Game Design

It takes a certain kind of endurance, creativity, time and manpower to start designing your very own video game. When looking at recent times, the rise of independent games has given not only the very industry some much needed inspiration, it keeps target audiences much more satisfied as well.

Throwbacks towards retro ages continue to be popular, while original and successful titles certainly appear as well, such as World of Goo or Fez. At the same time, regular video games these days get more expensive, it's hardly weird to see many of the indy games simply "lacking" with the graphics and technical details.

My first confrontation with the idea known as game design was with the BUILD Engine in the late 90's, used for the 3D FPS games such as Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and Blood. There, I could edit or create new levels with my own content placed.

A Japanese SNES ROM which I think was just called RPG Maker was not much later used by me as well. Throughout the 2000's, I was, to some extent, designing, programming and being creative with self made 2D RPG games with subsequent PC RPG Maker editions, but I never finished any of them.

However, Blizzard's WarCraft and StarCraft had the ability to let you create your own maps with an editor, allowing for input to be personalified and shared among Battle.net. I did succeed in finishing some work here, but of course they could hardly be called full fledged.

M.U.G.E.N., a 2D fighting engine lets you design your own characters, rules, stages and more, as I said previously. I never attempted to create characters, because that seriously looked difficult to do so. I did however include many content found online, and attempted to basically make an all-stars showoff.

Near the end of the 2000's, as the WarioWare franchise had sucked me into excitement for years already, WarioWare D.I.Y. was released, which let you be able to make your own microgames of either 5 or 10 seconds long.

I was pretty occupied by this little DS software, as I indeed finished a few creative microgames, some hilarious, others a bit more extreme. And it was pretty simple to use, but the challenge came with what you wanted to design for yourself(or others).

My last "design" attempt was about a year ago, when I saw all of these Mega Man fangames emerging. Inspired, I tried to program on my own using Multimedia Fusion 2. But I gave up very early on as I was just totally confused on how to even let Mega Man control like in his regular NES games.

So from what I have learnt from game design in general is that it takes a lot of endurance, creativity, time and manpower in order to release modest approaches. You really need a team about 90% of the times for these things to succeed.

There was a time when I dreamt of designing video games by my own hands and mind regularly,
But ultimately I could not picture myself going further into this with succession, due to heavy competition, a poor market location, needing a degree which takes 4 years and little chances of succeeding into even creating and selling a video game.

I hope to release my own original video game at one point in life, and of course get positive responses then. Designing stuff can be really fun, but also very stressful. So I have no idea how I will accomplish this.