Introduction

Through several months of mmorpg forum skimming I've come across the same sentence quite a few times, and since I am an evil minion I believe it is my duty to open the eyes of these players, which I presume are young and did not even mind Googling it at least.

They say:

"I want to make my own games, I want to make something like/better than WoW".

"I want to make games", it almost sounds fun just to say it, but lets face it, it's easier said than done. Well, now that you know why I am writing this, let's get started shall we?

Design

Just like any other Hollywood Movie, game creation starts at the storyboard, here is where the brainstorming begins. First you have to decide what theme is the game going to have, is it going to be a Sci-Fi shooter, a War shooter, an urban thief, or perhaps a fantasy world with huge dragons and titanic castles.

The artists make several sketches, and develop each character. They also design the architecture of the buildings and all the items we find inside a game. The artist then make rotoscopes, these are what 3D artists use as a base to design their models. The basic building block for a model is called a polygon, if you would like to know how these programs work, and/or you are interested in 3D design please refer to the sources section in this article for some useful links.

Rotoscope Sample:

Model without texture:

After the modeling is done, the models have to be textured, the way they do this, is they make a blueprint of the model and then they turn it into a flat image which the model is going to use. Image that you are going to cover a cylinder with wallpaper, you first measure the dimensions, then flatten out the wallpaper and paint on it, then later glue it to the cylinder.

Later, you would want to animate your characters, this is done by adding bones to your models and by programming their movements.

Game Engine

The game engine is going to be the heart of your game, it is going to rule the pipeline and your game dynamics. Before I go deeper into engines, lets review some basic concepts of games.

Game Loop

The title should give you a clue about what this is, this is a programmatically done loop that checks for state changes, for example if you press your UP arrow in your keyboard, the screen should move your character forward. And the same for every action that you might do in the game, another example is when you go through a certain checkpoint and an animation is supposed to play.

Refresh Rate

Ever played a game in a computer with low resources?, this is what happens when you try to play Half Life 2 in a slow PC you see the action almost frame by frame, and the game is basically unplayable.

Graphics Pipeline

As we saw in the design section, you have to bind all the textures to the 3D models, which I can tell you is a royal pain, because you have to set each model to a certain coordinate in the three dimensional XYZ plane, scale it( you don’t want a 7 foot book do you?), and assign the corresponding texture.

As our ever reliable Wikipedia puts it: "as a single license for a high-end commercial game engine can range from US$10,000 to $3,750,000 (in the case of Warcraft III)".

Ouch it sounds like a lot of money right?, well maybe, but it saves programmers a world of pain. Some of the reasons are because they can recycle the engine and use it for sequels and other games. If you are planning on making a Massive Multiplayer Online Game, you will need to look into an engine that has good database handling, among other features. I'm going to go ahead and finish game engines here because I don't want to get into boring technical stuff.

Sound very easy so far right?, well you have to be fast while you are working on this, otherwise when your final product is released it will be already outdated.

Next: How Games Are Made: Part II

Sources

(http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/)

(http://www.rodneyolmos.com/downloads/tools.htm)

(http://www.jpatch.com/)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_engine)

Got no money and would like to try some 3D modeling?

Try these links.

http://www.blender.org/