I am looking for proper guidance and advice in emerging into the field of game development. I enjoy Mac but I do everything on PC. Any help such as software recommendations, tips and tricks, and most of all where to start would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
I personally recommend you to start with basics using something like LÖVE.
The good thing about it is that it has a lot of tools to make you life easier if you wish to use them, but you can also write them yourself for the sake of practice.
A good way to to learn is to write simple games with that. Pong, brick breaker, asteroids, tetris, whatever comes to your mind. It makes for a good practice in managing objects, tweaking collision detection etc, if you want to focus on programming aspect of it. One of the most interesting assignments I've had is to write an asteroids game with an AI that plays it.
If you have some ideas and want to make games as soon as possible, Unity is probably a good choice, although note that unity requires you to learn a lot of unity-specific things.
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I second this.
I got gamemaker about a month ago, while it was on sale. Would that give me any amount experience? Game maker has its own language called GML, it wasn't too hard to make simple things with it, but I can never make collision detection. I followed every tip and tutorial, but I'd always end up with really weird results. Like warping to the top left corner instead of stopping.
I have never worked with gamemaker. You probably got your coordinates messed up at some point. Still, collision deteciton for rectangles is fairly straightforward.
I've heard that it's a good idea to get into modding before game development and design.
It puts stuff on your resume and gives you experience without having to get hired for anything.
There are many aspects of development that are completely absent in modding. But again, it depends on your specialization.
What sort of games would you like to end up making , mobile or desktop games?
Does this mean you would like to develop games for a Mac or On a Mac?
I'm looking to just developing for PC, or for Mac, on PC. To save money I might get a Mac. But I haven't made my mind up yet; I'm just gonna start off with Windows.
I pretty much said "if wall is 1 pixel in front of me then x and y = 0. It understood it as making my coordinance 0.
Setting x and y to 0 is warping your object to the top left corner of the world. If you want to stop something, you need to set its velocity to 0 (you should have variables like vx and vy).
That's the thing. I tried that. The warping thing only happened once, on my firs try. Gml gas a variables like the ones you mentioned, and when I tried them it did nothing.
Game maker isn't really relevant to any REAL game development. Ive have seen it and used it and I find it weird, clunky, confusing, and way to simple to do anything useful with it.
Play with Unreal engine 4 if you want to learn something that will give you experience relevant to the industry. It went free for everyone and you can spend time learning the engine and later dive into C++ code, both of which will be useful skills to have for game development.
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I was going to get unity, but that would work too.
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Feel free to play with Unity too but in my experience Unreal 4 is much more powerful.
I haven't read all the crap, but i believe best way is to move to a city where a lot game studio's are located, and become their quality testers... from there you'll see a lot of insides, and you'll have chance to speak with actual developers... many aspiring game dev's start like that.
Testing won't pay the bills, though. I got too much on my plate to make a move like that. Also, I'm about to have a kid in October. I mostly want to be a small time developer. Not as a career, but for the fun of it. I got so many ideas, and not a single medium to express them on.
One thing I tell everyone. When you get to the point where your good enough to make content. Just make sample levels in your spare time. When ever we get 3D artists that went to school for it. And they don't get the job and ask why. I tell them because you party on your weekends instead of building up a resume.