The story of my experiment of creating first video game
Mid-February 2017, my school introduced an assignment called “personal project”.
This is an assignment in which we can create anything we wish. However, the product has to be feasible and needs to be completed within 6-7 months. Of course, we also have to go through extensive periods of researching and planning before actually creating the product.
My friends created many interesting products such as model planes, music, videos and boats.
It took me a while to decide what I actually wanted to. There were so many cool things I could make. After lots of asking and thinking, I decided to create **drum rolls** a video game!
You had the liberty to create anything you want…Why video games?
Ever since I was a little kid, I loved playing video games. At times my love for video games bordered addiction, with around 8 hours per day spent on gaming, further 8 hours were spent on researching about games and the 8 hours of my sleep were filled with dreams of gaming (speaking of dreams, click here to see my article of whether dreams are actually connected to reality). As of November 2018, I believe that I have “rehabbed” from my gaming addiction…for now J.
So, on the cold day of February, while our teacher was explaining about personal project, my brain already drifted to creating a video game. But the biggest question that nearly stopped me from my goal was; how the heck do I create a video game.
How it all started
The first chunk of my time in creating a video game was researching. I have probably read the first 30 pages from the google search result to the question “how to create a video game”.
Venturing into the programming/gaming industry felt like a fish that grew legs and is now taking his first step on land.
Nevertheless, after some research, I managed to enroll in this course that taught me about a software that makes games.
The superior software that made my game
To gamers, game engine is just a term that is used to praise or critic the game for; “oh that game engine renders a beautiful cat” or “that’s a horrible game engine”.
To all those other non-gamers, a game engine is a software in which you put pictures, sound, codes to which the software produces a game.
The course I joined taught me to use an extremely popular game engine called Unity3D to make my video game. Without Unity and that course, I would have been doomed months ago.
The course was hosted by a respectable software engineer who taught me C# (a programming language) that was needed in order to tame the beast of a gaming engine known as Unity.
C# – An unsung hero
When people are asked to name a coding language, most people say python or C++. The language C# is rarely talked about or known to the masses. However much of Microsoft’s .NET framework (a very important component in the Windows operating system) is made out of C#. Subsequently, C# was the predecessor language to C++ and Java, two extremely used coding languages. Hence if C# would have never appeared in the market, we would have been far off from where we are now.
The pain of coding
When I started to learn coding, the pain experienced was unbearable. Every line of code I wrote would yield some error; mistake in caps lock, grammar issues or spacing fault.
If I got a penny for each minute spent on debugging (fixing coding errors), I would easily have reached Forbes top 100 richest.
However, the more I wrote, the better I became. Near the end of my coding experience, I could actually write ten lines of codes before getting an error. This is of course still not very proficient, but I was improving. More importantly, I started enjoying coding.
On the side note, it also felt very cool coding; a feeling of being a pro hacker.
Pictures, music, etc.
Even though coding was the most difficult part in creating the video game, adding pictures, characters and music still had some challenge (mainly the legal rights).
I could not simply get any picture off the internet and put it in my game. It would only result in a long bill in front of my front doorstep. After lot of trials and error, I finally figured out which pictures and music to use and which not to use.
Would I do it again?
If I was given another opportunity to start from scratch and create another game, I would definitely do it. It was hard, painful but definitely worth seeing my game on the android market!
Also, just because the project is done, does not mean I will stop coding. I truly loved the experience and will probably continue this experience.