INDIE HOW!

What is a video game, and what is more important the graphic,sound effects,game mechanis ?

2015-04-18T02:27:00.000+01:00

Some or almost indie game developers have a wrong idea about video games, some people think the graphics in game is the most important some others think the game play is the success key some others may think it's the story this is all wrong, if you want to know what is the most important you need to know what is a video game?

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a video game is very similar to a toy, if your game can success if it was a toy then it will succeed as a game, but what really makes a video game success ? What does the video game give to players that make them love it and want to play it ?

the video game gives the player a unique experience that mostly he experienced and some experiences that he can never live in real world. and every element in your game must work for this purpose.

every game must have a theme, so let's say our game theme is " the life of an assassin " so we must give the player the experience of an assassin life

- the game mechanism must work for that purpose to make the player live that unique experience, in the game mechanism is it helpful to make the assassin dance in the middle of street? it isn't believe me, no one want to experience being an assassin then he start making noises and getting attraction of guards and people. is it helpful to make him sneak silently? yes !!! then make it...etc

- for the story also must fit the experience, is it helpful to make assassin living a ideal life? no it's not, how can he be an assassin if he had a normal life? is it nice to make him have a great purpose to fight for ? yes sure?...etc

- needless to say, also all graphic elements must work for that purpose if you are an assassin in a world where assassins exist you can't just put funny rabbits and colorful flowers in the environment for no reason unless the story demand that , but for example of how the graphics should work for experience make the character look mysterious with a hood to hide his identity, make places where he hide and get away from guards. make every element to serve the experience because the player want to feel the experience as much as possible.

- the Sound effects and the music are not excluded they also must serve the experience , you need the sounds to make feel what the assassin feel and hear what should he hear, for example in Assassin's creed game you can notice that you can hear people talking in the streets , assassin need to hear everything while in other games you don't hear anything and you don't care about it , but an assassin must be careful, also the music must serve our purpose you can't have a funny cartoon music while you are having a battle with guard that will really ruin the experience.

conclusion no element is more important than other every game element is important and must serve the game experience they best possible way as much they serve the experience, the player will feel the experience and enjoy it , that's if it's an enjoying experience, that depends on the audience also the experience you wanted to provide, if you make a game of experiencing pooping i don't think people will enjoy it and also you can't target a 12 years old girl with an assassin experience.

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How to make games? Par1 : General knowledge

2014-10-29T18:07:00.002+01:00

Hey, This is the first of a series of articles about game development, it's mainly dedicated for newbies, but if you are a little bit more advanced you are also welcome to read it, you might be missing some basic stuffs.

Part1: Generale Knowledge

What is a video game ?

- a video game is a multimedia interactive application, i think this definition if fair enough.

What does it mean Multimedia application?

- basically almost softwares you use on your computer nowadays are multimedia application because they manage and emulate different multimedia elements.

--Multimedia elements are : text ,still images, audio, video. so it's obvious console programs are not multimedia applications ( if your a gamer, by console I'm not talking about your PS4 or Xbox).

What about interactive?

- interactive means that the applications is not static, it interact with the user, every user interact with it in a different way.

it's not the same way we play Soccer video game example KONAMI PES also it's not the same way we play NFS, the application respond to the way you control it.

OK..OK! I know what is a video game , Ive played thousands of them.

note : i have been stuck on this line for 3 days because i didn't exactly know how to start

First of all, for most people, the video game experience starts at the store or and ends on the couch. only few realize that creating a game can be as complex as making a Hollywood movie. Months of planning and preparation, script writing, casting, character development, programming, digital art like sketching and 3D modeling and sculpting, cutting-edge technology and massive computing power go into making games.

It's nearly similar in a big company or small independent team. there is some difference we will mention later after we go through the different game development departments, by department I'm talking about different process of making a video game, like programming department, design department, animations department...etc

This can be different depend on the company or the team.

