What's your story: How and why did you start learning how to make games?

Kevin Hawkins · 2018-09-10T09:35:01

I'm always interested in learning others' stories. How and why did you start learning game development? Mine: Like most of us, I grew up playing games. My earliest memories are playing games I can't even remember the names of on Atari, Donkey Kong on Colecovision, and I remember when I received a Nintendo along with Legend of Zelda, SMB, 10 Yard Fight, and Top Gun. My imagination would run wild during my days at school, so I started doodling levels and maps for different games. I'd draw my favorite characters, like Link and Mario (if I had the motivation I'd dig up the Mario coloring book I made when I was a kid and show it), then come home and play more games. I did a lot of other things as a kid, but any "down time" was playing games. Then I learned that you could do that for a living, and around that time I also got some exposure to computers. Some in my family came across a Commodore Plus 4 at a garage sale, and while they didn't know what I could do with it (if anything), they left it up to me to figure that out. In the manuals was a BASIC programming guide. And that's when I learned how to make games. "Flip a coin" was the first. Don't discount that simple BASIC code. In fact one should never discount anything based on its scope. The act of making that interactive, RNG, text-based game opened the mind to all kinds of possibilities. More simple games followed - and then I learned how to render lines on the Commodore and my focus turned to graphics. As I learned more about programming, my ambitions expanded, and I shifted into a pattern of learning more about game development by trying to replicate gameplay from games I loved to play. I jumped interest in BBS games and started writing a clone of BRE and SRE in Turbo Pascal. I did a TradeWars 2002 clone and a few other ideas I'd play with, like multiplayer games over a serial connection between two PCs (had to write the serial driver). I loved to play Warcraft, and one of my first C/C++ language uses was to make a text-based/ASCII turn-based, two-player Warcraft clone. Somewhere along the way I came across mode 13h. I spent many nights learning 3D graphics and rendering spinning boxes. Various other game projects came and went. I loved to read others' source code and learn how they approached many of the same problems I've faced. These days I can easily spend hours on Github. GameDev.net spawned out of a love for all the above and a desire to make it easier for people to learn and connect with others about game development - and nearly 20 years later (in June 2019!) all the above is still fuel for the fire. Eventually, I got a job in the simulation training industry - basically serious games interfaced with real equipment for training purposes. I worked on various products for a few years until we made the decision to upgrade our technology. Unity was brand new and barely functional, and UE2 lacked the necessary features, so as Technical Director I architected and led a team to develop an internally used game engine and toolset (entity-component) based on ~40 commercial/open source packages but with many of the same content creation capabilities in modern engines, including things like blueprints. The goal was to build a simulation and training curriculum without having to write a line of code, and we came very close to achieving that in most cases. Production went from ~12 months to ~3-4 months. Big win for the company and a total cultural change. Now I'm in semiconductors with a team working on developer tools, and we work with a lot of developers around the industry. Depending on what you do, it's possible you use my team's products. My game making days are pretty minimal, but I always have the urge and a list of games I'd like to work on. But making sure everyone here has a game development community through GameDev.net tends to take most of my free time. [EDIT: I should clarify why I didn't go into games. It basically came down to a certain type of work-life-pay-location balance that I wanted to have at the time I started my career, so instead of going into the industry I decided to do the next best thing and work where I got to work on the same type of technology, but the end product was different. I've thought about going more directly into games in more recent times, but I'm at a much different stage of my career now (engineering director-type) so it would have to be the right fit.] Having said that, it's motivating to see what everyone is doing, and I appreciate seeing how the industry has evolved since those early Commodore days. So, what's your story?

slayemin

6,313

April 21, 2018 07:49 AM

I started writing and I realized I'd already written this story before, so to save time, I'll just link it here

Eric Nevala

Indie Developer | Spellbound | Dev blog | Twitter | Unreal Engine 4

Owlish_Ashe

2

April 22, 2018 07:39 PM

Let's see...

I think it started at an early age. I remember clearly at age 11 drawing a platformer level on a bit of paper. I had absolutely no clue how to do anything back then (1997) but I definitely wanted to.

The next step was when I started playing Final Fantasy games. I loved them so much I remember I joined a forum dedicated to the games. IIRC it was through there that I encountered RPG Toolkit, the first game dev software I ever used. I started making a very basic game on there. Soon after that I switched to RPG Maker 2000 - the old bootleg version by Don Miguel - this was around 2003ish. I created a complete RPG based on the community on Bolt.com, which was a really popular community site for teens at the time. It was really not a good game, but it was so much fun. Since then I've got a Masters in Animation and during that degree I made a game with some programmers for a class. It was atrociously made, because we only had 3 weeks to do it and none of us were very familiar with Unity, which was the software we had to use. But since then I have learned a great deal about the art side of Unity, and have been working on an RPG using ORK Framework. Yeah, still on my RPG phase lol.

