As time passes and technology advances, new services and products are created, which facilitates many tasks in a lot of professional fields, game development is not the exception.
We have reached the point where you can create video games without spending a single dollar.
Warning: This does not mean, it will be easy or that your games will be successful, it however may work for you as a way to be introduced in the industry, create games for your own fun, or small prototypes (or Proof of Concepts) to share your ideas.
First, let's see what we need to create a simple basic mini game:
- An idea
- Development Tools
- Access to the internet
The Idea
Ideas are free, and an idea usually takes you to other idea. Inspiration is one of the keys to generate ideas and every person has his/her different ways to get inspired. Listening to music, reading books, meditating, talking to people are just a few ways in which people can be inspired.
Development Tools
A set of software that will create your game development environment.
Concept Art
For concept art, you can create it with tools such as Microsoft's Paint or Gimp.
Gameplay
For gameplay, you can use free game engines such as Unity or Unreal.
Unity comes with an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) named MonoDevelop and you can also download Visual Studio Community Edition if you like it more. In future releases, both engines will come with a version of Visual Studio already in the installers.
3D Models
3d Models can be created at no cost by using blender, or you can also download some from sites such as OpenGameArt.org, Archive3d, or TF3DM.
For humanoids and a small subset of animals and monsters, there are websites such as Mixamo, which allow you to even rig your own characters or download free rigged characters and animate them yourself. The website also offers a good portion of free animations.
Sound and Music
There are tools such as audacity which allow you to create your own sounds, or you can also download sounds from websites such as OpenGameArt.org, or Freesound.org.
Marketing
Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ are free and useful places where you can do your marketing for free.
What's the Trick?
The fact that there are tools which help you do everything incurring no cost does not mean that you don't have to work hard.
You still need to learn about a lot of topics, and understand how technology and trends work, including human behavior.
If you want to create a good video game, it is usually not enough to just go download a game engine and start creating a game, first you need to learn about things such as storytelling, game design, level design, 3D modeling, rigging, animation, concept art, anatomy, human behavior, behavioural patterns, culture and gender differences, creation of sound, marketing trends, blog creation, websites traffic generation, programming, analytics, and way more.
But guess what! You can still learn and apply all of that for free!
Google allows you to find almost anything you need, if you get to know the right keywords to search for, Youtube has a lot of useful training videos in all of the topics mentioned before.
There is always very good free information in websites such as:
If you want to learn to create games, but think you don't have enough money to do it, check the post, How To Learn Game Development for Free.
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