by John Niblick

Created on: September 18, 2009

I am sure we all have wanted to design a game from time to time. Perhaps you were playing your favorite video game and decided that you could easily make it better. Chances are you then gave up because the prospect of writing your own game engine sounded like way too much work. If this sounds like you then keep on reading because I have plenty of information for you. When you are first starting out you will need a game engine. Then you move to the graphics, dialogue and sound effects, and finally putting the finishing touches on. If this is your first game you won't need to worry about marketing or advertising in fact your main problem will probably be cost. However if you are internet savy enough you will be able to find most of the resources. I will not be discussing storytelling and characters because I am only covering the technology aspect.

Before you even start to think about marketing or betas or even graphics you will need a strong and easily reprogrammed game engine. You have a few choices here, but you have to answer a some questions first. Do you want your game to be in 2d or 3d, how much money do you want to spend, how much experience with programming do you have? Depending on how you answered you now have to narrow your choices down. If you are designing and programming a 2d game you should look at engines like Torque, by Garage Games, or the RPG Maker series, by Ascii, because of the midrange pricing and powerful graphical interfaces. You can find free game engines but they are severely outdated and a real pain to use. If you want 3d graphics in your game you choices are a bit larger. You can use Torque if you are looking for an inexpensive and very strong game engine although this is suggested for a beginning indie developer. If you are looking for something more professional there are engines like Gamebryo although the pricing and steep learning curve make these engines unappealing to beginners. You also have the choice of writing your own game engine and if you have a good enough understanding of direct-x programming and languages like C++ this can be a very useful thing. The downside is the beginning programming languages like DarkBasic and XNA lead to bad programming habits farther on down the line so this method should be avoided if possible.

After you have chosen your game engine you need to start working on the graphics. If you are using 2d style there are plenty of choices ranging from the simplest pixel art to complex vector art. If

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