Have you ever dreamed of creating your own game, but feared your coding background wasn't enough to deal with the myriad of challenges? Then take heart; the latest developments in game design mean that anyone can play, regardless of their coding ability; even non-coders can get involved. Keep reading for a closer look.
Contributed by Bruce Coker Rating: / 2 May 05, 2009
Every gamer knows the story. You’ve read the reviews, so you know all about the stunning graphics and compelling gameplay. But how often, when you get a brand new game home, rip off the wrapper and load it up, does it turn out to be a massive disappointment?
At some stage, almost everybody who has ever played a commercial game has probably felt that they could make something better themselves. Many game publishers have responded to this by packaging level creators and character builders alongside their games, which have allowed budding authors to exercise a certain amount of originality.
But a new range of tools is beginning to appear which threatens to open up new levels of possibility for aspiring game developers. These are geared towards removing, as far as possible, the programming and coding barriers to development, instead providing engines that allow complete beginners to create the most common types of actions and activities used in the majority of games. On top of these engines, creators can add their own graphics, characters, story lines and puzzles to make new games limited by little more than the power of their imaginations.
This game authoring revolution was, perhaps surprisingly, heralded by the Sony Corporation, with its decision to place creativity right at the heart of the Little Big Planet experience on PSP3. When you buy a copy of Little Big Planet you don’t just get the game. You also receive a set of the tools that Sony’s developers built it with. These powerful utilities allow the creation of levels every bit as complex, detailed and fully-featured as the built-in set. You could theoretically recreate the included levels down to the tiniest detail if you wanted, although designing your own is likely to be a more rewarding experience.
Of course all this power comes at a price. Using professional gaming tools to create professional-standard characters and puzzles requires not just skill and imagination, but large amounts of time. This level of accomplishment is a significant challenge that will defeat many people, but those who are seriously committed to the game and its creative ethos will discover a rewarding and largely limitless challenge.
Despite its power and complexity, the creativity tools bundled with Little Big Planet are by definition restricted to the game’s own engine. While the possibilities they offer are extremely broad, whatever you build with them must function according to the basic rules set up by the original development team. You couldn’t use them to create an entirely new game from the ground up.
Fortunately for those gifted with the creative ability to use them, free tools that do allow this are starting to become more widely available. One such is Scratch, which is a visual programming language and environment designed primarily to encourage children and young people to acquire programming skills. Scratch contains a large selection of objects and characters – called sprites, in the jargon of animation – along with stackable building blocks for a whole range of actions and behaviors.
In the right hands, these elements can be combined to stunning effect to build puzzles and strategy challenges, simple platform games and even adventure games. Take Cube World, for example. Despite the game’s rudimentary and angular graphical style, it has all the elements of a real platform game, such as running and jumping, flaming fire pits, dangerous-looking purple enemies, characters in distress to save, and a genuine mystery at the all-too-premature end, leaving you wanting more, as all good games should.
Cube World: less square than it appears
Scratch is designed to be simple to learn and use, and its success in achieving these aims is demonstrated by the number of people using the system. Popular games obtain thousands of views and hundreds of comments, and while the games themselves are often extremely simple, in many cases this only serves to illustrate the importance of gameplay over graphics.
Nonetheless, Scratch is oriented toward the younger developer and those who are entirely new to the art; its limitations can quickly become restrictive. The development of more complex scenarios and graphics depends on a more sophisticated tool set, such as the one provided by Gamestar Mechanic. This MacArthur Foundation-funded project provides aspiring developers with virtual workshop space, tools and community support to build platform and adventure games from scratch.
The use of similar sprites and components mean that Game Mechanic games tend to share a broadly similar look and feel. But the games are distinguished both by the quality and difficulty of the gameplay and the imagination manifested in the scenarios on offer.
Scattered among the mundane and predictable space adventures, killing sprees and various types of war game are a surprising and welcome number of unusual and thoroughly thought-out themes. These include Marathon for Life, in which the hero finds himself in a foot race against time with death the price of failure, and The Great Robbery, which demands precise timing and accurate observation in a quest to recover the stolen loot.
Some of the games are fiendishly difficult, like the strangely compelling A Racer’s Life. With its haunting soundtrack and eerie interstellar atmosphere, this is a challenging game somewhat reminiscent of the original Prince of Persia.
Despite the bizarre scenario, A Racer’s Life presents an absorbing challenge
Intriguingly, the Gamestar Mechanic environment is itself set up in the form of a game, with the task of designing new games as its central objective. The goal is to help new designers learn the essential skills required to develop quality games. These include things like systems-based thinking, networking and productivity skills, and the rudiments of object-oriented development. Of equal importance is the Gamestar social network, which provides a source of encouragement, criticism and opportunities for collaboration.
The decision to structure Gamestar this way was a deliberate attempt to provide an alternative to conventional development environments. Existing development learning tools such as Stagecast Creator and Toontalk have tended to focus mainly on the programming aspects of the design process, at the expense of the principles at the heart of successful games. The crew behind Gamestar prefer to focus on these principles, with programming knowledge being acquired almost as a by-product.
Gamestar attempts to be a self-contained world where every object and task is related primarily to gaming. It is hoped that this will encourage Gamestar’s population to concentrate on the relationships between different game elements, with the emphasis strongly on a design-based rather than a development or programming-based approach. How successful this will be in the long term remains to be seen. But the evidence so far is positive. Of all the new game development environments, the games emerging from Gamestar Mechanic tend to be among the most clearly thought out, the most challenging, and in many cases the most original.
Meanwhile, over at gamesalad.com, a different kind of design experiment is taking place. Here a growing team of new developers are cutting their teeth in a tool-based downloadable game-building environment. Once again the emphasis is on developing the vital base skills and thought processes that underpin good game design. These can easily be transferred to more sophisticated development environments later on.
Although graphically rudimentary and restricted to 2D, Game Salad encourages a high degree of creative expression. This is witnessed in the range of games on the site, which covers the spectrum from shooters (Lambo – the tale of a desperate sheep) through dungeon crawlers (Darkwood) to sims (World War Tree) and the Asteroids clone Space Rocks.
The GameSalad creator is simplicity itself to use. You just choose a template – options include basic platform, shoot-em-up and breakout styles – and GameSalad will present you with a basic environment and cast of characters. The rest is up to you.
The drag-and-drop interface allows you to add and change the properties and behaviors of any element in the game, or replace them with entirely new ones of your own. It’s a flexible, powerful system that gets people up and running quickly and that encourages experimentation and learning.
The GameSalad drag and drop interface encourages you to use your imagination.
Probably the biggest constraint to the spread of GameSalad is that both the web plug-in and game creation tool are currently available for Mac OS only, although Windows versions are in development.
With tools such as these becoming increasingly available, and with the web likely to rival dedicated consoles in the complexity and variety of games it can deliver as the future unfolds, it’s tempting to wonder whether a profound change might be taking root in the gaming world. It’s too early to say that the days of the major game companies are numbered. But unless the likes of EA follow Sony’s lead in embracing the full potential of game creation software, they could find themselves losing touch with the host of independent and aspiring game developers who have something fresh to say on the subject.
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Creating an Engine for Games for Windows
