Day 0

You've decided to build a game. GREAT! Now, stop, take a deep breath, and realize what you've just done.

You're building an enormously complex system. Compound that with the fact that you may never have actually DONE this before, and you've got a real problem on your hands. What to do?

The first thing is to stop and think of what you want to do. Do you already have a game in mind? Are you looking for a game to write?

For your first game, I'd suggest following exactly what every post to a newbie on www.javagaming.org has said: write something small and simple. What does this mean?

The standards have usually been as follows: write Pong. Then write PacMan, or Asteroids. THEN write your game.

Why is this recommended? Because through this system you are not overloading yourself with tons of information, and not making critical mistakes that will affect you emotionally. The more frustrated you get with your project the more likely you will not finish it. There are numerous examples I've heard of where this has happened. You may not want to write pong, or write PacMan, but the skills you learn there will be as important as learning how to manage 10,000 clients over a network.

(N.B. It might actually be good to post code to a version of Pong or PacMan, and rip it apart.)

Once you've done a game or two and feel comforatable with the basic concepts, it's time to put them into use. Further chapters will detail what decisions you need to make, but here's a short list of what you need to be thinking about on Day 0:

• what is my game about?
• is it single or multi player?
• is it 2D or 3D?
• what tools might I need?
• what artwork, sound, or music might I need?
• what timeframe and budget do I have or wish to set for this?
• what legal issues exist for doing this? ( i.e., do I need to license something to make this game, what license do I have for my own work (public domain, GNU, etc) and am I going to make this for fun or for profit?)

Answering these questions may not be easy, and can take much more time. It starts on Day 0, but to this day, almost 18 months later, we still ask ourselves questions about certain things with respect to Age of Storms. My advice is to get a start on these things early.

-- GergisKhan - 06 Sep 2003