Mostly in Indie(independent) teams it's not the same as big companies because the very limited members number, and every member is multi-skilled for example the Game artist can also be the Level builder and the writer can also be the Music/SFX composer, in other cases single person teams ( like me for a long time) that single person must know everything about video games development , so i compose music i make SFX i make game design , i make 2D/3D graphic assets and i do programming, but mostly I'm not a good programmer, thats why my project looks good graphically but poor in game-play and programming. the worst thing about being a single person team, is that you never get better in any of the game departments , you never become a better programmer or better artist... to become professional in all of them probably you need to live 200 years maybe unless you are a genius your born to do all of them , no you are not the genius guy don't even try to be, i know how you are thinking, that's not going to work. You need a team even beginners they will learn and become good team assets better than being alone crawling slower than a snail.

So the big companies compete with the small indie teams? is that even possible? they got millions of dollars and they make AAA games and they have haundreds or thousands of employees how can that be possible ?

That's true and untrue, because mostly big companies are like Lego makers companies they produce the same products , but each one offer different features different colors, it's the same for big games companies they are limited to some game categories with different stories game-play, game mechanics and they compete the graphics quality...

Indie game development teams mostly work on smaller projects casual games rarely hardcore but they are more innovative independent teams compete creativity and innovation for new games ideas. it's rare to find a team able to make a hardcore game, because they need a lot of hight end hardware and tools they also need a lot of team members. but nowadays it's becoming easier for indie teams to make hardcore games but it's still a really hard job, so if you are a newbie or small team don't even think of a hardcore game, don't ... don't ...don't , i know you like challenge and you wont listen as i did in my beginning i though to make the next AAA game i started to make a team so i made a team of 20 person programmers artists music/SFX composer and audio programmers and writer. I thought I'm that exception i can make the AAA game and become rich and have a big studio. It's obvious to me now how silly i was, the project failed needless to say, don't ask why and try to avoid the mistakes because you can't escape the beginner mistakes and if you avoid my mistakes you will make worst mistakes. just sticks to the rules you can break rules in you game design idea , but don't break management rules because you can't, because you will fail. obviously.

So if you are new team without big experience stick to casual and make small projects and each time you know each other better and have a better experience you can work on a little bigger project. maybe some of your innovative game idea success and you will have enough success to be a bigger and bigger studio. just go step by step don't jump.

In the end, this is not the end but enough talking today, i think you might got enough advices for now, next time we will be starting talking more into development rather than advices and management ... and blablabla i know it's boring but it's needed.

Construct 2 the 2D HTML5 game engine!

2014-10-24T04:35:00.002+01:00

In this article i will talking about Construct 2 game engine, if you don't know it. it's a HTML5 2D game engine

dedicated for non programmers or for fast prototyping. basically you don't have even to write a single line of code. but at least you must have a little basic programming knowledge, just basic.

Construct 2 is a HTML5-based 2D game editor, developed by Scirra Ltd.It is aimed primarily at non-programmers, allowing quick creation of games in a drag-and-drop fashion using a visual editor and a behavior-based logic system. wikipedia

after stealing that little definition from Wikipedia let me just explain why it's called Construct 2 you might think it's a version, no it's not! in Wikipedia they refer it as Construct which is a mistake, because anyone knows Scirra Ltd would think you are talking about Construct Classic, scirra is small company of 3 persons, yeah thos 3 guys , Ashley Gullen, Thomas Gullen and Paulo Ricardo Reinehr. so Scirra made an game engine that work only on windows and export

to windows, i think some people still use it untill now, because it's free and open source. but later when HTML5 technology started to invade the Web they let down Construct and moved to develop a new one which they called Construct 2, this last support more platforms by using the HTML5 technologie you are able to deploy your game probably on any platform. Construct that old engine was abandoned even the source is available but none is developing it as i think. then it's renamed to Construct classic to make it tell the difference. that's the story of the twin Construct engines.

Now let's talk about Construct 2:

What is Construct 2?

it's a powerful ground breaking HTML5 game creator designed specifically for 2D games. It allows anyone to build games — no coding required!

It's great for beginners, and powerful enough to let experts work even quicker than by coding!

