Hey, i'm new on this forum and this is my second post. I have just started down the path of becoming a game designer. However, my actual experience goes back 7 years when I was reskinning, making new origins, making new sounds, and compiling for Day of Defeat 1.3 which ran on the Half Life engine. I also spent time messing around and tweaking the codes in Total War games. One of my scripts is now a submod for a Medieval 2 total war mod known as De Bello Mundi. I specifically nerfed the Thracian faction who were unrealistically powerful compared to history.

What I am trying to get at here is that I have experience in working with games and tweaking them from coding to modeling but now that I want to be a game designer and graphic animation designer, the whole thing is overwhelming. So far, I have one partner who is extremely good at concept art and he also provides opposing views since I grew up playing simulators and the PC games of the 90s so I'm typically non-noob friendly and unforgiving in some of my designs. What is overwhelming to me is that I want to learn how to build games by myself essentially and I am not understanding how it all works exactly.

Do I start with concept art and models or do I make the world first?

How do I make the world exactly? Do I build the maps in blender or do I make objects and textures into a library and build the maps through the engine?

How does rendering and animation work? Do I need to build a render farm?

I could go on and on with the questions.

What I am wondering is if anyone can explain to me how this whole process works to creating a final game that I can put on a disc and install on a computer.

Personally I just dive right in.

I don't do concepts, designs, GDDs or any such thing, I know what I want to make and dive right in to get my hands dirty.

This may or may not work for you, I'm oldschool and come from the time when a game was made in a week but one guy in his bedroom.

Times have changed but I haven't and I'm still putting out games.

Good luck!

Personally I just dive right in.

I don't do concepts, designs, GDDs or any such thing, I know what I want to make and dive right in to get my hands dirty.

This may or may not work for you, I'm oldschool and come from the time when a game was made in a week but one guy in his bedroom.

Times have changed but I haven't and I'm still putting out games.

Good luck!

This is all I needed to hear. The reason I got into game design was because of old school games. Day of Defeat 1.3 was made by 2 guys in a college dorm room. Howard Scott Warshaw made E.T in 5 weeks. I'm just gonna dive right in and start cuttin throats.

Do I start with concept art and models or do I make the world first?

How do I make the world exactly? Do I build the maps in blender or do I make objects and textures into a library and build the maps through the engine?

How does rendering and animation work? Do I need to build a render farm?

I could go on and on with the questions.

What I am wondering is if anyone can explain to me how this whole process works to creating a final game that I can put on a disc and install on a computer.

here's the basic steps:

1. decide what to make. write it down. go into the minimum amount of detail possible. but figure out all basic aspects of the game before proceeding. don't waste time on design docs or concept art unless you have to in order to keep the team on the same page - they are not a final part of the game, just a means to an end.

2. select a suite of tools that will work together that can do what you want, this might be maya and unity, blender and directx, whatever. use an existing engine if possible. else you'll have to roll your own.

3. how you build the world will depend on your tools. you might use blender to make large ground meshes and OGL for drawing. you might use a level editor that comes with your engine of choice. in the end, you'll be using some sort of editing tool to make ground meshes, or using code to generate them procedurally.

4. these days, rendering and animation is usually done with the game's graphics engine. the days of the canned animation movie made with 3d modeling software by a 3d artist seem to have passed. so no canned "animations" in the traditional sense - and thus no renders, and no render farm. Instead, the artist will spend their time making skinned and static meshes, textures, and animations. all of which are imported into the game, and the game engine uses those to draw animated scenes in realtime.

5. so then you build your world (level maps, etc), code your behaviors, and create all your assets (meshes, textures, animations, music, sound effects, voice files, etc). check the unity docs for a quick idea of what this is like in a typical 3rd party game engine.

6. test, debug, polish.

7. create install program, and batch file to burn master CDs.

Good answers here! Make sure you know what you want when you start, lay out as much as you can without going into as much detail as you can (everything can change!)

Look into choosing an engine and devoting your time to learning that. A good engine provides all the tools you need to get almost through your entire title, and have great communities!

Yea thanks for all the help guys!