fun.

The mod weighs in pretty steeply for us bandwidth-conscious South Africans (it’s a little under one gigabyte), but if you have the megs to spare you can get it over here. Also, be sure to read the Gamasutra interview if you want more details on the developers – it’s an interesting, educational look at the challenges they faced during their labour of love.

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Adventure Game Studio (or AGS, as it is more conveniently known) is a specialised game development framework used to make all sorts of classic adventure scenarios, equipped with ready-made functionality for pathfinding, inventory management, and the ability to save games so that developers can focus on the juicy stuff: making interesting puzzles, characters and environments for the player.

Shifter's Box, a short adventure game made in AGS and inspired by a really twisted imagination."

AGS makes use of a friendly, Windows-based interface that eases you into the game creation process and allows any user to create simple applications once the basics have been learned. For more advanced users, the program also comes equipped with its own scripting tool, allowing you to code more complicated interactions, events and other programming magic.

AGS sports a very large community, all of who are enthusiastically churning out whole packs of cool adventure games. Before you decide whether or not AGS is the tool for you, just have a look at the sort of results that it offers. Some examples are of extremely high quality, such as A Tale of Two Kingdoms: a full-length, commercial-quality fantasy adventure with a deep story and a well-crafted set of puzzles for players to solve.

Trilby: The Art of Theft. Like every other Thief clone out there, except that it doesn't suck.

Then there’s Yahtzee. Yes, that’s Mr “I hate every videogame in existence” Yahtzee. The famous Zero Punctuation creator doesn’t just review games – he makes them too, and has been doing so for a mighty long time. His weapon of choice: AGS. In fact, he loved AGS so much that he went on to create one of the best indie games of 2007 with it. Oh, and it was an action platformer, made that way just because he wanted to prove a point about the engine’s flexibility.

If you want to get started on AGS yourself, a brilliant way to get familiar with it would be to follow these handy tutorials. If you’re still having problems (or just want to get involved with the community), have a look at the AGS forums. The local Game.Dev community also has a few members who wield the stick of AGS experience, so stop on by and show off your new project if you have something up your sleeve.

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This wasn’t the first Ludum Dare competition to ever be held. In fact, Ludum Dare’s core idea isn’t even all that unique nowadays. A few months back, for example, developers were treated to the Global Game Jam (there’s a local Game.Dev entry over here), another competition where people the world over were required to craft a game in – you guessed it – 48 hours. Heck, these sort of competitions are breeding like rats on Viagra.

But why all the fuss?

Tombed, a retro-style Ludum Dare entry. Try not to get squished.

Rapid prototyping is one of the most effective ways to test ideas, improve one’s design skills, and focus on what’s important in a game’s design. Instead of labouring for days, weeks, or even months on an idea that’s essentially broken (and poring over the minutae of your work like a jeweller who’s forgotten to wear contacts), a lot of developers find it easier and far more sensible to craft something in a day or two with humble graphics and simple gameplay.

“Why, oh why?” I hear you cry. “My product is going to look cheap and stupid and everyone will hate me FOREVER!” Well hey, the great thing about prototyping is that it’s okay to hate the results! Even amongst top developers, not every single game idea is an instant smash hit: if you were ever to get a peek at their workstations, you’d probably find an entire folder full of random projects and half-baked notions that never really got off the ground.

Take Dylan Fitterer, for example. He’s one of those “game-a-week geeks”: in other words, he resolved to make a working videogame every seven days without fail, no matter how crude or crappy the result would be. Where is he now, you may ask? Well, if the name alone didn’t have alarm bells ringing, then you may know him better as that demigod of game development who created Audiosurf.

48 Hour War is a local effort made for the Global Game Jam. Blow stuff up and appreciate its artistic meaning!

Know about Crayon Physics Deluxe? Or how about World of Goo? Both of them started off as prototypes in the Experimental Gameplay Project, an initiative which required people to submit prototypes of games built in seven days or less. Now they’re huge indie titles that are raking in fame and cash.

The point is that you shouldn’t be afraid of quickly generating something horrendously crappy on a regular basis. A lot of your ideas will be discarded immediately, yes. But remember that discarded prototypes are never a waste: they’re simply the videogaming compost in which you’ll one day plant the seeds of that next killer idea.