Indies and Hobbyists: Use Construct 2 to enter the world of game creation.
Teachers and Students: Teach the principles of programming in a fun and engaging way.
Designers and Artists: Produce games without having to learn difficult languages.
Professional Developers: Rapidly create mockups and prototypes, or use it as a faster alternative to coding. Scirra.com

anyway that's what they say on the website

i have been using construct 2 for 2 years learning new tricks every time and
i had a lot of problems and figured out how to solve so i think I'm in a good position to allow me talk a little about Construct 2:

First the engine is easy and fun, it doesn't look complex as other engines, if you have a good computer knowledge and you used to many software interfaces you can start working without even tutorials the user interface is very friendly, the engine is well documented and there is even a little note with every component in the interface to to explain what that thing does.

the engine is really powerful thought it's limited only to 2d games, but 2d games still have a good part in the video games industry. it comes with a lot of plugins and behavior, and your can extend it by getting more plugins made by other or if you are familiar with Java script you can make your own plugins and behaviors.

Plugin is used to add more functionalities to the engine

Behavior is used to tell your game object how to act you can make it manually but behavior save a lot of your time and makes it simpler to make games. don't worry there is a good variety of great behaviors that allows you to make a different type of game in manner of time, you can make a platform game with few little mouse clicks.

The Editor is easy and comes with a drag n drop workspace, and an event sheet editor, that last is used to make your game code without writing a single line of code it only uses logic blocks, it's like playing with LEGO you take parts that can fit together and make anything you want.

the engine uses Webgl and canvas2D for render it's on Canvas2d by default but if the platform support Webgl it will use webgl to make a better performance.

by supporting webgl you are able to make great effects.

the engine also uses Box2d as its default physic engine.

there is a lot more features in the engine, but enough talking about features for now i will talk about some important points :

Scirra says that engine export to multiplatform and .... , actually the engine doesn't export to any platform, the engine give your the source files as html and javascript. and then to build them to a specific platform you need a third party service like phonegap, cocoonJs or intel XDK or for desktop systems webkit.

at least the engine come with web-kit included so when you choose to export to windows or linux... the editor will automatically deal with web-kit and give you the final executable.

another thing is the performance, when you use Scirra Construct 2 you need to make your extreme optimizations, the problem is not in the engine itself but it's the HTML5 your game will run on a browser so it's not directly running on the system this will reduce the game performance, if you don't take care of optimizations you will suffer low frame-rate.

Conclusion : in general Construct 2 has advantages much more than it's disadvantages so it's still a great Engine give it a try if you are interested in making 2d games for many platforms using HTML5 technology.

For Newbies: Opengl Vs DirectX Vs Unity 3D Vs C#

2014-10-24T02:30:00.000+01:00

I was browsing a forum and i found a thread where some guys were discussing the difference between Opengl and directX and some even more newbies try to compare it to unity3D and C#, i couldn't believe what are they saying so i wrote this maybe for many people to understand things clearly if you are interested.

Game development is a huge industry and a good way to make money, that's why game developers community is growing everyday, it's not an easy industry the challenge is very competitive, anyway no one born a game developer every professional game programmer or game artist was newbie at his beginning so don't worry you will be that Pro someday.

but in order to take your first steps in this industry you need to understand some stuff and have a minimum knowledge even if it doesn't matter in the present time due to the technologies that make it easy for you to make video games. This article is useful for you to have a little knowledge about game developement.

-DirectX is not a graphic library it's a package of libraries inluding Graphics,
Audio...etc
DirectX handle multimedia applications such as games, so it's called Multimedia Librarie it's even wrong to compare it to Opengl.

a simple explanation of a Library is : it's an extension for a programming language to make it have more functionalities.

- The part that handle graphics in DirectX is called Direct3d or Dd3, that part now is comparable with Opengl.

- Opengl is a graphic librariy same as Direct 3D, i can't discuss differences here but mostly Opengl support more platforms and unity uses OpenGl and Diret3d , if you are on Windows it's going to use DD3 by default but you can force it to change to OpenGl, the main difference between OpenGl and directX that Opengl support more platform , it can work on any system you use or even if you build an new machine, opengl will be able to work on it. while direct3d mostly dedicated to Microsoft platforms such as Windows, Xbox.

