Make games, it’s important!

To read about making your own game, click Day 1 – Starting, Day 2 – AI, Day 3 – Art and Sound, Day 4 – Creating Levels or Day 5 – Debugging

IC.HACK began life as a partly-implemented codebase for another game, called Dungeonesque. I’d been writing it as part of TIGSource’s ‘VERSUS’ competition, where over sixty people developed games with a player-versus-player element in the months of February and March. I had a three-hour train ride ahead of me, and I sat down with some sample code and bent it all into shape. A few hours later, I have day one of_ IC.HACK_ ready and some words for you to read.

Hopefully you got a chance to play the game that came out of last week’s romping through videogame development. If you did, and if you read the articles that go along with it, you might have found things a bit lacking or hollow in places. That’s because game development is hard, and try as you might you can’t get much done in a week. I slashed everything I could out of the development schedule, and managed to get some big, juicy core components into the game by the end of the week, but if last week’s articles achieved anything, it was merely to show that it could be done, not that it could be done well.

So why was I so eager to write these articles and try and fire up some interest in development? It’s not because games development is an easy ride – it combines so many skills, from art to creative writing to programming, that the chances of you being even average at all of them are astronomically small – it’s because having gamers make games is really important for the health of the gaming world.

The indie scene, always rumbling along underground no matter what goes on elsewhere, is a furnace of exciting new ideas.

I can’t think of a comparison that is suitably pretentious, but if I were that kind of guy I might liken it to speaking a language. As many of you will know, particularly those for whom English is not a first language, keeping a language alive means using it often, bending it into new shapes and finding new uses for it. In the same way, we keep gaming fresh and lively by having people hacking out insane ideas in their spare time. Ideas that could never, ever, ever work in a million years – but then do. Procedurally generated worlds of lego-like blocks, games that you control by shouting into a microphone at different volumes, games about hosting orgies to gain in the stock market.

As much as we might hate games like _Farmville _and its ilk, they have a role in the world of gaming – they bring new people in, teach them to play with friends and help them feel happy to talk about games. The teen-focused worlds of high-pace shooters (which I’m beginning to realise I am too slow to play any more) also help to keep gaming sexy and exciting to the world media. And the indie scene, always rumbling along underground no matter what goes on elsewhere, is a furnace of exciting new ideas. And it always needs more firewood.

So it’s going to take a bit of sweat and tears to get close to a really good finished game of your own, if you’re interested in such a thing, and_ IC.HACK_ is in no way an example of one of those. In fact, since finishing IC.HACK I’ve put aside the project that spawned it – _Dungeonesque _– in a fit of procrastination, so that I can start on another pet project on the side. That’s a few weeks of spare time just archived in the blink of an eye.

So why do it? It might benefit gaming, but that’s not why you’re going to want to give up your Saturday morning. Chances are you’ll do it because it’s fun. Surprisingly good fun. In fact, every time I get a new prototype working or get a little dot moving on the screen for the sixtieth time that week, I get a little burst of excitement. That sense of botching things, muddling through to success and solving the problems that come up along the way seems, for me at least, to tap into the same reason I enjoyed my degree work in the first place.

Not so much of a postmortem as a heart-to-heart, eh? For more game development goodness, hook yourself up to the TIGSource community at www.tigsource.com, and feel free to e-mail me whenever for help, collaboration or commiseration – imperialgamedev@gmail.com. Thanks for taking part, and thanks to all those who e-mailed last week.