The Indies’ Guide to Game Making

This article originally appeared in issue 246 of PC Gamer UK.

You might have heard that “It’s never been easier to make a game.” And it’s true. But how do you actually make one? What do you make it ‘in’? How much does it cost? How long does it take? Can you sell what you make, and do you owe anyone any royalties? Do you need to learn a programming language?

I don’t know, but I do know a lot of indie games. And lots of them are made with tools and suites that claim to be beginner friendly. So for each of the most popular tools, I found an indie developer who had made something cool with it, and asked them what it’s like to work with.

I’ll also cover how much these tools cost, what your rights are when it comes to selling your work, and what platforms they can make games for. If you’ve ever been interested in making a game, hopefully this will give you an idea of how long it takes to pick up, which tool will suit you, and where to start.

Unity looks like a level editor, but does everything.

Unity

What is it? An all-inclusive development suite for making 3D games.

Price and licence: The free version has all you’ll need as a beginner, and is fine to use commercially unless you’re making more than $100,000 a year from your games. The pro version has fancy things like pathfinding, physics, and graphics tricks, and costs £924. No royalties for either version.

Makes games for: PC, Mac and Linux. iOS and Android versions are £246 each.

Tutorial: Infinite Ammo’s Unity tutorial

Aaaaa! is a game about falling.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – For the Awesome

Developers: Ichiro Lambe (Dejobaan Games) and Alex Schwartz (Owlchemy Labs – Unity Version)

How long does Unity take to learn?

Ichiro: Beginners often adapt and reframe what they’re thinking about to fit what’s readily available to them – they’ll learn how to code through tutorials. The ability to create something playable becomes less “Do I know enough to create something or don’t I?” And more “I don’t know what everything does, but I know enough to screw with Euclidean space…”

What that gives us is the ability to become creative in a matter of weeks!

What prior knowledge or skills are helpful?

Ichiro: Knowledge of another 3D engine, Solid C# (or C++, etc) skills, vector algebra.

What can’t you do with it?

Alex: Honestly, we haven’t hit development walls that prevented us from fulfilling our creative goals, and anything that annoys us is usually just a minor editor idiosyncrasy.

How long did you think the game would take to make, and how long did it actually take?

Alex: We estimated around six months, with only two full-time developers on Owlchemy Labs’ end and one to three part-timers on Dejobaan’s end. It ended up being closer to eight-and-a-half months.

How much of the development time was enjoyable, and how much was unpleasant?

Alex: Thankfully the work within Unity was mostly pleasant. The most unpleasant part of the development of the game involved bringing in 3D Game Studio’s proprietary asset formats where a source asset was not available, but that was solved early on in development.

Unity is best for 3D games.

How much did it cost you to develop, and what did that money go on?

Ichiro: Most of the project was done via revenue share, so development/marketing costs were well under $20k.

How well has your game done for you financially, on a scale from 1-10? (Let’s say 5 is ‘enough to make your next game’.)

Ichiro: Time will tell. Most of our revenue comes about over the course of two years after the initial push (when we do bundles and Steam sales and so forth). The original Aaaaa! was doing pretty well, until we added it to the Portal 2 Potato ARG. That dialled things up to 11.

If you could give your past self one piece of advice before starting to make the game, what would it be?

Ichiro: Add in one more killer mechanic that pervades the entire game and gets fans of the original to pick up the semi-sequel.

Conclusion

Unity is the best combination of approachable and versatile for 3D games. It’s more complex than Game Maker, but about as easy as it gets for 3D development. The free version is very generous, and the recent addition of Linux support makes it one of the only noob-friendly tools that can make games for all three desktop operating systems.

AGS provides the basic adventure game structure.

Adventure Game Studio

What is it? An all-inclusive development suite for making 2D adventure games.

Price and licence: Free, you can sell your work, no royalties.

Makes games for: PC

Tutorial: Official AGS tutorial

Adventure games require a lot of art...

Ben There Dan That

Developer: Dan Marshall

How long does Adventure Game Studio take to learn?

AGS abstracts quite a lot of the complicated stuff for you and it all just works. You can pretty much make the bare bones of something simple in a weekend with a lot of perseverance and very little programming knowledge, because it’s largely just filling in forms and ticking checkboxes.

