How I became a game developer in one month (and scored high in a worldwide competition)
The contest
With a group of friends in Germany, last March, we decided together to participate in the next competition of the Ludum Dare, each on our side.
The Ludum Dare is an event that happens every four months or so. Thousands of developers from around the globe set out to create a video game in just a few days.
A "compo" version exists: Teams are forbidden, the developer must create EVERYTHING for his game in 48 hours, be it music, art or sounds and he must provide the source code of his game in its entirety.
I have no particular talent in music or drawing, so I participated in the easier version of the competition: the "Jam". The one in which the majority participates, because more flexible in its rules.
So I had 72 hours to create a game from A to Z, but with the Jam rules, I had the right to use external resources for art, music and sounds.
Unity: a good first step
One month before the competition, I began my apprenticeship. You should know that there are many different ways to create a video game. Large studios often use their own game engine, but engines available to the general public exist, and it's totally free!
I chose to use Unity, an ultra-known engine. Among the games built with this engine are Hearthstone, Ori and the Blind Forest and Rust. (If you want to see more: https://unity3d.com/en/showcase/gallery)
Unity uses a script editor with code in C #, but its particularity lies in its drag and drop interface which allows to test in real time assets and gameplay of your game during the development.
Unity also has an enormous community that helps each other, and whenever I have a problem, I have found the solution on the forums.
I will discuss Unity in more detail in future posts if you are interested. For now, you just need to know that this is the perfect software for beginners!
It's never been easier to become a developer!
I will also talk about my learning process in future posts. This may be of interest to you because it can be applied to any "talent". Whether it's to learn to draw, play music or anything else.
I say it again, I had no background in the creation of video games or in the code in general. At the beginning of the month, I knew as much as you do now, if not less!
The results
Haha! I kept the suspense to the end.
It's time to share my results. The ranking is decided by the other jammer's votes nearly a month after the competition. Each assigns a score of 0 to 5 for each category.
In the Jam, 1841 games have been submitted, here is my ranking:
I finished 5th in the Humor category, 19th in the Fun category and 103rd overall. A very acceptable score! When I saw my ranking, I first believed that the site bugged, I did not expect it at all.
You can test my game by clicking here: https://satalien.itch.io/holy-shit-a-spider
I will talk about the creation of the game itself (again, you guessed it :p ) in a future post.
What I learned from this
The most important to me was the feedback from the community. I gathered about fifty comments, Youtubers played my game (here and there) and hundreds of people spent time to have fun on my game, including my little brother who I surprised a lot with my "hidden talent".
I gained confidence in myself as never before. In a month, I learned that anyone could succeed in having a positive impact on his own scale.
Even today, I can in my analytics that people are still playing and enjoying my spider game every day :p
It was a new feeling for me. There is nothing better than to see his hard work rewarded. It is through this experience that I am now on Steemit, where I hope to relive this kind of stuff with you, Steemians!
So go ahead! Everybody! Create! Create and share! For it is by creating that the world is changed!
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Do not hesitate to give me feedback on this first post. I was forced to cut a lot, as it would have been too long otherwise.
I could have talked about the similarities between Steemit and the Ludum Dare website, the voting system or what I did AFTER the competition as I continued my momentum and produced another game in the following month.
I'll do some other posts on the subject and may be ending with a facecam video.
Thank you to all my readers! I love you all, for taking time reading me! I would love to have your feedback for this first real post :p
Bye !
Aurélien
Now, that's a really nice journey. I tried once to create a game but my programming skills are not good enough :D
With the method that I chose, anyone can do like me, no programming skills required. You'll see more in the next posts, and who knows, maybe some day you'll do your own games ;)
That's an incredible experience. As someone with barest of minimal coding experience, was everything done in Unity or did you need to use some other languages as well (Python, Javascript, etc.)?
Everything was done in Unity. I began by learning some C# but I quickly switched to Playmaker (a plugin in Unity). Almost no coding was required to do my game.
Thanks, I will be checking out unity.
If you want to begin making games, you should definitely ;)