by Stephanie A. Smith

Created on: August 31, 2010

Video games may be virtual reality, but they are real work to create. To make a video game that hard-core gamers will love and to make the game believable, game makers need to use sophisticated sciences and even more sophisticated programming, not to mention good old-fashioned common sense. There are many problems faced by game makers that are creating today's new video games. Here are a handful of the most challenging ones and tips for how to get around them.

A great idea for the game itself is the most important part of creating a game, without it, you have nothing. You can be the best programmer in the world, and no one will want your game. Ask yourself these questions before trying to make any game.

1) What is my competition? If your game is in a genre that has many games in it, your game will have to stand out from the crowd in some way. Look at sucessful games and see what really makes them tick. Then incorporate some of that into your game, or better yet, try to make them bigger.

2) Is the content engaging? A game can have the best graphics and awsome moves, but if there is no engaging storyline, then you will have little chance in the crowd of games. There are some exceptions to this (Guitar Hero, DDR), but they tend to have a fancy controller.

3) Do I have enough elements to keep this game engaging? These elements take the form of upgrades, and just about every game has upgrades. Weapons, abilities and powers, enemies, new places, etc. have to slowly get harder and/or cooler as the game progresses or you could lose people's attention.  Adding upgrades is simple enough when plotting out a game, just be sure to keep them in the same genre as the previous weapons/abilities.

After you asure yourself that the ideas are up to par, then you can begin programming. But there are many difficulties here.

The absolute worst challenge any programmer will face is the amount of processing power a console has-or lack thereof. If the computer inside of the console cannot keep up with everything that is being fed into it, the game can skip just like it would if the disc was scratched. This skipping will ruin the game for even the casual gamer. Yes, processing power does get better all of the time, but the better the processing power, the bigger the game that game makers want to create and the bigger the game that buyers will want. Because of this, processing power will always be a problem. All of the other problems in this list eventually boil down to the

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