What prior knowledge or skills are helpful?

If you want to do anything exciting or interesting with the game, you’re going to have to learn some C.

What can’t you do with it?

Lots, I’m afraid. AGS is great for making faux-1990s point-and-click games, but nothing else. It’s also Windows only, so no iPad or Linux versions.
AGS is also kind of getting on a bit, now. You could probably make an AGS-equivalent in Unity in about a week, and get all the multi-platform benefits and visual boost with it.

...but not much serious programming.

How long did you think the game would take to make, and how long did it actually take?

I think it probably took about as long as I’d expected it would, a couple of months. But then, Ben There, Dan That! has a deliberately… uh, slapdash style.

How much of the development time was enjoyable, and how much was unpleasant?

Ben There, Dan That! was pretty much a laugh from start to finish, largely because I wasn’t taking it seriously. Maybe the only unpleasant bit was writing all the dialogue – there’s a unique reaction for most things in the game, and so sitting there churning out dialogue did start to become something of a chore.

How much did it cost you to develop, and what did that money go on?

Uh… I don’t think I spent anything.

How well has it done for you financially, on a scale from 1-10?

Ooh, tricky. On its own, probably a 3 or a 4. As a Double Pack with the sequel on Steam, definitely a 9. I could always use more money.

If you could give your past self one piece of advice before starting to make the game, what would it be?

HEY! IDIOT DAN FROM THE PAST. Make the graphics nice!

Conclusion

Adventure Game Studio is perfect if the cool thing about the game in your head is its story, characters or humour. If you want to make all- new game mechanics, you’re better off with Game Maker. But if you’re a writer or artist and you want to tell a story with as little coding work as possible, this is where to start.

RPGM comes with art to get you started.

RPG Maker

What is it? An all-inclusive development suite primarily for making 2D RPGs. Includes some graphics sets to get you started.

Price and licence: £18 for the older version, £55 for the latest. You can sell what you make, no royalties. 30-day trial available.

Makes games for: PC

Tutorial: RPG Maker Web’s tutorial

If you can produce art like this, make a game.

To the Moon

Developer: Kan Gao (Director/Designer)

How long does RPG Maker take to learn?

Anyone could just sit down and get a character sprite to run around on a map with a basic battle system, but I think a few months to get the basic technical aspects down. To create your own systems and mechanics involves programming logic just like any language.

What prior knowledge or skills are helpful?

On the technical side, programming experience (the engine uses a scripting system based on Ruby) and a general grasp of logic.

Otherwise, every creative skill comes in handy – the engine actually has a rather active community, which is exciting because it also means that there’s a lot of bartering for resources going on. It’s like Burning Man, but with less sand.

What can’t you do with it?

As far as 2D stuff goes, there’s actually not much of a limitation as far as the program’s capability is concerned. You can operate on the entire engine and create a shoot-em-up like U.S.G.. The main technical restriction for me right now is the inability to port to Apple Mac and Linux, but that might change.

Get used to drawing every character from 4 directions.

How long did you think the game would take to make, and how long did it actually take?

21 months. We started in February 2010, and it was released on November 1st, 2011. But its initial ‘expected’ release date was April 2010.

How much of the development time was enjoyable, and how much was unpleasant?

It wasn’t all prancing around a meadow, but I did purr a lot. A large positive factor was the variety of tasks to break down the monotony of the ‘work’. The unpleasant part was mainly personal rather than work-related. But still, making the game was definitely an 87.3% enjoyable experience.

If you could give your past self one piece of advice before starting to make the game, what would it be?

Plan out the progress in small segments, then spread them out over twice the time so you can actually follow it sustainably. Also, tomorrow’s winning lottery number is 08 21 59 37.

Conclusion

RPG Maker is very well suited to a very particular kind of game: Japanese-style RPGs with turn-based combat and top-down exploration. You can certainly stray from that template, as To the Moon does, but the further away from it you go, the more sense it makes to use Game Maker instead.

The built-in sprite editor isn’t bad.

GameMaker

What is it? An all-inclusive development suite for 2D games. You can either create rules with a drag-and-drop interface, or write code in its scripting language, GML.