So I guess my life has flirted with game dev for a very long time.

Edit: Oh! I forgot to mention, in 2001 I made a silly game in QBASIC, as that was what we were being taught in my Computing Studies class. It was pretty lame, but it helped me learn the logic of programming, which would help me when I started learning Web development a few years later.

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desiado

23

April 23, 2018 01:57 PM

A lot of good reads here..

On ‎17‎/‎04‎/‎2018 at 12:28 AM, khawk said:

I got a job in the simulation training industry - basically serious games

Yes agree ? i’ve worked on programming games and military simulators. The day to day job is similar. Games are mostly simulations with human-in-the-loop. Only difference is the military simulator had to be accurate, and a game just has to look a feel accurate. I think I will write my story up in a bit.

desiado

23

April 23, 2018 04:03 PM

This is my story on how and why I programmed games and got into the games industry.

For me, it all started with the home computer revolution which happened here in the UK during the early 1980s. It almost seemed compulsory that all households had to buy a computer - ours was a Acorn BBC micro. The user interface on these computers was primitive and you needed some technical knowledge just to use them. Books and magazines taught you this and encouraged you to learn more, however, most people just played games on them including myself which I loved! Initially I had limited access to games, so my Dad brought a book of 20 games that you had to type in yourself into the computer. These games were in BASIC and was suppose to have an element of learning about them. Anyway I typed them in and got them working... eventually. After many months of doing this, you get a feel of the code you're entering. When you see a few lines of code which kind of read.

lives=3
..
..
Def proc TouchedAlien
lives=lives -1
if lives = 0 then goto GameOver

It doesn't take long to work out how to modify the code in order to cheat at the game. Also I started to modify the code more to add features and also brought a book dedicated to learning BBC BASIC. I started making my own primitive graphics games and text adventures. I would typically write something in a weekend or week. Some I finished others not but overall I got reasonably good at this.

However, my games were very primitive and ran slow. I found out commercial games weren't programmed in BASIC but instead programmed in something called Assembly. For me, owning a BBC micro, it was 6502 Assembly. I dabbed in and out trying to program in 6502 but it completely baffled me. Total hieroglyphics! It made no sense. There wasn't really many resources available teaching you this advanced stuff at the time, but with a lot of perseverance and trial and error I eventually got there. There really was a moment when it all clicked. Suddenly I understood it!

Programming up to then was an occasional hobby and I still mostly played games. However because of my new found skill my life was about to change. I stopped playing games and became absolutely obsessed with programming assembly languages and mastering it. I use to lay in bed at night spending hours thinking of the fasted sprite routines I could do. New computers came along and I got hold of a cheaper model Archimedes and learnt ARM assembly. I then wrote a game in ARM Assembly which was near 'commercial' quality. I didn't approach any publishers about it though because I was shy, naive and also perhaps understanding that writing commercial games was a full time job - I was still a kid at college. I had signed up to a BTEC software engineering course and then later a similar Degree course at university. These were very new courses at the time and only been running a few years. Because of the time constraints studying, I stopped writing games and got heavily into the 'Demo' scene.

This was late 1980s early 1990s. Demos were just programs showing off some graphical effect pushing the hardware to the absolute limit. Importantly they could be programmed a lot quicker than a proper game and fitted into my life pattern. Typically I would program some demo and upload it onto a BBS for people to download and watch. I even wrote a megademo (a collection of demos stringed together) but then I was done with this kind of thing. Also I had left University, was broke and needed any kind of programming job to start my career.

I got a programming job working on a Military simulator. This was ok but the thought of writing games for a living was still at the back of my mind. After a few years I applied for programming jobs in the games industry and got accepted at a company! I believe this was because I had advanced C++ skills now and the games industry was moving more towards this language. I then worked on commercial games for the original PlayStation, PS2, original XBOX, PC and Dreamcast. I enjoyed my time in the games industry but in 2004 I sort of retired from it, partly because of the stability of the companies I worked for, partly because I didn't feel like I was a true gamer i.e. I only occasionally played games and didn't know much about other games out there. But mostly because normal programming contracts became available to me which paid a LOT more. I got sucked into the more money option.

These days I mostly look after young kids. It has reminded me, watching the kids play, that sometimes you just do things for fun. We forget that as adults, it's not all just 'I'm not getting out of bed unless you pay me £high per hour to write some code'. For this reason I recently wrote a simple android game in my spare time, just for fun, totally free. Reminded me of my old demo days.

