I’ve often been asked this question, and when people hear the answer to it, a lot of them go ‘well, why DO you make games?’

The short answer to that question is because its fun to me. I love creating new experiences and figuring out HOW to make the new experience happen. I like to think of it as figuring out a puzzle, and there’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of ‘hey, i made that!’

So are games fun to make…?

Yes and no?
I’d say maybe 10% of the process in making games is fun and the other 90% is plain hard work (and some smart work and laying down the groundwork to eliminate some hard work).

You might be thinking: ‘So how does one make games?’

Well, there’s some questions there. Let’s start with – are you making it with a team or solo? What are your skillsets and limitations, and how do you make sure you’re playing to your strengths when making the game?

Then comes the brainstorming, which is arguably the most fun bit. This is when everyone throws ideas around and figures out what and how they’re coming together to make the game. This is usually where you figure out the goal of the game, what genre it might be, what it looks like, the mechanics and number of players. Is this a 5 minute game or an 8 hour game? Depending on who you’re teaming up with as well, this could be digital or physical!

Now that you’ve got the idea of what you want to do, you’re going to need to figure out HOW to do it. If you’re not digitally adept, you might start by paper prototyping and figuring out how the gameplay works. This is where you find your pain points, what mechanics work, and where the ‘fun’ is coming from. Is this fun from the mechanics and how they stack? Is this from players interacting and cooperating? Is this the adrenaline rush after beating the game or a level?

This stage requires a LOT of iteration, playing, replaying and determining whether you’ve dialed the fun up to the max. Can music add to it? VFX? graphics? what would entice players further? You’ll start by adding polish to the graphics maybe or the narrative (text), and you keep going round this with every single feature that exists in your game, polishing not till perfection, but up until the first deadline.

Now that you’ve hit the first deadline, you’ll need to polish, take care of bugs and test in every way you can think of, to make sure the game doesn’t crash unexpectedly. Once you’ve managed to get it stable enough, congratulations! Now all that’s ‘left’ is for you to save this build, and get it to your players somehow. Whether that’s steam, android or some other platform, you’ll need to get it out somehow.

Once you’ve figured all of that out and made it, congratulations, you’ve made your game!
Conversely, if you stopped at one of the stages above, but at least attempted to make a game, then congratulations, you’ve started on a long and rocky road called game development.