Game Development

tok9

Pretty sure this is the right area for this.

I'm just after finishing Business Information Systems in UCC and fortunately have a job and am pretty happy with it.

However I would love to get into game development. I'm after downloading unity and currently in the process of downloading unreal. Has anyone any advice on good tutorials to use etc?

I'm hoping that if I can get the hang of it and maybe develop a few basic games that I could start looking at possible jobs in the industry, maybe starting as a tester and progressing. That is what I'm thinking..

I'm basically just wondering what do others think? Is what I'm saying achievable if I put the time into it or am I being a bit naive?

RedXIV

what you're saying is definitely feasible but will still be difficult. Depending on your ability and willingness to leave the country will probably be the two main stumbling blocks.

First off, Unity is a great tool for beginners as it has a huge community which is what you want when starting off, you also want to start getting involved with the likes of gamedevelopers.ie who can give you a bit more advice and direction.

As regards industry work, i'm not going to lie, its difficult enough to get a job. testers are usually hired for being multi-lingual in ireland as we do mainly localisation testing in this country for games. some do purely functional (PopCap, gPotato) but the compeition for these is usually fierce. Also, the starting salary for a tester isn't great but if you are planning to use it as a stepping stone into development, that probably won't be too much of an issue.

Hope some of that helps!

tok9

Thanks RedXIV, that's very helpful!

Just curious, are you working in the industry yourself?

I've never really worked outside Ireland before but I know that I have to if I want to have a career as a game developer.

I'll try to get to grips with Unity first and learn some C++.

If anyone has any more advice it would be very much appreciated.

RedXIV

tok9 wrote: »

Thanks RedXIV, that's very helpful!

Just curious, are you working in the industry yourself?

I've never really worked outside Ireland before but I know that I have to if I want to have a career as a game developer.

I'll try to get to grips with Unity first and learn some C++.

If anyone has any more advice it would be very much appreciated.

I worked as a tester for Activision, Vivendi and another crowd called Keywords. Got a bit higher up in Activision, got to look in the project management side of things. The games industry in ireland is very close knit, alot of the guys jump from company to company so it might be a good start going to game dev events and get yourself known.

In Ireland, we're mainly concentrating on casual games and mobile games instead of AAA titles so if you want to stay in Ireland, maybe concentrate on that. I believe Unity has a mobile engine, might be worth looking into that and then web development?

Ethan.Saaris

My advice would be not to use Unity, or any other development SDK, but write your own game engine.

riddik

hahaha, what? a beginner getting into it for the first time shouldn't check out unity, but start off writing their own game engine? i think u can disregard that last bit op, get unity, go for it!

Ethan.Saaris

Yes, indeed. A beginner should check out Direct3D or OpenGL and start writing simple routines, like displaying a cube, a sphere, play with lighting, creating a fullscreen window, and so on.

Are we talking about hobbyist beginners or serious beginners?

Also, it's more rewarding getting things done by yourself.

murphy20

hi , i would like to get into the game development too maybe we could get a noob team together and start working on a project or something if you look up youtube this guy be cool to make a game even a small one one of the game developers said your dont need qualifications he said to get your foot in the door of game industry is to "just make something" i know a good site to get feedback of a game and to get it out there for free want to team up anyone and make a game or some project .. its worth a shot theres alot of free software and tools for it

Retr0gamer

I wouldn't recommend Unity as a starting point. Anything 3D gets complicated and the amount of work required goes up exponentially.

My advice is to try something like Gamemaker out first but even before that leanr the basics of a programming language like Java or C Sharp, enough until you can create a simple text based hangman game that is object orientated (very important). From there you should ahve no problem understanding how something like gamemaker works. I'd recommend sticking with learning programming languages though so you cnan eventually write your own engines and modify others. There's plenty of books and tutorials.

Torakx

Yep, couldnt agree more on the programming side of things.
If you even want to make a simple 3d game with UDK which uses Kismet(messy graphical version for makign scripts) It still helps a whole lot to know some programming.
At the moment I am looking to start learning C#

C# In a Nutshell seems to be a good series.That combined with LINQPAD free software (known as a scratch pad) is looking pretty usefull for testin code and going through tutorials.
The linqpad actually downloads samples from online that are taken from the books!
So you can follow the books and look at the programmes in Linqpad and change the code and run it.

Also I found UDK easier to use and even from doing basics in college with unity, I still find UDK better.
However if you want to use Google sketch up to build mock levels fast, the files export directly into unity where as they wont to UDK and you may have to mess around with another program to get them into UDK.

Either way, have fun

ps, Retrogamer is correct.Working with 3d engines will be a big project if your looking to release any half decent game at all.
I enjoyed messing with them as a hobby though.
Used blender and UDK to start off.
For a longterm plan though, a programming language will always be an advantage, probably the most important advantage to have.

koHd

Ethan.Saaris wrote: »

My advice would be not to use Unity, or any other development SDK, but write your own game engine.

riddik wrote: »

hahaha, what? a beginner getting into it for the first time shouldn't check out unity, but start off writing their own game engine? i think u can disregard that last bit op, get unity, go for it!

It can be actually less complicated to start building your own game engine rather than jumping into something like Unity.

Building your own text adventure engine in any raw language could be an easy starting point that will actually teach you quite a bit about coding game logic.

You can start with basic selection & iteration and actually have something working fairly fast. It won't be the fanciest game ever created, sure. But that will force you to think about the linearity of your game.

I personally think this is a more natural way to learn to code games. After all it is how video games evolved.

But each to their own...

Retr0gamer

The first test someone should give themselves when learning a language is to programme a simple text based hangman game. It helped me really start understanding it.

koHd

Retr0gamer wrote: »

The first test someone should give themselves when learning a language is to programme a simple text based hangman game. It helped me really start understanding it.

So after this suggestion I went ahead and made a hangman type guessing game in java. Took longer than anticipated and has some complexities you might not anticipate! Very good suggestion.

About 10 hours work overall. But I added some hours by first attempting to break everything into separate methods, then combine them.

Lesson learned on that one. Best to get a big ugly looking main method carrying everything out properly first, then breaking it into the smaller methods once you establish the relationships between variables and objects.

Overall, a good lesson.

Retr0gamer

It's how we were all thought in the current course I'm doing. If you have that all working and have it object orientated then you are pretty much ready to learn new languages or start using something like Gamemaker.

FewFew

Thought I'd pop up and say we're trying to get a specific Game Development Forum going.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056907061