- C# is a programming language, you use the programming language to develop any kind of computer softwares, the programming language doesn't show graphics or control your hardware, so it need a graphic library to tell the Graphics card how to render graphics ( how to show the graphics in your game). programming language also uses other libraries to get inputs from keyboard, game-pad..other library to play sound ....etc

- Unity 3D , Cryengine , Unreal Engine... are game engines which mean , it's just an integrated development environment dedicated for video games, i'm sure you know some IDE such as Visual Studio, Code::blocks ....etc and yeah you can use them to make games too, but they are general purpose IDE they can do any kind of programs, but Game engine is targeting video games development , so it had many features included to make it easy make video games.

Note : Obviously if you have enough knowledge about game engines, you would say no the game engine is set of libraries to make it easy developing a video game. yes that's 100% true, but nowadays the game engines are tightly built with the Editor so you don't have access to the core engine unless you hack it maybe. so probably when almost people talking about game engines they are talking about the whole binaries you install on your system, mostly about the Editor because almost people who have not try coding low level don't know the difference between the engine and the Editor. so it's easier to explain for newbie this way.

Why the Game Engine ( the Editor ) is an IDE?
game engine provide a 3D render engine which is written with OpenGl or Direct3d and provide many other libraries to handle many other things in video games development, and game engine sometimes provide it's unique programming language to make it easier for developers. game engine provide your with game editor which include the terrain editor and the level building window, in Unity 3d case , The Scene window and the game window , the terrain editor , the light , the waters ....all this stuff is ready made objects to make it easy for you, if you wanted to use Code::blocks for making your game , you would do almost everything with codes, and the game engine also offer a text editor and a compiler for the languages they want you to use. in Unity 3d case it supports C#, Java Script and Boo.

Conclusion : a game engine such Unity 3D , is a huge software that includes everything you need to makes video games , it includes Opengl, Directx(direct3d as a part of DirectX also includes programming languages C# and JavaScript...

So, no more comparing Opengl to Directx , or Opengl to C# or Unity 3D to Opengl because that doesn't make any sense of comparing a desk with the room because the desk is a part of room and can't compare a desk to a chair because you use them both to set and make homework on the desk. and also you can't compare the your room to the neighbors house, just because the house has many rooms and it can't be compared , maybe onlt for the size in this case if you insist to compare it , then yeah compare Unity 3d , Opnegl , directx and C# source codes they are comparable that way, but the functionality is totally different.

Godot Engine the open source commercial quality game engine

2014-10-24T02:10:00.000+01:00

Few months ago, when i was browsing GitHub repositories so i might find something interesting, i found this project :

Godot Engine :

Godot is a fully featured, open source, MIT licensed, game engine. It focuses on having great tools, and a visual oriented workflow that can export to PC, Mobile and Web platforms with no hassle. The editor, language and APIs are feature rich, yet simple to learn, allowing you to become productive in a matter of hours. Godot Wiki

Developement History:

Godot has been in development and used in house by OKAM as early as 2001. In February of 2014 the source code for Godot was released to the public on GitHub under the MIT License.

Some of the engine features:

There's some truly exciting stuff to comb through since it's a well-used engine with a lot of history, not someone's hobby hack.

What I've seen so far:

A custom scripting language(GDScript) which is roughly Python-esque. The wiki explains that after trying the other common choices(Lua, Squirrel, Angelscript) over a period of years, they rolled their own solution that could be more closely integrated to the engine.

An in-editor help, it has some API docs
.
Classes for GUI controls, including layout containers.

A fairly rich audio API, including positional audio, streamed audio, common sample playback controls(pan, volume, pitch, looping), and some effects(reverb, chorus, frequency filter).

Some networking functionality, including HTTP, TCP, and UDP mechanisms.

Keyboard, joystick, mouse, and touchscreen input classes.

And of course lots of rendering and physics-related stuff, including various shapes, cameras, meshes, sprites, animation, tilemaps, texture atlasing, internationalized fonts, particle systems, and multiple viewports.
Godot Engine
https://github.com/okamstudio/godot/