Designing your game

Caution! Yes, caution is definitely called for when designing a game. Avoid newbie mistakes! Follow this advice:

• Start small. Most newbie game programmers dream of making the next hit game. If you’re just starting out, this is an impossible goal! It will only lead to frustration and defeat. You must start small; the only way to learn game programming is to be a game programmer. Try making a simple card game, a dice game, or something of that nature. You’ll run into enough trouble with a card game if you’re just starting out.
• Plan. If you have nothing more than some vague notion of making a “really cool RTS game” you are likely going to run into trouble about halfway through your project, when you realize that your initial assumptions were incorrect. Try to be as thorough as possible in the designing phase; it’ll save you countless hours in the end. Create a design document for your game, and include a structured version of all of your gameplay and technical design notes. Think through your game from beginning to end, and document every gameplay feature, and how you plan to implement it technically. Having said that, I’ll now suggest that no design document is perfect. Something unanticipated will always come up, no matter how thorough you’ve been. Just do your best!
• Wait. I’ve always found that my ideas seem brilliant to me when I first come up with them, but a few weeks down the road they don’t always seem quite so interesting. Be sure that you’ve given yourself ample time to mull an idea over, before committing yourself to it. You don’t want to get bored with your game after investing hours in its development!
• Get feedback. Find a group of gamers and pitch your idea to them. If they’re not excited and interested by your idea when you’re enthusiastically describing it to them, they’ll surely not be excited and interested by the end result. Get feedback, and re-work your idea. Ask input for instance at http://www.criminalexistence.com

Creating Game Media

For many game developers, this is the hardest part! After scavenging the internet and deciding on a set of tools, it’s time to get down to the business of creating your game’s media. If you aren’t an artist, you may need to search around for partners who are skilled in this area. For beginner games, there isn’t anything at all wrong with so-called “programmer art,” however. You can also try some of the freely available art resources that can be found on the Internet.

Coding your game

• Code flexibly. Changes happen, no matter how well you plan. If your game’s structure is too rigid, you may find that a single oversight in the design phase could necessitate a re-write of some of your game’s engine.

• Prototype. Try to get your game to a quick-and-dirty playable state as soon as possible. The graphics need not be complete, and the bells-and-whistles need not be implemented, but it is important to get an early idea of how your game will play. It’s possible that you’ll try it and say, “Wow, this is no fun at all.” Thankfully, if you’ve made this discovery early enough, you’ll be able to re-work the gameplay and try again without much trouble. Seeing your game in action, even if in a rudimentary state, could also motivate you very effectively.

• Don’t optimize early. Spending your time optimizing code before you even know how the game as a whole will perform is pointless. Code flexibly, yes, such that future optimization will be possible, but early optimization can be a big time waster. You won’t know where your bottlenecks will be until the game approaches its final state. If you spend days honing your blitting routines, only to find out later that your pathfinding routines are the bottleneck, you’ve wasted your time!

• Try not to throw away well tested code. The principle of code reuse is very important for large projects. You may think throwing away all of your code and starting from scratch is a good idea, but it may not be. Think of the weeks, months, and even years you have spent writing and testing that code.

In part IV of “I Want To Make A PHP Game” we will talk about publishing your game, how to, requirements, etc.