How To Make Games

In this article I’m going to be talking about the process behind actually making, testing and publishing a game. It’s aimed at the absolute beginner but there should be something of interest here for the intermediate level reader as well. I’m going to be concentrating on making game with Adobe Flash, but the general techniques are applicable to any platform.

What is a game?

Wikipedia defines a game as:

“…structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes used as an educational tool”

I would add that a game should generally contain these three components:

• Interactive element
• Challenge
• Goal

Obviously a game must be interactive, there must be some kind of challenge involved (mental or physical) and in most games there is a predefined goal which the player strives to achieve.
For example, take Pac-Man, one of the most recognisable games there is:

See this essay for a good description of fairness and it’s importance in games.

The Pac-Man Dossier, which you can read for everything you ever wanted to know about Pac-Man)Each little 8×8 square in the above image comes from the tile-set for Pac-Man, indeed you can see that this tile-set actually does contain the font as used by the game to display the score. If you took every unique tile in the above image and put them into a set, that would be all you needed to re-draw the Pac-Man world:

Here is an excellent article about how game mechanics can be used to build good games.

How do you come up with a game idea?

Take some of your favourite games, look over at the game mechanics they contain (i.e. the mechanisms which enable the game-play, an example would be eating a large pill in Pac-Man and being able to chase the ghosts), pick some that you really like and see if you can put a unique twist on them.
An example would be something like this:
To get inspiration spend some time playing old arcade games in Mame; there are an absolute ton of good ideas just waiting to be re-awakened.
Resist the temptation to copy an existing game, you should instead strive to provide something new and fresh. The reason for this is that when you copy an existing game you start to lose that creative mindset which is so important and will tend to keep falling back on doing things exactly how the game you are copying did them. Avoid this at all costs. It’s fine to use concepts from other games, but you must be free creatively.

Make a prototype

Once you’ve got your game idea, you should try to construct a prototype to test it out. If possible it’s a good idea to prototype the rough ideas for a game on paper first before even attempting to make a playable version. Keep it simple, though.

Here is another detailing how the on-paper prototype fits with the rest of the design process

How do you make a good game?

This is the most difficult part of all. You’ve got your game idea, you’ve made a prototype, but how do you know if it’s any good?
Once you’ve been working on a game for a while it does get rather difficult to tell if what you’ve been making is fun. The reason is that being constantly exposed to every minute detail of the game it becomes very difficult to see the wood for the trees. A good way to tell is to leave the game overnight and if you find yourself thinking about wanting to play it the next day, you’re probably on to something.
The next thing to do is to get as many people as possible to play it and let you know what they think. It’s better if the people aren’t family members because you’ll tend to get a rose-tinted spectacles response that way.
Collect all their feedback and try to remember one thing: every single piece of constructive negative feedback is correct. Everyone who takes time out to tell you want they don’t like is right.

Negative feedback

This is a very difficult thing to take on board and it’s so, so easy to just start dismissing individual pieces of feedback because they’re inconvenient to fix or would take too long. But you must address these issues because if you don’t you will end up with a poorer game in the end at which point it will be too late to fix them. Believe me there is nothing worse than seeing a negative review online which mentions one of those bits of feedback that you ignored.
Keep a tally of the most common issues and sort them by frequency; addressing problems in this way allows you to concentrate on fixing the main issues with the game.
If you get a lot of feedback that the game isn’t fun, stop work on it right away and come up with a new game idea and a new prototype. It will seem like a waste, but it’s an essential step towards becoming a good game designer. In fact it’s probably best to come up with a number of potential game ideas at the initial design phase so you have some other work to fall back on.
Starting over is never really starting from scratch in game creation because you’ll be able to save some parts of the work you’re discarding, whether that be the graphics, or some logic or whatever, it’s all part of the creative process.

Here is another article on the role of user feedback in game design

Bug-testing

Once your game is complete, you’ll want to start getting as many people as possible to play it in order to find all the little bugs that you’ve missed.

No matter how well you think you’ve tested it yourself, you can guarantee that the minute you hand it over to someone else they’ll find a bunch of horrible problems that you’ve missed.

A good tip for the intermediate/advanced level programmer is to install an exception handler to catch all unhandled exceptions and display a message on screen (with a call-stack) so the person playing knows they found a bug and should report it to you. Remember to make the message text selectable so the player can copy/paste it.
Even better, if you have a server with a database configured, submit this message directly into the database.

After you’ve done this it’s time to move into testing stage 2, whereby you should sign-up to http://www.flashgamelicense.com as a developer and submit your game for evaluation and testing by other developers only. That means only other developers can see your game and they should be able to provide you with more feedback on any bugs and also give you a review. Once you’ve done this, gotten as much feedback as possible and fixed any last bugs it’s time to think about releasing your game into the wild!

Publishing your game

Congratulations! You’re now ready to show your game to the world! Doing this is usually as simple as creating an account at the major portals and uploading your game.

Here is a list of the major portals ranked by website popularity.

Looking through that list you might start to get the impression that you’ve got your work cut out for you. However, once you’ve spot picked a few of your favourite portals, you can then upload your game to http://flashgamedistribution.com/ which will do a lot of the work for you via a method called viral distribution. Viral distribution is the process whereby portal owners will see a game they like the look of and take it for use on their own portal, thereby spreading it around the internet. They know that http://flashgamedistribution.com/ has been specially designed to assist in this process so a lot of portal owners go there on a regular basis. To be honest, they also go to the major portals as well, so this process may well just happen automatically.

Good luck!

I’ve covered every stage of game development from concept to implementation through testing and release. Making a game is not an easy process as you’ve probably gathered by now; it’s much easier to make a few simple game mechanic prototypes though, so don’t be put off just yet.
The best advice I can give you is to be persistent and never give up; much like anything in life, making a game requires a huge amount of perseverance especially if you’re just starting out. Take things step by step and treat every bit of progress as a triumph.
Until next time, have fun!
Cheers, Paul

Source http://www.wildbunny.co.uk/blog/2012/01/06/how-to-make-games/

Sumber http://upsicopyit.blogspot.com/

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