For a number of years, I've been looking for an artistic outlet. I grew up doing musical theater, and that's always something that I can go back to if I really feel like it. I've been in a band before, and I love performing music in that way. The thing is, I do need something I can do on my own; even now, at home, I have an acoustic guitar, vocal microphone, and mixer that I have hooked up to my computer. With that, I've been playing music more often, and doing some recording and production. Also, I've played with a few different trial versions of computer programs like Photoshop, seeing if visual art is a better channel, but never had much luck. I've always had a hard time creating my own fictional stories, so writing never seemed appealing either. I've also thought about doing more photography, but that's much less expressive for me. None of these things have really appeased my urge to create something.
A few weeks ago, though, I came across an artistic inspiration. It was in the form of an independently designed video game called "Cave Story." If you're into video games at all, I recommend you give this game a shot, especially since it's free on the PC.
There's nothing totally remarkable about that game, but something about it set off a spark of determination. I decided I wanted to learn how to design games. Not just learning how to write programming code, since that's actually the least exciting and artistic part - but creating a visual, interactive world full of personality, music, and beauty. So, for the last couple weeks, I've been trying to figure out the basics for game design.
The first thing I decided to do was figure out how to design with Adobe Flash. Just based on websites like "addictinggames.com," it seemed like you could create relatively simple games that probably wouldn't require a ton of learning. I discovered something I was semi-excited about: Creating interactive media in Flash requires learning how to use ActionScript, a variation of ECMAScript, which is commonly used in other programming like JavaScript and JScript for gaming platforms. In addition, ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language, which is the type of syntax and language that you use for interactive media. Those aspects gave ActionScript some appeal as the knowledge can be used in other applications for similar purposes.
I spent some time learning how to use Flash and am going to continue learning how to use ActionScript. The problem I came across is that it's REALLY HARD to learn programming languages without any sort of formal training. I started looking for a simpler solution, and perhaps in the future I'd focus more on learning the complexity of such a language.
Coincidentally, I came across an application that is used specifically for making games, aptly named "Game Maker." This program does a number of things, but I've discovered two steps that this program takes to make game programming exponentially easier.
First, it uses the high-level programming language of Delphi. High-level refers to the amount of "abstraction" from machine language (binary). Essentially, it hides a lot more details of of the code, making it more user-friendly, but conversely ends up with less efficient and less precise code. So, it may be a good language to start with if you want to jump right into making complex applications. It's object-oriented, so it will have a lot of similarities to the languages in other interactive media. I may be able to use what I learn from that and apply it to other languages.
The second thing the program does is create a very user-friendly interface. It takes many of the commonly used functions and makes simple-to-implement buttons that you can use to quickly generate sprites, objects, rooms, background music, sounds, and timelines, along with rules like gravity. I've been playing with this program for a few days, and I can see that it has the potential to do exactly what I'd want to do, and my potential to make it do that is within grasp.
So, as soon as my brain comprehended that beginning to design a game could plausibly happen in mere weeks, a floodgate opened in my head. I started creating a fictional universe for a game to take place. I've got this huge backstory and plot, and I'm trying to develop an entire civilization based off of the premises given in this world. I have a sort of role-playing, platformer adventure in mind that will be vast in depth, gameplay, and length.
All the aspects of developing a game are tedious, but interesting. Designing environments, sprites for characters and monsters, thinking of music to implement, coming up with game concepts to integrate, learning computer code, and using the program to tie everything together is sort of a holistic artistic outlet that I'm excited to suddenly have. I have no sense as to how long a project like this would take to finish, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took me years to complete. I will likely create some simpler games as side projects as the time goes, but I have aspirations to create one very large project. High hopes for 2015! ;)
~A
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