Here is My How to Get Started in Game Development Journey

All right, so today I'm going to tell you how to get started in game development by telling you all the different steps that are involved in creating a game app. I will share the best resources that I've found that can help you actually complete each step. So let's go! I tried to build a viral game app in less than a week and one of the main purposes of this blog was to learn how to build a mobile game. In that process, gather resources for every step along the way so that I could then write this blog where I could share with you the best tips and tricks that I found.

Before starting, If you’re looking for full guidance on how to start in game development or how you can start a career in game developing. So this is an article explaining everything from scratch on how to become a game developer after 12th pass-out.

Concept and Platform Selection

The first thing that you have to decide is what framework or platform are you going to use to be able to create your first game. And my recommendation is that you use Unity.

Unity Game Development

Unity is cross-platform, which means that you can develop a game in unity and run it on pretty much any device. So you don't have to do anything twice. And in my opinion, it really doesn't make any sense to build natively for only one platform because you essentially just limit the potential for your game to do well. And working natively and building the game for both android and ios separately, Definitely doesn't make any sense right now. Since you can just build it once in Unity and have it work on both platforms. Don't do more work unless you have to.

Design and Development

The second thing that you'll have to do is actually figure out how to build the game that you want to build. And the way to do that is by breaking your game down as much as possible. So for instance, if you want to build something like Zelda, a 2D Zelda game, then you'd first have to figure out how to move an object to the left. Then you'd have to figure out how to move it to the right. etc. until you actually arrive at a fully fledged Zelda like game. So break it down. I made this pretty easy for myself because my game was pretty much just the Flappy Bird mechanics. So I found a couple of articles on google that taught how to build Flappy Bird.

Next, I would suggest learning how to procedurally generate things in your game. So there would be things like weapons, obstacles, enemies, etc. Because in most games you'll need things to show up on the screen at different times in different locations. And in order to be able to do this, I would say that you need to understand two key concepts.

Key Concepts

The first one is what a prefab is and how to use it in Unity. Essentially, if you add a ball into your scene, and then you attach a script to that ball to make it do something. At that point, the ball and the script are connected, but only in the scene.

If you generate a new ball, it won't have the script anymore. But if you make a prefab out of the ball and the script, then you can generate that prefab into the game, and then you get a ball with the script that makes the ball do something.

Unity Prefabs Generation

The second concept is how to procedurally generate these prefabs, which this article really helped me understand. And procedural generation of objects just means that the game basically creates these objects one by one as the game progresses, so they're not there from the start. After you understand those things, you should be able to create your game. You'll still have to Google how to do the specifics, but you'll have enough understanding to be able to put things together.

Data Storage

So the next few steps are things that are more for when you've created the game and you're getting closer to publishing it. Therefore, the next tip is learning how to store some simple data in your game. And for more advanced games, what you would do is you would have an online database somewhere. Where you'd store all this data. But for more simple games, storing it on the device is fine. And the reason that you want to be able to do this is because you want your users to be able to track their high scores. That's one of the main reasons why we actually play any game. It's to beat our previous high scores.

Monetization Strategy

The next thing you'd probably want to do is implement ads into your game. Ads and in-app purchases are the main two ways that you can make money from your games. Implementing ads into an app with Unity is super simple. There's also an article here from Unity themselves that goes through the entire process. And for in-app purchases, that's where you can make the most money. But it is usually something that takes a slightly more complex game to implement. But I would recommend looking into it for sure.

Trial and Test

Now that you've done all that, you're getting ready to start the process of actually publishing the game, which is really exciting. The first thing that you need to do is port the game to an actual device so that you can test it and make sure that it runs the way that you'd expect it to. And this is where I ran into some problems. I decided to try to port the game via Flutter and that just led me down the wrong path and I ended up spending two full days trying to get that to work. Only to then decide that maybe I should do a quick YouTube search to see if or see what the process might look like for porting the game via Unity.

Once you've tested your game out on a device and fixed any potential bugs that showed up, then it's time to add the app icons. And for this, I suggest using a website called makeappicon.com. you just create your icon and then go to the site and upload your photo and then they will send you an email with all the different versions of your icon that you will need. It's super simple. And then you just add them into your unity game and you're done.

Launch Strategy

Now finally you're ready to publish the game to the google play store and the apple app store. This is not something that's super complex but it's one of those things that if it's your first time then it can take a while just to complete all the different steps. Like signing up for different sites, creating provisioning profiles and keys, etc.

If you want to publish the game to the Apple App Store, you also need a machine that can run Xcode, which only Apple computers can. So you either need an Apple computer or you can run it via a virtual machine. I've never tried doing this via a virtual machine, but I hear that's a way to do it. Anyway, for iOS, I use this really good article from codewithchris.com, where he goes through the entire process. And for Android, I used to read articles by Instabug. That was also really helpful.

And yeah, that's it. So that's my map for going from never having built a game app to building and publishing your first game app.

Conclusion

I hope that the resources and tips and tricks that I brought up in this blog helped you get an idea of how to get started in game development, where to start, and also what it takes to build and publish your first game app. This was kind of an experimental blog where, I don't know, it's a bit weird having a lot of resources in a small blog that really are like text format or links. But I hope that this kind of helped and was somewhat useful for people to get an overview of what it takes. I've tried to build the best list of resources that I can. So I really hope you enjoyed it. And that's it for this one.