Keep this in mind, prototype regularly, and never be afraid of mistakes.

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As it turns out, the IT giant has just announced the beginning of its 2009 Dream-Build-Play challenge, a game development competition that allows everyday Joes and Janes to pick up their dev kits and create games for the Xbox 360… potentially winning truckloads of cash for their trouble.

Yeah, yeah, you can tease Microsoft all you want. After all, they brought us Vista. Heck, they even brought us Windows ME (though there’s apparently a valid explanation for that). But with the release of the Xbox 360, Microsoft gave the market a fairly good gaming console which has thus far enjoyed a reasonable amount of success – something which we can all probably acknowledge without succumbing to rabid fanboyism.

SpaceHack. It's a roguelike in space. With guns. And cool stuff.

More importantly, Microsoft followed this up with the release of a handy set of Visual Studio libraries known collectively as XNA. This free offer allows pretty much anybody to begin developing games that are compatible with both their PC and their Xbox 360, granting everyday users a level of flexibility that’s otherwise unheard of in the console arena.

Dream-Build-Play revolves around XNA as a development tool and everybody who registers for the competition gets a free 12-month subscription to the XNA Creator’s Club, allowing them to deploy their creations to an actual Xbox 360 and play from the console.

Is the competition worth it? Well, sure: not only do you get a golden ticket to develop your own Xbox 360 games, but there’s no entry cost for the challenge itself and you stand a chance of winning up to $40 000 (that’s US dollars, folks) for a first-place entry.

Ultimate Quest, another South African DBP entry. Now with 50% extra viking!

It’s not as if South Africa hasn’t already yielded some stunning entries: several local projects have received overwhelmingly positive feedback in previous DBP challenges and a few have even enjoyed their own spot in the competition’s Top 20 list (QCF’s SpaceHack is a good example – check out this video interview to learn more about the developers).

Even if you don’t know anything about XNA, DBP serves as the perfect excuse to start learning: it’s free, it’s backed up by an awesome development network and it allows you to share your creativity with a global audience.

If you’re not scared of programming (and have a hankering for console development), sign up for DBP yourself and have a go. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to learn.

Keen to enter the competition, but not sure where to start? Check here for the latest XNA download and make sure that you have Visual Studio 2008 installed on your system (see link above for the free Express version). Then register for the challenge here and start developing! A beginner’s tutorial is available at the Creator’s Club Website and you can check on other South African submissions by visiting the Game.Dev forum.

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A lot of pretty cool things have emerged from the Unreal development community over the years: some, like the hugely popular Invasion mod, started with a few pieces of chicken-scratch code held together with bubblegum and MacGyver’s nosehairs back in the dark ages of the original Unreal and UT99.

Of course, mod development is just like regular game development: you need to start small. No, seriously, get away from that jar labelled “IDEAS FOR BIGGEST AND BEST MOD EVER!”. If you don’t have a group of dedicated devs that outnumbers, say, the sheer horse-choking quantity of crappy Star Wars videogames that get released by LucasArts on a day-to-day basis, you’re never going to get further than modelling half a leg to hop around some blocky greyscale arena.

3DS Max's ActorX exporter tool in action

Start off instead by making a few levels and perhaps some new game types with the help of UnrealEd, Epic’s officially supported map editor and content generator for games made in the Unreal engine.

UnrealEd is a WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) map editor which allows devs to quickly and easily create maps, script AI, and make French toast. On the art side, UnrealEd conforms with most modern level editor standards (in fact, it was responsible for kick-starting most of them), allowing users to start with a big chunk of geometry and add or remove shapes to create a navigable level for players to walk about in.

Static meshes can be created in standard 3D modelling programs such as Maya and 3D Studio Max, and even open-source software such as Blender for those of us who don’t sweat out 100 Rand notes every time we jog to the kitchen for another sandwich.

UnrealEd is also a helpful introduction to Java programming, if you decide to dip into its built-in UnrealScript. The script is a powerful way to tweak your creations in ways that normal map creation wouldn’t allow (affording custom behaviours, events and rule sets) and follows the same rules as standard object-oriented programming.

