So, over the past few months, I’ve been giving the same advice to lots of students concerning what they should do for their first games. They usually either ask this question directly, or I give them this advice after seeing what they’re trying to attempt as their first games, in clubs or individually. So, I’ve decided to write up a few points of advice about your first games as students, or even as people attempting to make just small things for themselves to play. This all comes down to one major piece of advice: start small.

Now, you hear this phrase a lot. The assumption is that most students want to make a fully 3D action game that looks like Assassin’s Creed or Oblivion, or Halo 3. But even those people that decide to do an “easy” 2D side scroller game don’t really quite gasp what we mean when we say “small.” When I say small, I mean use lots of freaking “middleware”. SDL, GameMaker, Torque2D, Flash, DarkBasic, DarkGDK, and XNA, are all resonable choices, even for programmers just starting out (though I do feel that XNA is a little complicated for my tastes, at least for initial games). The farther you can get from actually needing to program, though, the better.

Now, should you always stay with these? No! Absolutely not, unless you just want to make small games for fun as a hobby (which is perfectly legitimate. Some of those games are really fun!). But by using these pieces of technology, you gain two distinct advantages:

1. You can completely screw up and have everything fail on you and you’ll have lost, maybe, a month or two of your time.
2. From every screw up, you’ll learn just a little bit about how it’s should be done, and that’s a lesson that’s worth more than gold.

Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t try to program cool 3D engines or create IK rigs on low poly 3D models in your spare time, but by making simple games in very simple engines, you’ll have these games in your hands that you can play quickly, and that will build your design cops AND your development chops at an astonishing rate. In the mean time, you can screw up your 3D engine as much as you want (and you will screw it up a ton I promise) because you’ve got these other things that are keeping you motivated and in practice.

Another note for solo developers, those that are solo by choice or by accident: Don’t feel like because you don’t have a team, you can’t accomplish anything. I’m guilty of this train of thought, I admit, but you need to get over it. Either learn Photoshop or start looking for free art on the web. There’s plenty I promise. Then design your game with this as a restriction. It’ll get you ready for the real world, where restrictions are pretty much par for the course.

Anyone else have other advice?