Price and licence: The limited version is free, basic version is £30, a version for teams is £60. You can sell the games you make with any of them, no royalties.

Makes games for: PC and Mac. iOS and Android versions are £120 extra each, HTML5 is £60.

Tutorial: TIG forums tutorials

Consistent rules are simpler to code.

Spelunky

Developer: Derek Yu

How long does Game Maker take to learn?

It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. It’s very intuitive and there is a wealth of tutorials and scripts for it.

What prior knowledge or skills are helpful?

Some programming knowledge and familiarity with C-based languages would help you take advantage of the scripting language. Some skill with pixel art couldn’t hurt!

What can’t you do with it?

Game Maker 8.1 (the version I’m using) is too slow to handle modern graphics and audio. It is strictly for games that look like they came from the ’90s or earlier. But I don’t know if that’s still true of Game Maker Studio, the latest incarnation of GM.

Making levels tile-based saves a lot of time

How long did Spelunky take to make?

Spelunky took me about a year of on-and-off work to finish, which is maybe double what I guessed when I started working. But I also didn’t anticipate that the game would get as popular as it did.

How much of the development time was enjoyable?

I’d say it was 90% enjoyable and Game Maker played a big part in that. Given how easy it is to use, you can spend most of your time doing art and design!

How much did it cost you to develop?

I don’t think I spent any money on the original Spelunky, aside from the £12 registration fee for Game Maker (£30 these days).

If you could give your past self one piece of advice before starting to make the game, what would it be?

I’d be afraid of messing with my past self too much, since things turned out well and I attribute part of that to my naiveté. Maybe I’d just send myself a cookie!

Conclusion

Game Maker is one of the easiest tools to use for an absolute beginner, and it’s flexible enough to make almost any 2D game you can think of. The only reason not to use it is if you want to make something in 3D, or you’re planning an adventure game or J-RPG. There are better options specifically for those.

You can jump in and play very quickly.

Unreal Development Kit

What is it? An all-inclusive development suite for making 3D games in the Unreal Engine 3.

Price and licence: £60, no royalties on your first $50,000 in revenue, 25% royalty afterwards. Free for non-commercial use.

Makes games for: Almost everything – PC, Mac, iOS, Android, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Flash (web), WiiU, PS Vita.

Tutorial: Epic Games official tutorial

Waves makes the most of UDK’s flashy effects.

Waves

Developer: Rob Hale

How long does UDK take to learn?

It’s tricky because you’re always building on top of how Epic like to structure games. That learning process will continue for years, but you can make something simple very quickly, maybe within just a couple of hours, and be relatively competent in a few weeks.

What prior knowledge or skills are helpful?

Any previous programming experience is very helpful, but be prepared to swallow your pride and do things the ‘Unreal Way’.

What can’t you do with it? Anything that involves changing terrain in real time. Voxel worlds like Minecraft.

How long did you think the game would take to make, and how long did it actually take?

If you asked me during development how long I had left I would always say “A couple of months.” Ultimately I worked on Waves for about nine months in total, but I wasn’t doing 40 hour weeks or anything.

How much of the development time was enjoyable?

There were a few times when working on the game was a chore, specifically getting the user interface and menus done. I will say that if you don’t enjoy solving problems and being faced with mysteries on a daily basis, then don’t get into games development.

3D engines tend to be better for fancy lighting, even for 2D games.

How much did it cost you to develop, and what did that money go on?

Living expenses and music. I had about £6k saved up when I quit my job and went full time and I spent every penny of that finishing the game. UDK has an upfront fee of £60 but you don’t need to pay anything until you’re ready to release.

How well has it done for you financially, on a scale from 1-10?

I’d rate it as a 6. I can afford to make another game and I even have a little bit extra so I can pay some freelancers, but if I don’t get another game released inside of a year then I’ll be in trouble.

If you could give your past self one piece of advice before starting to make the game, what would it be?

Don’t call it Waves! Nobody remembers the name and you can’t find it on Google.

Conclusion

UDK is the thing to learn if you ultimately want to be making big, shiny, multi-platform games. It’s harder to learn than Unity, and you’ll need to be very versatile or form a team to make something that looks good. But it’s also great experience if you want to join an established developer, since Unreal 3 is the most commonly used engine in mainstream games.