How to Make a Video Game: Video Game Design Software

Playing video games is one of the great joys in life.  The human civilization has never been the same since the advent of this pastime.  There are those who revel in the playing and interacting with of video games.  Then there are those who would prefer to be on the other side of the coin: to make and create games for others to enjoy.  This divine act of creation is only shared by only a few select individuals in our society: authors, writers, chefs, mothers, and video game designers.  However, to become worthy enough to walk the vaunted halls of video game design you must realize that there are many paths to take and many barriers to break.

Don't forget to think about what you're actually going to create! Do you have some burgeoning new idea that you think will force all competition out of the market and fill the streets with the laments of video game developers who have been thrown aside? It's okay if you don't, because it's really hard to to be really original without a lot of financial backing and investment.

You're going to have to start small. That doesn't mean you have to think small! Your only limits are the limits of the software you're given and even those can be cast aside if you have enough dedication.

For now, you can stick with more simple things. That means no ray-tracing, parallax shading, or bump mapping.. just stick with something two dimensional for now! Like how the human race originally flopped out of the two dimensional primordial soup and evolved into a race of tertidimensional traveling entities, you will have to make do with the current soup that you have been given... until you have evolved your mind to accommodate more advanced video game design software.

This soup is like chicken noodle soup: really simple but really great! I suggest a game maker program to start you off like Game Maker 8 or KooBits. If you're really daring you can even try Adobe Flash but I won't get into that since it's beyond the scope of this article.

Flash is probably the most difficult program to use at first besides learning programming.  If you don't know how to make a video game, this is probably not the video game design software you would want to use.  I can't help you very much here except to recommend starting with something simpler like Game Maker 8 or KooBits.

Game Maker 8 has many resources for the nascent game designer so you can look around on their site for information or read their forums.  It's still kind of difficult for the beginner to get into so I would recommend KooBits if you're really starting fresh.  It's a very simple program that requires very little instruction at all if any.  Just load it up and then you should be fine!  Good luck!