Rutin

1,701

April 23, 2018 04:06 PM

Interesting stuff @desiado ! Thanks for sharing.

Programmer and 3D Artist

I_Am_DreReid

150

April 23, 2018 05:36 PM

I love playing video games and learning about information technology and after finishing high school I went to community college to do computer science. I will honestly say that programming wasn't really my cup of tea however I could do some stuff with it. After leaving community college and all my friends went of to university I was thinking of ways how I could start my career in it. At first I was ultra interested in cyber security and I started to study real hard to get knowledgeable in that area, at one point I was even willing to do illegal stuff to gain money. Then one day i was browsing online on how to make some money and I was on a game forum (don't remember the name) where some people where talking of how much money they were making creating from their games and it intrigued me. So I quit learning cyber security and went full time into game dev. So far I have finished one simple 2d game that I intend to publish but am saving some money for some fees. I just love game dev,working with different software, creating all the assets then bringing them together to create something marvellous, creating soundtracks, coming up with the idea and plot for the game all these things get me pumped.

//Dre Reid\\

Kiber_Sandy

2

April 23, 2018 05:51 PM

I`m new to the game developing, but I do really love this thing! I was an artist, so I have never thought I would be interesting in developing games, lol.

Lets start the story... You all may know Subway Surf. I was 13 when I get a new phone for my birthday and I downloaded this app. All my friends had the SS by the time, but my phone wasn`t suitable for the games. I was so envious back then haha...

But I downloaded the game as soon as I unpacked a new device. I wasn`t very good with Subway, so I didn`t earn lot of money. Then my older brother suggested to hack the game for me (he is a programmer now, he doesn`t hack these days lol). I was watching the whole process of him hacking the game and wooow. "It looked so incredible!" I thought. So David helped me to learn some things about Android and game developing.

Then I dropped this hobby because of school. But like a year ago I decided to start again. Now I`m trying to develop my skill!

khawk

Author

3,764

April 24, 2018 08:57 PM

On 4/23/2018 at 6:57 AM, desiado said:

Only difference is the military simulator had to be accurate, and a game just has to look a feel accurate.

Very much this. For a long time - and even still in some cases - Unity and Unreal couldn't handle the requirements for military simulation without major customization. Things like large scale terrain data sets, 10+km object visibility, physics accuracy, multi-faceted scoring systems, interoperability requirements with legacy systems, man-machine interfaces, training scenario tooling, and so on. Of course these continue to improve and become less of a gap, but at the time it's why we ultimately went with a homegrown solution.

Admin for GameDev.net.

HotButtonGames

5

April 24, 2018 10:41 PM

Cool thread.

My love for games goes back to the Atari days, where I would sit and play asteroids for hours. When others would be out swimming, I'd be in my aunt's house playing Mountain King on her Commodore 64. Fast forward to Nintendo, and Konami comes onto the scene with graphics that just blew me away. Capcom had a hand in there too with their exciting playability and good graphics. This inspired me to draw my own game characters and ideas for games, which was a lot of fun but led to nothing at the time. I went to the gaming convention when it came to town, and Megaman 2 was being teased with their innovative giant graphics that seemed like the kind you'd see in an arcade. Mortal Kombat also debuted at that show, and when Scorpion took off his mask to roast the loser, it was life-changing. You could do anything in a game.

Later on I went to college for multimedia and the final project was to team up and create a game. But the game was to be created in Flash, which at the time was great for artists to dig in and make something - but you later learn that it is so far from what you need to know to Really create games. We created a game called Dusk that was similar to Shadowgate from Nintendo, where you'd explore a castle riddled with Slayer/Megadeth/other music tracks - and if you didn't get killed in 20 different animated ways, you could eventually beat the game. We later sold it to the school for marketing. This taught me that (a) I want to spend my life making video games, and (b) you can actually make money by doing it.

I ended up working in Marketing for a variety of companies over the next 20 years, during which time we developed games/apps for DreamWorks Animation, among other smaller companies. I still prototyped my game ideas in Flash right up until two years ago where I set it down for a little while, as it seemed like using that medium was constantly working against me. Three months ago I resolved to find something better, so I picked up Unity and started taking tutorials. It seems like a solid fit. I expanded on the most promising/fun game I had, and vowed to once-and-for-all work towards becoming a full-time game producer. I still have my client work during the day, but if I'm ever going to get to where I want to be, this is where I need to start. I would love to get a team going as that's always the best way to work, but everything in time.

Specializing in 2D Game Design