A First Article

Making a Computer Game - A Founder's Journal.

Phase 1

A friend and I were recently enthralled by a big-name multi-platform game, which we had long ignored, despite numerous and successful iterations over the years.

For some reason, we imagined merging it with another, older and almost cultish game. We joked about making something that incorporated both.

So was planted the seed of an adventure into what is now a fledgling game development project.

Uncharted Territory -
How every adventure begins

I have been tasked with all things word based (dialogue, story, back-stories  you know, the really important stuff) and my friend, I suppose he's a business partner now, has taken command of the development side of things.

Our first task was to select an engine for our game.

Were we going to go the purist route and opt for our very own engine, something completely our own and free from the possiblity of royalty fees? The answer came swiftly. "Hell, no". It would simply take too long. Although it would allow for great freedom and individuality, the time and effort required simply wasn't feasible for us.
One independent developer, Dan Tabar, has spent the last 11 years on a project recently released under the name of Cortex Command. If you don't know it, think Worms with an amazing physics engine, aliens, robots and severely armour-deficient brains. Yes. 11 years. That's almost half as long as I've been alive and twice as long as my patience is willing to stretch.

Our other option was to use a pre-existing engine. Many of which, to my great pleasure, are either free or open-sourced. The difference, as my partner explains it as follows: "Free is like having free coffee; you can take the grains and use them as you please. But open source is like having access to the farm and factory; you can change the coffee to suit your tastes and needs".

There are numerous free and open-sourced engines to choose from, including Valve's Source (Half-Life), Epic Game's Unreal Engine 3.x (Mass Effect) and Bethesda's Creation Engine (Skyrim).
All of these listed are free to modify, provided there is no intention to make money from the mod.

Mods: Sometimes, there's just no hope

One of the advantages of using one of these engines is that much of the code is already there. That translates into us (okay, okay, my partner) having to spend less time creating code since many of the basic elements are already present.

We decided to use the Creation Engine, since our perceived game is RPG based. The sad part: we can never make any money from the modification.

But, it is one of the best ways to break into the gaming industry, and break in we shall.


A Wandering Wonderer