Getting started in Game Development might possibly be one of the hardest parts of game development itself.
This topic will be dedicated to helping explain the different parts of game development. Also feel free to correct me, this topic is about creating an accurate knowledge base, not to raise egos!
Popular Game Engines:
Unity3D - Unity is a growing engine, Since unity 2.6 the development environment has been extremely effective for every form of developer alike. With recent updates Unity3D actually supports 2D Game development including 2D Physics which makes it just more enticing for indies to use.
Unreal Engine - Unreal has made itself popular with AAA Titles using it with just a few of the many titles named as Borderlands Series and the BioShock Series.
CryEngine SDK - CryEngine is notorious for its amazing default shaders/rendering with amazing support for even more amazing 3D Art. CryEngine is known for its games like Crysis and FarCry.
The easiest way to learn the basics of game development is to open up the Cryengine or something similar, then load up a singleplay map. This way you can see how the professionals make the map, what techniiques they use to make certain things do what they want and to overall get a better understanding of what's going on behind the scenes.
A solid way of starting with game development is to educate yourself on the topic. I'm quite sure that people who want to make a game have a game concept in their head, they have the mechanics roughly sketched out in their head, and they want to make a product.
The first think you should do is dedicate a serious amount of time to the documentation of the platform you'll be working with, no matter if it's Source, Unreal, Unity or other gaming engines with an SDK or a working environment. Once you're past that, and you have a basic understanding on how stuff in the particular engine works, if you wish to resume on educating yourself, you've got an enormous amount of educational resources, both professional and enthusiast which can be found on Lynda, DigitalTutors, Design3 and YouTube.
There are quite a bit of topics that need to be addressed, some of which include 2D/3D design for environments, various types of props, characters and such, graphic design for sprites, bitmaps, textures, animation, coding, AI, sound and others.
If you're gonna be a one-man band, it'll take a quite a lot of time and effort on your side to be a jack of all trades and execute tasks.
Don't lose your drive, don't lose your vision, don't get lazy, it'll be the end of you!
Don't lose your drive, don't lose your vision, don't get lazy, it'll be the end of you!
isnt that the truth. look at many recent games, BF4 really good example. terrible launch because it was all rushed and no one cared. great games take time. a long time.
I found a good step by step process on how to make a basic game on r/gamedev. A guy made a game in one week and tried to explain every choice he made while doing so. I am curently going through it trying to grasp the basic concepts, and so far it was a good ride. Link to his > BLOG Just go through the posts and some of you might find it useful. Also I suggest browsing some subreddits like r/gamedev and r/programming.
As to the pre-built engines I have found plenty of tutorials on YouTube. Unreal Engine for example does all the tutorials themselves, and little people create their own just because the team took it upon themselves. I also believe Unity has plenty of tutorials there as well.
Map designing is surely an integral part of making a good game, but I doubt that a beginner is required to be able to build a sufficient level. Although it will be a must when diving deeper into Game Development.
LÖVE is a great engine for 2d games. You start with a blank file and build everything from scratch, so there's no mystery code that you don't know how to use.
love2d is probebly a better start then UE4, unity or cryengine. start simple people all this shader nonsense u dont want to start of with unless your a graphics artist. understanding any of these biger engines takes some time leurning befor u even start hacking away at your own game.
i have teached people to program from 0 to pong in love2d in like less then a day give it a try