The same mesh imported into the Unreal Engine

If you own an Unreal game, chances are that you already have a version of this extremely popular editor. Check out the Unreal Developer Network for helpful links and ideas, or see other people’s creations in Epic’s User Maps and Mods forum. Community Websites such as BeyondUnreal and Planet Unreal (they have a nice little beginner’s tut right here) can also be useful.

If you have a hankering for modding and are willing to start small, you should play around with making some maps in UnrealEd. Not only is it one of the best tools out there, but the opportunity to gib your buddies at that next LAN with a carefully concealed doomsday device that only you know about is something altogether far too tempting to pass up.

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Nay, dear reader. The annual IGF, better known as the Independent Games Festival is the chance for aspiring indie developers to showcase their work and enter into one of the world’s most prestigious game development competitions for a shot at fame, glory and lots of delicious cake.

Wait, what the heck is an indie developer?

You are. If you’ve taken up game development as a hobby, and don’t have the backing of some sort of gargantuan publisher or enough money to buy your own island (hey, it happens), then congratulations! You’ve been welcomed into the indie developer’s world and can now appreciate the fact that the IGF is aimed at people like you.

Past IGF winner Aquaria. Now with 50% extra turtle!

Okay, now tell me more about this thing.

The IGF is held near the beginning of every year. While the festival’s main drawcard is its prestigious competition and the announcement of the winners (the grand prize is a whopping US$30 000), there’s also a whole bunch of other events behind the scenes: in fact, the IGF is part of a much bigger annual event called the Game Developers Conference, where prestigious game development figures from all over the world gather to generally mess around and do really cool stuff.

What are some of the games that have emerged from the IGF?

Kyle Gabler's World of Goo. Clever, addictive and really sticky.

Prize-winners in previous IGF competitions include Xbox indie hit Braid, undersea action-adventure game Aquaria, Kyle Gabler’s quirky (and addictive) World of Goo and many more well-known indie titles. If you don’t know about these games already, hit their links and get your hands on them if you can. It’ll be an eye-opening experience.

This is way too hardcore for me!

You don’t need to be intimidated just because you’re gazing at the cream of the crop. The fact is that anybody is allowed to enter and some rather intriguing entries have gone through to the finals in recent years, including simple Flash games and even one or two Game Maker submissions.

Yes, if you’re a brand spanking new developer, chances of you getting through to the finals may well be slim. But it’s important to see the competition for what it is: a means of promoting and honouring indie game developers. Don’t look at the entrants and curl up into a little ball: instead, consider how you’ll one day reach that level too.

To check out the results of this year’s IGF (which was held at the end of March), head on over to the website (http://www.igf.com/) and click on “Finalists & Winners”.

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This perception of game development, however, is remarkably slanted: most indie developers occupy themselves with much smaller and simpler projects, many of which enjoy a great deal of success without ever having to put the finished product on a store shelf. More importantly, the tools used to create these things don’t need to be horribly complicated: sometimes all it takes is a friendly interface and a flexible system. A system like the one presented by Game Maker.

Once you have the basics down, Game Maker is about as complicated as cabbage soup.

Game Maker is a rapid game development tool first released by Mark Overmars way back in 1999. It began as a simple graphics creation tool, but quickly evolved into a system that allowed even the most hopelessly drool-inclined, dunce cap programmers to create games visually with a drag-and-drop interface.

Game Maker is great because not only does it cater to complete beginners, but actually allows advanced users to create some very impressive products using its built-in script system and its faithful reproduction of real object-oriented programming concepts.

Derek Yu's Spelunky. Expect lots of snakes, spikes and cheesy Indiana Jones references.

Recent offerings from Game Maker include Spelunky, a Roguelike cave exploration game made by renowned indie game developer Derek Yu, and Battleships Forever, a freeware RTS that was nominated for an award in the 2008 IGF. These are just two representatives of an entire army of great games built in GM.

Game Maker also has an online portal called YoYo games, which is dedicated to showcasing Game Maker creations and building a community of GM developers. Signing up allows others to play your GM games straight from the Website and receive comments, user ratings and reviews on the game’s page. The community is extremely large and consists of many knowledgeable and passionate individuals who can help out any budding developer.

So, give Game Maker a shot. The download is pretty small and the official website contains a set of tutorials that serve as a brilliant springboard into the system. No matter who you are, you’ll be creating your own awesome projects in no time. Ketchup and fries included.

