If you’ve played games long enough, you’ve surely thought, “Hey, what if I made a game?” Problem is, you don’t have a fancy computer science degree. You don’t know JavaScript from Fortran, and you wouldn’t recognize an art pipeline if somebody hit you over the head with one.
Making games isn’t easy. It wasn’t easy 35 years ago when Warren Robinett was writing machine code to cram Atari 2600 Adventure into 4 kilobytes of memory, and it isn’t any easier now that 300-person teams are spending millions to create incredibly complex 3D worlds with the latest in bleeding-edge graphics and animation techniques.
But if you can set your sights a bit lower than Halo 5, there are tons of resources out there to help you turn your playful dreams into a reality. These days, game-making software is practically a cottage industry. The first thing to do is find the right tool for the job. Start with these five.
Boldly going where better game designers have gone before. (Credit: Gordon Cameron)
1. GameMaker: Studio
First released in 1999, this is the granddaddy of modern game-making software, and its popularity is easy to understand. A no-frills interface will make anyone familiar with Photoshop feel right at home, and it combines tremendous depth with a huge community of users. The answers to many GameMaker questions are just a quick search away. Plus, the community forums are full of helpful veterans.
At its core, GameMaker is built for two-dimensional gaming. The toolset lends itself most naturally to classic genres such as platformers and scrolling shoot-em-ups. Go through one of the first tutorials and you’ll quickly author a simple shooter that’ll be familiar to anyone who’s played the classic arcade game 1942.
Some may be turned off by GameMaker’s old-school vibe, but I found it a powerful, surprisingly simple introduction to game design, partly because it forces you to confront fundamentals. What exactly is happening when one object bumps into another? If your character “shoots” a gun, what does that mean in terms of graphical sprites placed along X/Y coordinates? How many frames are in your heroine’s animation, under what conditions does her image flip horizontally, how high does she jump, and how much control do you have over her while she’s in midair? Answering these questions may seem tedious, but it can be exhilarating once you dig into them.
If you do want to write code — or better, yet copy and paste someone else’s — GameMaker accommodates that with its proprietary language, GML, which can be integrated with the mostly drag-and-drop interface.
Price: $99
Sample Game: WizardWizard
Sample Game: WizardWizard
2. Construct 2
Construct feels like GameMaker’s younger, hipper, and pricier cousin. Released in 2011, it does a lot of the same things GameMaker does, but in different ways.
One of Construct’s interface innovations is the “Event Sheet,” a separate tab that aggregates the game logic and instructions running in the background. While there’s nothing here that can’t be executed in GameMaker, the different presentation may be easier for some users to get their minds around.
Which program you prefer will largely come down to personal taste. I gravitated toward GameMaker for the simple reason that it was less picky about which sorts of audio files it was willing to import for sound effects and music, plus the full version is $30 cheaper. But both feature plenty of depth, have a manageable learning curve, and will be especially congenial if your design ambitions skew retro.
Price: $129
Sample Game: The Esfaralante
Sample Game: The Esfaralante
3. GameGuru
If you’d rather dive face-first into the third dimension and starting whipping up a crazy shooter, GameGuru might be right for you. Think of it as a stepping stone to more sophisticated 3D level editors likeUnreal Engine 4 and CryEngine. It’s limited, but you can start creating stuff fast.
Within about ten minutes of first booting up GameGuru and barely glancing at the documentation, I’d built a simple outdoor level containing trees, buildings, enemy soldiers, a zombie, and a medieval barbarian. And a trio of psychotic, laser-wielding rabbits. Horrifying! It’s a rush to be able to dive so quickly into a world you’ve just painted.
The flipside to that, of course, is that a great deal of work has already been done for you in advance by the GameGuru folks. It’s theirversion of a shooter interface, their version of an ammo/health counter, and their version of how an enemy soldier behaves. After all, you can’t have it both ways: if you want to throw together a first-person shooter in a hurry, you need to rely on someone else to lay the groundwork for you. Much of GameGuru’s content can be customized, but understandably, it takes significantly more technical expertise to do so.
GameGuru is such a new program that it doesn’t have the wealth of add-ons, documentation, and veteran users that distinguishes, for example, GameMaker. Still in Early Access, it’s got only a fraction of the features that, its makers claim, will eventually be available.
Price: $20
Sample Game: There’s not much out there yet in a finished state. But the GameGuru Developer Blog highlights promising works-in-progress from fans.
Sample Game: There’s not much out there yet in a finished state. But the GameGuru Developer Blog highlights promising works-in-progress from fans.
4. RPG Maker
Prefer old-school role-playing games? RPG Maker is your jam. Dating to 1988, this venerable series gives you a complete tool set to create maps, specify character classes and skills, script encounters, and tell for the umpteenth time the tale of a young hero from an obscure background who is called upon to save the world.
Like GameGuru, RPG Maker is initially a blast: You can create an environment, drop a character into it, and try it out in minutes flat. Dig into the tutorials, though, and you’ll see there’s a lot of depth here. It turns out making an RPG is about more than just painting happy little trees all over your hand-crafted mountain village. It’s about databases. Databases! Character classes, skills, weapons, armor, magical items: Each one must be named, given characteristics, given an associated graphic, and cross-referenced based on who can use what and at which level. And we haven’t even gotten to the monsters yet.
Even if its cutesy aesthetic isn’t your cup of tea, RPG Maker will give you a powerful insight into the kind of background work it takes to make a good role-playing game. All without a line of code written.
Price: $69.99
Sample Game: Aveyond: Lord of Twilight
Sample Game: Aveyond: Lord of Twilight
5. Twine
Twine isn’t conventional game-making software, strictly speaking. It’s a program that lets you quickly and easily create web-based, “choose-your-own-adventure”-style interactive fiction. A simple browser-based interface lets you click and drag different sections to create a complex flowchart. Each section is a standalone page, describing whatever you wish, with as many branching paths as you desire.
The dividing line between a “game” and “interactive fiction” is a fuzzy one, and open to debate. What’s significant about Twine is that using it forces you to confront the very particular problems of branching-path storylines. How do you strike a balance between imposing your own will on a player’s experience, and allowing them the freedom to make and own their choices? Can you come up with outcomes that are equally satisfying whether there are three different endings, or a hundred? Such questions are a part of designing all but the most linear games, and Twine provides a great sketchbook in which to work them out.
Alternatively, if you consider rich interactive fiction an end until itself, there’s no easier program on this list to use. And best of all, it’s absolutely free.
Price: Free!
Sample Twine: Swan Hill
Sample Twine: Swan Hill
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