Unique Original Articles » Stirring Guidelines On How To Make A Video Game

You may be familiar with the new product from Nintendo called WiiWare. It is the new channel called the WiiWare Shop Channel. And it is where you can buy games for Wii points currency. You can get downloadable games there, and not just legacy games, but new releases.

Video Game making has evolved dramatically over the past decade. It used to be a world filled with tedious hours of programming in a language like C. But today there are readily available tools that do all this programming work for you and allow you to focus on the creative task of building a fantasy world game.

Finding and Using the Software

There are many free for public use video game software suites and they are all very similar. If you learn how to use one of them you can readily transfer your skills to the others. And if you are serious about your video game making, the skills you learn with the free software are a good foundation for working with the high-end software tools that the professionals use. You can easily find any number of these free software applications by using a popular search engine. Two of them that I have used are the Genesis game engine and the Reality Factory game development suite.

Five Steps to Making a Video Game

There are five basic steps to making a video game. These are the steps that professional developers take when making a cutting edge game and they are the same steps you take when making a small game that you and your friends can enjoy.

Step One - Design on Paper

The very first thing you have to do when designing a video game is to get it down on paper. This is the most over-looked step and it is also the number one mistake that many budding game designers make. If we compare the process of making a video game to the process of building a house this step would be like drawing up the blueprints. Before building a house you have to get everything into the blueprints so you can know exactly what you are building, where everything goes and what everything looks like. This holds true with game design. Before you start making your video game you have to conceptualize it. You have to draw out on paper what the game looks like, where everything goes and to take this one step further than home building you have to write a script so you can understand what will happen in your game. This script doesn't have to be complex. It can be as easy as "The player has to work his way through the dungeon and find the Sword of Happiness to complete the game".

While there is nothing groundbreaking about this Nintendo has taken a developer friendly stance on the whole WiiWare concept and are going to be making Software Developer Kit available to small developers so they can create games that will be made available on the official WiiWare channel.

Maps and Sketches

Your video game is a complete world that a player will be able to walk around in and this means that the first thing you should make is a map of the whole world whether it is an outdoor world or an indoor dungeon-like world. When you do this it gives you a base to start with. When making your video game one of the first things you will do is create a large box that contains your whole world. Inside this box is where you will place all of the various objects of your game. If your map has outdoor areas you will put in it the terrain features like mountains, rivers, bridges and building. If it is strictly an inside world you will map out all of the various rooms.

After you have your overall map completed you can work down into the details. Draw floor plans of any buildings and dungeons. Place the rooms and all the structures. To aid in the visualization of your buildings and rooms you should draw sketches of key areas. Are there temples? What will they look like? What are the unique things about your game? Draw sketches of these. Once all the concepts are detailed, and your vision of the world is created you can begin the actual software creation of your game. This translates your game from its paper version to its computer version.

Professional video game design companies spend an enormous amount of time in this phase of game development. They work out every detail and make drawings and sketches of every room, every character, and every scene. You do not have to design your game with this level of detail but you should make it as detailed as possible. Every hour of work you do in this stage of the process will save you several hours of work in the next step.

Step Two - Building the wire-frame of your game

This isn't aimed at the guy who wants to make his own games and share them with friends. It is more aimed at serious little developers that have some skill, and big, creative ideas. Nintendo has gone on record as saying the developer kit will cost between two and ten thousand dollars so that leaves most people just wanting to make a game out. But it really does open the doors to programmers, developers, and designers that really want to make a go of it.

I think this is a really good move on the part of Nintendo because it really will give creative start-ups a chance at fame and fortune. If you have a really good idea and the drive to see it through you could practically get overnight success with this. And by overnight success I mean after you put in the long months or a year or more developing your idea! But once it hit the Wii Channel, if it is really good, it could take off.

Nintendo has found a balance with this new developer kit. They are a worldwide name brand and they need to control the quality of the content that the produce and publish, yet they still want to reach into creative minds and find the next Donkey Kong. It's a great philosophy because it is pretty much what happened to them when Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong and that ever famous Mario.