I have been inspired.

Recently my game collection has been growing and growing. I have been playing a lot of building / management sims. Specifically Prison Architect and Rim World. Both use a lot of the same sprites, but that's not all of my attraction. I really like the idea of the colony sim game. The games I've been playing leave me wanting more.

So I wrote down a little plan today and I am going to take into deep consideration. The long hard drive of trying to make my own game.
I am in the research part still. I had no idea the things to take into account. I think unity can do what I want. I have been checking out some tutorials and I am not really sure how to search for what I am interested in making. So I looked up some RTS tutorial videos seems legit.
I have very little programming knowledge. I have used blender a few times. Used to play around with it a bit make tanks and stuff.

I was wondering if anyone had any light to shine on the subject. Any suggestions?

 

When you are new to game development really big ideas tend to sound plausible. E.g. a lot of people often say things like "I'm gonna make an MMO, like Word of Warcraft, only bigger and way better" and they do it with a straight face. I'm not sure exactly how big your idea is, but I can guess that it's too big for your first project.

But that doesn't mean you should abandon it. I would keep working on it over a period of time, writing stuff down into a ideas journal for it, and collecting images etc into an inspiration folder. This way you can see if the spark is really a passion for game development, of it it was just a fleeting idea.

In the meantime we will want to learn the fundamentals. Some people suggest trying to build really simple games like pong. This is good advice. Unity also has you covered here: Learn. Pick one of the Tutorial projects, build it (or as much as necessary) until you understand enough to recreate it yourself. You will also become very familiar with the Documentation. This isn't often mentioned, but learning how to refer to the documentation for a product/language and solve a problem you have yourself is an extremely important skill that all good game developers have cultivated. Documentation is 'boring'. But if you aren't intimate with it and you can't use it properly you will never finish a game of any complexity.

There is also the problem of learning C#. Some people recommend The Yellow Book (but there might be better choices).

Along the way you will start to see how to build certain parts of your dream game. When you have specific, actionable questions, the forums can help.

 

@Neckrow - You are really getting way ahead of yourself... just mastering the programming part necessary for a game like that will take you months... do you got the artistic skills to make art stuff? Sounds? Have you designed the math in the simulation so that things will make sense and be balanced once it is in the code?

You need to learn, learn, learn and then learn some more in many different topics... that is what all of us has done over the years and the things we have learned taught us that is more things we can do if we learn even some more.

Then making the actual game takes time... you will find bugs that needs to be fixed... you need the knowledge to find the problem and how to solve it... the more complex the game is, the more time it will take.

My overall recommendation is... sketch on the idea if you like... but learn coding, learn the basics of development and concentrate your effort on just making three-in-a-row, pac man, tic-tac-toe clones... then advance into making a simple chess simulator with an AI opponent when you feel ready... maybe in a year or so...

 

Make pong, then write a postmortem and evaluate your project goals again. Should take about two days, right? Its just Pong?

 

I would recommended starting small just until you've gotten your footing.

 

Yes, make 2D pong, then make 3D pong, then make Pacman, then make them multiplayer.

Don't even consider looking at an RTS now. Way too complicated.

 

playing games wont mean you can create them.

it takes ALOT of work. start small. re-create flappy bird.

 

Lol one time when I was browsing Collaboration forum there was one guy who wanted to make MMORPG game.
His set of skills were: project management, idea making and finally "I spent lots of hours playing World of Warcraft and therefore I know how the game works".

 

Just one time? You must be new around these parts

 

my 1st game was a Robot doing the Robot

 

Don't let people crush your dreams. If you really take a look at those games it's basically just a bunch of crap moving around on top/in front of other crap with some sounds playing now and then. Sure you have some collisions and control stuff to add but that is basically it. These games that list teams of 100+ people and say it took 3 years you know that is mainly due to them surfing the web 80% of the time hanging out at youtube and break.com and probably having office parties the majority of the remaining time.

 

Just find a place to start and start researching that. For example, you probably need terrain so start messing with the unity terrain system and figure out how to work with it, then worry about placing fortresses and stuff, then worry about spawning enemies, then worry about combat ai, sooner or later you'll have something that resembles a game, and a bunch of knowledge as well.

I'll warn you about tile maps though (which seem to be the style of your examples), its not an easy thing to accomplish in a 3d engine. There are all kinds of things that will come up. I wish I wasn't so effin dead set on having a tile map type terrain. It would be so much easier If I would just do splat mapping like everyone else seems to do.

 

Don't dive headfirst into the project, with guns blazing and everything. This will get you a SLAP in the face. Trust me, take it easy, because chances are, your game is going to be incredibly hard to develop and code, because its something nobody has done before. But don't that let that get in the way of trying to make your game happen, start small, and just tinker around with unity, as its pretty fun to figure out things, and be impressed with what you create.

 

Another easy game you could make is the game in my signature

No but seriously, the game is easier to program than pac man.... much easier. So try doing pong, my game, asteroids game, pac man, then try moving to a mario project or something. Just keep practicing your skills and refine them.

 

...uh, yeah. Just do stuff. A couple years from now you can be a pro, if that's what you really want to do. I used to think this stuff was really hard, but in reality I was just really lazy and unmotivated. There's a tutorial/faq/answers page for everything. Unity has a Learn section that basically walks you through it all. It's like anything else you can convince yourself to do it or to quit, but it's definitely within the range of possibility for you to do whatever you want, provided you keep your goals realistic.

That said, a space colony simulator is going to be a challenge right out of the gate, not because of any special magical reason, but because it is a pretty high abstraction built on lots of other little abstractions... there's a lot of automated stuff going on with any kind of "community" simulation, which means some pretty heavy consideration for how it should all work together. It's an engineering challenge.

I think what people mean by "build pong first" is really, learn how to create something elementary first, because unless you can quickly build rudimentary systems (stuff that is super basic to programming, but if I told you this same stuff by name you'd be like... wtf does that mean) fast and effectively, you can't do the more complex stuff.

It's like entering a whole new universe and, to be honest, it isn't always a ride down fun mountain. But, if you want to be a crazy person for some reason, go for it.... nobody can actually stop you, anyway. So, yeah. Doors wide open.

 

I hate to break it to you, but playing games is no part in making games. As you get more and more into development, you'll start to play fewer and fewer games. A lot of people make the mistake that because they like to play games, they'd like to make them.

Also, there is no 'one tutorial to rule them all'. Its like learning a language, you cant just go on youtube for an hour or so, and come out with all the skills you need. That being said, do look at some tutorials. The way I learnt is to type onto youtube 'Unity how to make a .... game', and follow the tutorial, or 'Blender how to make a plane'. You dont learn how to make a game with those tutorials, but you learn skills, and bit by bit, these all come together.

Oh my. My first game was a procedurally generated MMO zombie survival game (Baring in mind this was way before DayZ), with massive cities randomly generated as well (Im mixing random and procedural here because I didnt really know the difference back then, of course I do now), and a load more stuff. I didnt actually know how to do any of this, but I said to myself what we all do in that stage 'its been done before, it cant be that hard'.