How “don't know” the game did

Foreword

Good day, dear readers. I am a student with a lot of free time and desire. I decided to share my experience in creating the simplest games and write about it on Habrahabr. I hope I can answer someone’s questions, or at least take a moment of your time with an interesting story. So let's go.

Idea

I thought about the need to do something of my own about two years ago, but I began to take the first steps quite recently, in the autumn of this year. It all started with the fact that ideas were born in my head a la “I should do something”. I wanted to make a game that would allow me to pass the time. Also, I thought that its embodiment should not take a lot of time and effort. It is worth mentioning the fact that until that time I had never seen any programming languages ​​and did not know how it works at all.



I was somewhere at the level of an ordinary user who simply pressed buttons and was happy with the magic of the 21st century. By the way, it was my first mistake, which made me nervous at the time when I went to take decisive action. All my requirements were perfectly met by the endless run mobile phone game. I didn’t want to do something difficult, like Subway Surfers, I wanted to do something like a game called “Run” (by the way, it wasn’t that popular). I thought that I could do a project of such a small scale.
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Embodiment

After making the necessary decisions, I sketched out a few concept art (to be honest, none of these “concepts” were used). Then he began to storm the Internet and, in particular, Google. First of all, I had to solve the question of the engine - which one to use? The engine was chosen - open, free, easy to learn and use Unity3D. In order to start work not with an empty head, I decided to look at and read a few lessons on how and what to press in Unity so that the game will turn out. It should be mentioned that, according to the instruction of my friends, I chose to program C # and not JS. Why? I dont know.

And I advise you not to neglect this rule.

Starting to create a game, relying on knowledge that was obtained from several video lessons and written sources from Google - was my terrible mistake. However, once the business has begun, I will complete it. After several days of stubborn battles with the compiler, which continuously screamed about some new errors in the code, I got the first results: my character was already running continuously (moved along the axis, because there is no animation yet), I could jump by pressing “space ", And the plate on top of the screen showed the number of my points.

The first gameplay of my "game" looked well, very ridiculous, but still I was happy about that ...

The next problem for me, which seemed insurmountable, was to make the game create and delete platforms so that my runner would be really “endless”. Of course, after some number of attempts, time and nerves were killed, this system was made, but it still had a lot of bugs. Naturally, I did not like it. Therefore, the system had to radically alter.

Already at the end of the week the game suited me completely in terms of all the major systems. I made my character accelerate, the platforms were built and disappeared, and even I could add coins that gave the player extra points. It all made me very happy, but still there were minor bugs and shortcomings that required urgent correction - this required a cold mathematical calculation.

A good part of the programmers want me a painful death for my code.

Exterior design

Not less difficult (and even more) was the task of the external design of my self-made game. The whole problem is that my drawing skill is “ equal to 0 and tends to a minus of infinity ” and this, of course, prevented me from doing a good job. Also, I could not close my eyes on the fact that I can not calculate the distance between the platforms without taking into account the size of my character. So I had to use Simple Assets. To this day, the visual design of my game remains for me the main problem, since I still have not come to a design that would fit my desires. To create all the models, textures and sprites (Sprite), I use programs from Adobe (in particular, Photoshop) - ideal.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to say that the process of creating the game is extremely interesting, exciting and informative. Of course, you will have to make a certain amount of your strength, and also kill a lot of time. This applies in particular to people like me who do not know any programming languages ​​and are the first to encounter this matter. On the way to creating even the simplest game you will have difficulties, but the result will “pay for” all this many times. So let's summarize:

1. Before embodying your ideas, study at least the basic level of a programming language, otherwise you will have great difficulties;
2. Do not set big goals, start with small projects;
3. Make your product quality, do not regret the time for fixing small bugs. After all, sometimes small things start big;
4. Feel free to ask for help on the Internet, there are a lot of kind and helpful people here!

Thank you all for your attention!