If you have any further queries about Game Maker – or simply want to get in touch with a local community of developers – sign up at the Game.Dev forums and ask around. Beginners are always welcome.

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According to some, modding traces its humble beginnings to a rework of Castle Wolfenstein (note: this isn’t Wolfenstein 3D) known as Castle Smurfenstein, built way back in 1983 by a programmer with a penchant for design and an uncanny hatred of little blue men. It was a basic reskinning of the original game – the title screen was changed, all of the pixelated Nazi soldiers were replaced with pixelated blue muck, and German exclamations were turned into angry smurfisms. It wasn’t much, but back in the day it was an incredibly novel concept.

DoomBuilder, a level editor for Doom, Heretic and Hexen

Nearly a decade passed, however, before modding received a real kick to get it going. Enter id Software and their hip new FPS, Doom. Although it was a great game in itself, Doom‘s lifespan was greatly extended by a community which thrust itself into generating new content and tools like an army of fornicating rabbits. People who owned the game were now exposed to a stream of content generated by an enormous fanbase of amateur developers. id Software even went as far as releasing a retail package known as Final Doom which contained two community-generated mission packs.

Eventually, the original developers caught on to the potential and started releasing their own mod tools. One early success was UnrealEd made by Tim Sweeney and the crew at Epic for their FPS title, Unreal. “Mod” and “mutator” tabs soon started springing up in mainstream titles. The line gradually became more blurred between gaming consumers and developers, especially once popular offerings became integrated as standards in subsequent game releases – think of the original Invasion mod for Unreal Tournament. Think of Tower Defence. Think of Team Fortress. Think of Battlefield 1942, which is so hopelessly lost under a deluge of mods that some poor souls probably don’t even remember what the original game actually looks like.

Modding may or may not be the thing for you, but one thing is certain: modders have a great deal of weight behind them nowadays. A lot of contemporary multiplayer mayhem is a result of user-generated content. Bigwigs such as Valve and Epic Games have absorbed reputable modders and level designers into their ranks. Mods have even outgrown their “host game” on occasion, rising to levels of popularity that were unheard of in the vanilla title.

Give modding a shot if you want. It’s fun, accessible and can produce results – even if all you want to do is screw around and make something interesting.

Unreal Tournament 3 Editor

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1) Get a rapid game development kit.

One of the best starts you can make in game development is … well, developing games. Use whatever tools you can to generate unique titles quickly and easily. Yes, you may not get the awesome 3D particle effects of Ridiculous Rubbish version threeventeen-blorgh, but you’ll receive something far more valuable: experience and a set of finished products. Start small. Start easy. Try out something like Game Maker and have a little fun.

2) Try modding

If you feel more secure attaching yourself to particular games and generating custom user content, then you’re welcome to try that too! Heck, don’t even worry about making full-blown stuff like Counter-Strike and UT mutators. Just pick up your favourite game, go into the level editor and create some fun and engaging challenges for your friends. At the end of the day, even DotA is just a fancy Warcraft III map.

Damnation by Blue Omega, which began as a mod for UT2004.

3) Code your own engine, get snapped up by EA and release the ‘Next Big Thing’.

To be honest, this probably isn’t going to happen. But it would be really cool if it did.

4) Get schooled

South African universities are starting to present exciting new opportunities for students interested in game design, offering development-oriented courses for those aspiring towards the lofty heights occupied by the likes of John Carmack and Jonathan Blow. UCT and Rhodes are already offering game development courses, and others are quickly jumping onto the bandwagon – keep this in mind if you plan on studying next year.

5) Join a community

We all go a bit nutty in isolation, so share the crazy with a bunch of other lunatics who share the game development vibe. Have a look at joining local communities such as Game.Dev – not only will you be surrounded by people in more or less the same boat as you, but they’ll be able to give loads of advice that this 400-something word article would never be able to cover. So sign up, get chatty, and start devving!

No matter which route you take, always remember that making a good game is something that takes practice – much like learning how to ride a bike. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to make a simple project, and every random prototype that you construct will give you more experience and ideas to work with in future endeavours. Give game development a go. It’s an easy start, we promise!

Be sure to keep an eye on NAG Online for weekly articles about improving your game development skills.

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