How to Write Your Own Game Program

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By sunnylyon
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Write Your Own Game Program

If you want to write your own game program for fun, that's fine, but if your motive is to become a professional game designer or programmer, then you have to be serious. To write your own game program takes time and dedication. This guide will not give you all the details of game programming, but rather give you a head start to write your own game program.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

Computer
Programming Books
Compiler

Step 1

Decide what kind of game you want to make. Consider the kind of genre of games you like (adventure, role-playing, first person shooter game, etc.). Keep the design simple. When you first write your own game program, think tetris and space invader, not like some popular role-playing games with a 100 characters, 3D graphics, and amazing sound effects.
Step 2

Look in the resources section to find programs to write your own game program. You're now done, if all you wanted to do is make a game and skip all the programming. However, if you are serious about becoming a game programmer or want to actually write your own game program, then skip this step.
Step 3

Decide a language. I recommend C or C++, since the majority of games are programmed in that language. Also, there's numerous resources for those languages. You can pick either C or C++, since once your learn one, it's easy to learn the other.
Step 4

Get a compiler. You can write your code in notepad, but you need a compiler to write your own game program because a compiler translates the code so your computer can understand and execute the program. You can look in the resources section to find a list of free compilers for C and C++.
Step 5

Learn the language. The best way to do this is take a class, but if you can't afford it, then either buy books or go to the library to find books on programming. You can also use online sources to write your own game program, but you really should buy a book.
Step 6

After you have a basic knowledge of whatever computer language you picked, you can now start to write your own game program. Tetris is the best things to start with because it includes all the components that you need to learn to make write your own game program. It's also easy enough to learn, but hard to enough to challenge you. You have now made your first game program!

Comments

snowbite said

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on 7/14/2009 Very interesting. I've always wanted to write my own computer game, but unfortunately I don't know any program language well enough to do it.