Welcome to O-XP, a soon-to-be guide on making games from knowing nothing, to publishing on Steam. You’ve come a bit too early though (how did you even find this?), nothing has been set up for you. But so you don’t go away completely empty handed here’s a basic framework to get you started:
Learn Scratch
The most fundemental step I recommend to get started is to learn how to make interactive experiences using Scratch. It’s a totally free game engine created by the folk at MIT and can be found here. It teaches the absolute basics of getting something interactive to work, and does so in a very intuitive way.
Follow the tutorials over there and keep making new virtual experiences based off what you’ve learnt after each step but try to expand it further. You’ll retain what you’ve learnt better that way.
Once I set up this site properly, our starting point will be using Scratch. So it’s a great place to begin your gamedev journey – especially if you are new to programming.
Moving over to a ‘real’ game engine
The next step will be to take what you’ve learnt and transfer it to a more complicated tool. For this, we are going to use the Unity game engine (free to use*). I’ll cover in more detail *why* we’ll choose this engine to start out with, again once this website is fully ready. If this tutorial series goes well, I might add an optional path here with other engine but for now Unity will do.
This section *really* needs the full tutorial series but for now I’ll just say that there’s many resources out there already on how to learn Unity – I recommend Code Monkey if you like tutorial in the video medium. Maybe something like catlikecoding if you prefer written tutorials.
Focus on learning one part of the engine, placing block into the world, and basic navigation. Then make a small “game” (a basic interactive thing) using what you’ve learnt, then learn another etc.
*Up to $200,000/yr company income. Check official site for accurate data.
Making it look good
Once we’ve got the ability to make objects do what we want, we’ll then want to make it look good whilst doing it. We’ll look briefly at creating pixel 2D using Paint.net(/Aseprite), 3D Models using Blender, 2D Textures for 3D models using GIMP. These tools (except Aseprite) are fully free to use.
This will do for a temporary page. I’ll be posting semi-regularly in All Posts with some more specific game-dev related stuff.