So You Want To Be A Game Developer? Tools of The Trade

No cash to splurge on expensive development licenses? Well things are a lot different nowadays than it used to be. The tools for making games are becoming much easier to use and much cheaper. Heck, you can find a few offering free versions that aren't completely gimped. There's no better time to get started in game development than now. Lets look at the tools that you could pick up and useful sites that you might want to bookmark...



The Tools
The days of coding a game from programing languages are nearly over. This is not to say you could make game without programming knowledge, but the tools game developers use are more user friendly and more approachable. Game developers now have access to propriety engines which come with proper IDE's. Thats an Integrated Development Environment which basically is a graphically oriented development software that unifies all the necessary tools game developer need to make games. Here are some really easy to use development software you can use to start making games.

Game Maker 8.0

Game Maker by Yoyo Games is an excellent choice for making simple pixel art type games and is a popular choice amongst many indie game developer. It's very easy to design a game as things are kept simple. You create objects(player object to other stuff which you can manipulate with scripts) and rooms which are your levels the objects one. It has a visual scripting tool as well as its own scripting language if you want to get down and dirty writing scripts. The most notable game made in Game Maker is Derek Yu's Spelunky.

Spelunky, one of the best games I played in 2009 made entirely with Game maker

Unity 3.0
I've used Unity quite a bit and I've got to say, I really like this development tool a lot. It's as easy as game maker in a way as everything is a game object. If you'd like to give a game object a certain attribute such as physics effect, particle effects, a particular material type, all you need to do is add the correct component and tweak to your hearts content. It doesn't have a visual scripting tool, so you'll have to know an actual scripting language such as C#, Javascript or Boo to do scripts for your game objects and code the game logic. I'd highly recommend you to use Javascript as most tutorials use this and it is relatively easy to learn. Whats cool about unity is that it supports development for Mac as well as the iphone and ipad.



Unreal Development Kit

Epic's baby is now available for free to anyone that wants to use a technically current Unreal Engine 3. The UDK that is available for free is limited but has full functionality for building an Unreal Engine 3 game from the ground up. What I really love about UDK is the robust and powerful visual scripting tool called Kismet. Kismet basically controls your entire game and you script every single element of your game in in. You don't need to know any scripting language, all you need to do is add the right events, and tweak the correct attributes. It's more complex than what you get in Game Maker, but it is very powerful. You'll need to put in many hours learning how to use the tools in UDK properly before you manage to pull off a level in a game. But the effort is worth it.

Teotl Studios The Ball was an Unreal game

Blender

The 3D game development kits don't come with a 3D modelling tool. You'll have to use a 3DS MAX or something similar to make meshes. Those can be costly but Blender is an open source 3D modelling software which you can get for free. It is based on python so you need to install python prior to installing Blender. There are lots of tutorials available online for it. The only downside to it is that its user interface has a very Linux feel to it. If you're a windows user, the right mouse button might throw you off. It might take a while before you get used to it, but its free and fully functional. It also has a real time game engine which you can use to build prototypes(with physics built in).

These are some of the tools you can use to make a game(or a prototype). Next time, I'll share with you resources and communities you can go to to learn new stuff and get help from.